Can JCPenney Recapture Digital Leadership?
CONTRIBUTOR
JCPenney has gone through some tough times, and that’s an understatement. People tend to forget that the company has done more revamping and restructuring than just the Ron Johnson era, however brief it may have been. It was a company that was struggling before Ron Johnson came, and while it has found a certain amount of stable ground today, it still struggles on the digital front.
There’s a certain irony in that. Catalog retailers were some of the first to grasp the need to present one face to the customer across channels, or “omni-channel retailing.” And JCPenney was one of the first among catalogers to get it. Sales from jcp.com passed the $1 billion mark in 2005, an enormous milestone at the time. Of course, the company then tried to kill the catalog in 2009, and learned consumers weren’t quite ready to make that leap, resulting in a painful drop in sales.
JCP’s digital presence has never really recovered, kept down by the Great Recession and then by the chaos of the Ron Johnson era. Michael Amend, the new head of omni-channel at JCP, aims to change that. Amend is the man who was largely responsible for The Home Depot's HD +4.35%transformation into one of the most omni-channel of retailers today. To be fair, The Home Depot has a long way to go itself, but that’s another story.
What does Amend have to work with as he settles in to his new role at JCP? And what should his digital priorities be?
What JCP Has Today
After stumbling around a bit, the company itself seems comfortable with its tagline, “When it fits, you feel it.” There’s a lot of room for stories and relationships in that tagline – all of which could easily be taken to digital touchpoints to create shopper engagement. Honestly, given the sorry state of retailers’ digital presence in general (see examples here andhere), JCP has an opportunity to leapfrog the competition.
Let’s take a look at their back to school campaign as an example, since it’s still running.
Right now on the jcp.com home page, back to school is #3 of four rotations on the hero image slider (focusing on deep discounts of Arizona brand clothing).
When you click on that image, depending on where you click, it takes you immediately into a product results display. To their credit, the items featured at the top of the display, whether guys, juniors, boys, or girls, are the items actually in the hero image itself – a very nice touch that many retailers overlook.
But below the fold of the hero image on the home page, JCP has two important assets. One is a back to school mini-site. It hits both college-age (including dorm style) and younger kids. Below that slider is “Bend the Trend” and a tie-back to the second asset, JCPenney Cares.
Right now, JCP is running a “round up your purchase” campaign to donate to their JCPenney Cares non-profit. The non-profit supports after-school activities for kids, mainly focused on Boys and Girls Club, art and music.
When you click on the banner for the JCPenney Cares promotion, it takes you to a site that features stories from a year ago – August 2014, October 2014, and “holiday 2014,” all presented as static text and a couple of images. While the non-profit did admirable things to help kids last year, the page has the feel of an old campaign resurrected with no updates for 2015. This is ironic, because if you follow the tie-back promotion on the back to school mini-site, it takes you to a video player that rolls four videos of inspirational stories about kids helped by the programs JCPenney Cares supports. And these are current stories – the After-School All-Stars video features a girl who graduated from middle school in spring 2015.
JCP’s Facebook FB +4.60% page has a post from August 19 that reminds people to round up and save, but it links to the static page from 2014.
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JCP’s Pinterest account doesn’t have a board or mention of JCPenney Cares at all, which is a shame, because it could easily invite much wider sharing of these inspirational stories, as well as surfacing more, genuine stories from people impacted by the program.
JCP’s YouTube account has the videos, which show they weren’t uploaded that long ago – which means, theoretically, they should be featured prominently in the Facebook feed, at least – but they’re not.
So – here is a campaign which is genuine and has a strong human element. JCP is raising money and having a direct impact on people’s lives, and they’re doing it through after-school activities, which is a great tie-in for back to school. The company presumably has years of success stories to draw from. They have videos, they have organizations they’re working with, like Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which also want to promote what they’re doing and share how lives have been impacted. But all JCP has done with it is create some videos, which are lost in one corner of the company’s website, use what appears to be an old web page about their non-profit, and other than the Facebook post, make little to no mention of the round up promotion in any other place.
That’s just one promotion. The company actually has a lot of other cool things that it is doing, but they’re all disconnected. Instagram has been problematic for retailers because you can’t link direct from an image posted there. Retailers have responded by posting a link to their eCommerce home page in the header of their Instagram account. JCP does one better. They link to a Tumblr feed, which is specifically set up to be the shoppable version of Instagram. This is a repetition of content, but it’s repetition with a purpose. But it’s all completely commerce focused. There is no content on there that is not product and promotion.
On JCP’s eCommerce site, the back to school mini-site also features a “Bend the Trend” interactive page, where shoppers can create Polyvore-like sets based on a preset selection of items.
There aren’t a lot of options for choosing how the items are displayed, but the custom-created shoppable page that results from the set is done well:
There are some candid customer shots on Twitter TWTR +4.00%, where shoppers are sharing their outfit purchases using the hashtag #BendTheTrend, but it’s not a very active hashtag. And there’s no tie-in to Pinterest, where JCP could easily create a board “Favorite #BendTheTrend Looks”. On Facebook, JCP posted an in-store promotion on their page which appears to leverage some of the looks from Bend the Trend:
But the link on the post leads to a Sephora online store-in-store page, and not anything back to school related.
The Bottom Line
JCP has great ideas, but the execution across digital touchpoints is lacking. Back to school and JCPenney Cares are both examples where the retailer has inspirational content, or at least fun content, which could easily be leveraged across multiple channels. But both campaigns seemed to be lacking a content strategy, let alone any kind of plan for execution. Both campaigns have a human element – and back to school could easily have tied in to the “When it fits, you feel it” tagline. For kids nervous about going to a new school or making new friends, a message about boosting your confidence with the right outfit might really have resonated.
Social content needs to be human, relatable, and shareable. Which means when JCPenney went to all that trouble to create those inspirational videos for JCPenney Cares, they should’ve been thinking about more than just video. They should’ve been thinking about images good for Pinterest, hashtags related to the round up campaign, which groups like Boys and Girls Clubs of America or Girls Inc. or No Kid Hungry could pile on to reach their constituents. And they needed specific calls to action to the community to share their own stories about how some of these organizations have impacted their communities or their lives. And then all of that content needed to live on the JCPenney Cares page, so that there was a home base to connect all of it together.
Finally, part of any content plan needs to think through transparency to consumers. In the case of a fund-raising campaign, JCP could provide visibility into the number of transactions to-date that have rounded up, or a running total of the amount rounded up. For the Bend The Trend campaign, they could have created a board on the site that shared all of the sets their customers have created.
I think JCP has some great digital ideas. If they can create real stories, and tell those stories in unique ways across each touchpoint, they have a real opportunity to do something differentiating in digital.
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