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BJ Bueno

Be A Better Brand Manager: Measure Everything

It’s pop quiz time! Where do baby Geckos come from?

If your answer begins “When a Mommy Gecko and a Daddy Gecko love each other very much…” stop now. And this isn’t really part of the ever-popular live birth vs. eggs debate either. Geckos, or at least the Geico Gecko, which is the one we’re particularly interested in, owes its ongoing existence to a very proud set of data.

In an interview with AdAge, Ted Ward, Geico’s CMO, said, “The green scaly spokes-character you reference was actually born in a petri dish of data. The Gecko was ‘hatched’ with absolutely no research or even the intention of producing a long-running, iconic campaign. The fact is we analyzed results from running the first set of Gecko TV spots and liked the bump in business volume. We were able to attribute the increased business to the campaign and decided to move forward with additional Gecko executions. From that point on we have incorporated more traditional market research to track and monitor consumer sentiment related to the little green guy.”

Cult Brands Measure Everything

The measurement-centric approach definitely appears to be working. Geico appears to be on the verge of moving past Allstate to capture the #2 spot in the highly competitive auto insurance industry. Many pundits have attributed Geico’s success to their huge advertising budget, but as we all know, there are plenty of brands out there that do a ton of advertising without achieving a dominant position in their industry.

What makes the Geico story important for brand managers is the explicit relationship between marketing campaigns and the measurement thereof. When Geico knew, with a high degree of certainty, what types of messaging were most effective at capturing both customer interest and business, they were able to replicate the essential elements of that campaign in other campaigns.  Geico’s Cavemen and Maxwell the Pig campaigns were both powerful tools for the brand, but who knows if they ever would have seen the light of day if there’d been no data to support the fact that quirky humor helped sell car insurance?

Being unique in the marketplace is not easy. Creativity requires courage. That creative courage is sometimes at odds with institutional decision makers who prefer a more conservative approach. Measuring everything and making smart use of the data makes it easier to get the creative freedom you need to be an effective brand manager because you can say, with a high degree of certainty, that your campaigns will be successful before you launch them.

Be a Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Data is your friend. The more you know about your customers, including how they find you, their path to purchasing, and how they talk about you online, the better you’ll be able to serve them.

Data needs interpretation to be a meaningful asset. Ideally, you’re looking for identifiable patterns of behavior held in common by significant numbers of your customers. This will allow you to figure out how well your campaigns are working.

Be willing to accept that data doesn’t always dance the way you want it to. The results of inquiry will not always yield up  the answers you’re hoping to hear. Great brand managers listen to what their customers are telling them.

July 30, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Understand What Doing Business With You Gives The Customer

Do you recognize that image in the corner? It’s a shot from NBC’s Today show, covering the Cronut phenomenon. Cronuts, in case you haven’t heard, are the legendarily delicious pastry creation of the Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York City.  Only 200-250 are produced each day, and you can only buy 2 at a time.  People are willing to stand in line for hours to get a Cronut, and if you don’t have the time to invest, don’t despair. An underground Cronut economy has sprung up, with scalpers more than happy to sell you the $5 treat for a cool $30.

The media has been going nuts trying to figure out what’s going on here. Reporter after reporter has gotten testimony that the Cronut is, indeed, delicious. But there are over 4,000 bakeries in New York City — and that’s not even counting the street vendors and food trucks that have more than a few scrumptious baked goods for sale.

To understand the Cronut phenomenon, you need to know one thing. The Cronut may be very good. But it is the experience of getting the Cronut that is even better.

Cult Brands Deliver Memorable Experiences

Buying a Cronut is not a simple endeavor. The high demand and low supply requires New Yorkers to do something antithetical to their kind: stand patiently in line and accept the fact that they may, in fact, be disappointed. It’s a low-cost version of the heroes quest. Demands are put upon one, albeit only for patience and civility, and at the end, there’s the uncertain promise of a reward. You may get your Cronut, you may not.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve gotten the Cronut. What matters to the people lining up is that they’ve been part of the Cronut experience. They have a unique story to tell, their own personal angle of the story of the moment. Even those folks who pay scalpers for Cronuts are participating in the larger narrative: for the price of a few dollars more, they can position themselves as the possessor of the smartest sweet tooth.

