The J.C. Penney Case - Assignment Example

THE J.C. PENNEY CASE The J.C. Penney Case The new business model was one that had components made up of corporate branding made up of new logo, new brand spokesperson, and new store design. The core component of the J.C. Penny new business model is one that can be described as focused on aggressive specialist team building. This business model is directly connected to the new sales structure that the company created to encourage sales clerks to sell aggressively to customers. There are several business and marketing models that this new approach can be compared to.

One of these is the cross-function team business model where the company focuses on how team work can be improved at all levels of the business to ensure that efficiency with production is not undertaken by a few people but as a team (Perreault Jr., Cannon & McCarthy, 2014). The case of new business model of J.C. Penney, such forms of tea work is rather focused on the sales force. The components of the new business model were all well related and so it was very easy for the components to work together.

This form of success can generally be attributed to the fact that the new business model was built on the idea of cross-function team and so it was very easy for the different components of the new business model to work together. What is more, the different component of the new business model were all aimed to achieve the same goal and so to get to the ultimate outcome, the people involved could not have executed their roles in isolation and expect the goal to be achieved. Having said the above, it would also be stressed that the fact that the components of the new business model worked together did not necessarily mean that they could achieve the goal for which they were set.

It cannot also be said that the components could lead to the expected results of the company. The lapses came because there were some key components that were missing from what was institutionalized. More specifically, the new business model had eliminated the role of customers as there was no market research leading up to the implementation of the model. Meanwhile, customers have been identified as very important stakeholders for the success of any business model (Ofek & Avery, 2012). One major deficiency that can be seen of the administration of Johnson is that its business model was totally disjointed from its pricing strategy.

As a matter of fact the aggressive sales expert team that was institutionalized as a result of the new business model could have functioned best if there were specific promotions they were championing. The business model was however brought in place after the old pricing strategy which was the high-low pricing strategy had been scrapped. This created a total disconnect between the business model and the pricing strategy because there was virtually no promotion in place for the sales experts to pursue.

Meanwhile, the customer base of the company had repeated given signal to the fact that it preferred to have promotional sales in place. Perreault Jr., Cannon & McCarthy (2014) emphasized that in any competitive market, different companies ought to identify what makes them unique and base on these uniqueness to create their competitive advantage. One major problem that was associated with J.C. Penney however was the fact that Johnson overly compared his company to others like Target and Apple and wanted his to be like those companies when in actual fact J.C. Penney was totally different from these companies. J.C Penney’s uniqueness was firmly rooted in the company’s old pricing strategy which seems to have gone down well with the customers.

The best Johnson could have done was thus to build on such a strategy. References Ofek, E., & Avery, J. (2012). J.C. Penneys “fair and square” pricing strategy. Watertown, MA: Harvard Business School. Perreault Jr., W. D., Cannon, J. P., & McCarthy, E. J. (2014). Basic marketing: A marketing strategy planning approach (19th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.