The stories we tell about the experiences we actually have are most valuable form of social currency we have. Cult brands know this, and go out of their way to provide experiences that are worth talking about. Every time a customer lines up at the Dominique Ansel Bakery, they may or may not come away with a Cronut. But they definitely will have a story that they can tell to their family and friends for years to come.

Be a Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Having great products and services is only the starting point. To create a Cult Brand, you need to identify and deliver an experience your customers will want to share with all of their family and friends.

The stories we tell about our own direct experiences are the most valuable form of social currency. Customers value these stories more highly than stories they can tell about things that happened to someone they knew or heard about.

Scarcity has its role in the marketing mix. Combining limited supply with a positive experience is an irresistible combination.

July 24, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

As a brand manager, you’re well aware of how difficult it is to capture your customer’s attention in the current super-saturated messaging environment.  The ubiquity of smartphones and tablet computers means our buyers are always ‘plugged in’, consuming the content they’ve chosen for themselves; CNN reports that adult Americans are spending at least 8 hours of every day staring at a screen.

What can you do to stand out in that environment?

We think that the folks at the Discovery Channel might have a clue. Check out this commercial:

Know The Narrative and When to Disrupt It

In two days, the official Discovery Channel Youtube video has been viewed more than 30,000 times. What is it about this particular commercial that has captured the public’s imagination?

The spot is a variation on a classic story telling device, the Bait-and-Switch. The Bait-and-Switch is a narrative device where viewers are led to believe they should expect one thing, only to experience something completely different.

Traditionally, a Bait-and-Switch leads the viewer in with content they believe to be of high value, only to deliver content of lower value. But in this case, Discovery Channel, demonstrating a superior understanding of what their customers truly enjoy, lead the viewer to expect a heartwarming tale of a rehabilitated seal and delivered a massive shark having a snack.

High value content was followed by higher value content. A story that the viewer felt they ‘should’ care about, in order to be viewed as a good person under prevailing cultural norms, was replaced with a ‘guilty pleasure’ story that they truly enjoyed.

The experience of this unusual Bait-and-Switch is novel enough to make the viewer actually pay attention to what they’re watching. The commercial shocked the viewer to another level of awareness, forcing them to examine their perceptions from a new perspective.

If you’d like to use the same technique to connect with your customers, there are two things you need to know: what narratives your customer expects to encounter in the course of their day, and what narratives your customer would like to encounter during the course of the day. This requires significant psychological insight. A nuanced understanding of your customer’s life experiences and the factors that influence their worldview is essential. You need to know what they truly enjoy, and what they feel socially or morally obligated to enjoy. The juxtaposition of the two is a powerful attention getter.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

  • Familiarize yourself with universal narratives, and the stories that are most relevant to your best customers.
  • Maintain an awareness of the media your customers are consuming, and what tales they’re being told. You can’t provide something outside of the norm if you don’t know what the norm is.
  • Understanding the social and cultural pressures that dictate how your customers feel they should behave makes it easier to craft messaging that will attract their attention.
July 12, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Attend the Cult Branding Symposium

Here’s your chance to learn how you can put the secrets of Cult Branding to work for your company. Join BJ Bueno for a focused, growth-oriented session on the forces that influence customer loyalty. The Cult Branding Symposium is your opportunity to tap into the insights, strategies, and unique humanistic approach top brands like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Target, Kohl’s and Scheels used to achieve their dominant place in the market today.

When you attend the Cult Branding Symposium, you’ll learn:

– The Seven Steps to Cultivating Customer Loyalty
– Decoding Brand Communities

With this knowledge, you’ll be able to attract more business and build long-lasting, profitable relationships with your customers. The symposium has been designed to facilitate real learning, with specialized support materials to enhance and augment the educational experience. Symposium participants will receive:

– Hardcover copy of Customers First: Dominate Your Market By Winning Them Over Where They Count The Most (McGraw-Hill 2012)
– Digital copies of the decks presented at the symposium so you can share them with your marketing team (in PowerPoint format)
– Whitepaper, “Why Customers Join Brand Communities” (PDF)

Have You Been Struggling to Bring Your Company to the Next Level?

Building a strong, sustainable business isn’t an easy process. There are times when even the best companies get stuck on the journey from good to great. Consistently, it’s the companies that have the best understanding of who their customers are and the unconscious forces that drive their purchasing decisions that get ‘unstuck’ and go on to become powerhouse profitable Cult Brands.

You don’t have to stay stuck. Space for this special session is limited, and you don’t want to miss out on this unique educational opportunity. Register for the Cult Branding Symposium today!

June 27, 2013 by

Be A Better Brand Manager: Know What Time It Is

imagesThe Gilt Groupe is a flash sale company. On their website, they host extremely short-term sales events (most last less than two hours!) featuring limited quantities of merchandise from top brands. The combination of short duration and limited quantities makes an appealing mix for competitive shoppers, who are legion. In six years, the brand has accumulated 7 million customers.

Why, then, did the Gilt Group recently take a 90-day break from sourcing new merchandise, adding any new services, or even trying to attract new business?

Know What Time It Is

According to the story Alexis Maybanks, Gilt Groupe’s co-founder, shared at the Women Entrepreneurs Rock the World Conference, the company was experiencing tremendous growth, and with that growth came some growing pains. The sales volume was overwhelming; the customer service department was swamped.

The Gilt Groupe leadership team faced a choice: continue pursuing growth at any cost, or put the brakes on long enough to focus the organization’s energy and resources on better serving the existing customer base?

This is not a unique challenge in the retail world. Every brand wants to grow; many brand managers have been duped into thinking that growth generation is the raison d’etre for their profession. And they’re not completely wrong: a brand that is not growing is a brand that is dying.

The Gilt Groupe demonstrated an understanding that not all growth is equally desirable. There’s a difference between sustainable growth (an increase in market share that allows a company to both attract and please new customers) and problematic growth, where the sheer volume of customer traffic rapidly outpaces the brand’s ability to provide an emotionally satisfying experience on an individual basis.

Problematic growth is the retail equivalent of a Bangladeshi garment factory: the building gets taller and taller, with more and more people inside of it, working harder and harder — all until the critical moment where the building’s infrastructure fails and everything comes down in a horrible crash.

A Time To Build, A Time To Grow

As a Brand Manager, you don’t want to build the Bangladeshi garment factory. You want to build a strong company with a robust retail infrastructure to support brand growth. That means you have to know what time it is. Consider your brand’s current circumstances, and examine how well you’re pleasing your customers. Be objective and analytical. Ask lots of questions, including:

  • How long does it take your customers to place an order or make a purchase?
  • Is it easy to reach your customer service department?
  • How long does it take for the typical complaint to be resolved?
  • How many complaints do you have, and what are those complaints about? (Be aware that customers can leave without ever once voicing their displeasure with how you’re doing things.)
  • What percentage of your business comes from repeat customers?
  • How much of your new business converts into an ongoing relationship?

It’s only after you have the answers to these questions, and you can compare the actual results to the benchmarks of performance that you’d like to see, that you can determine what time it is. Is it time to concentrate on building your company by improving and enhancing the customer experience, or do you have the justifiable confidence to focus your efforts on growth?

Sustainable growth is a balancing act, predicated on the understanding that it is always ultimately better for brand longevity to build a good company than a bad one. Customers are drawn in when they know they’ll be treated well; they’ll stay when you prove it to them.

The effort and energy Gilt Groupe put into building up their website and customer service capabilities is time well spent. So much of the brand’s appeal is dependent on a specific emotional experience: the thrill of competitive shopping, coupled with the triumph of getting in on the deal. Ensuring that there are no technical difficulties or overwhelmed staffers to short-circuit that emotional experience will result in brand growth.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

Know what time it is. Assess your company’s performance regularly and objectively.

Improving the customer experience always pays off.

Don’t be afraid to put on the brakes. Going full speed is no good if it takes your company right into the wall of disappointing your customers.

May 28, 2013 by

When Should A Brand Manager Say “We Don’t Want You In Our Stores?”

Abercrombie_and_Fitch-logo-2A582EB94D-seeklogo.comBeing a great brand manager isn’t about understanding what will make everyone love your store. Being a great brand manager is about understanding what will make your best customers love your store.

These two things are very different, and we’re seeing this illustrated by the recent flurry of headlines surrounding Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries’ 2006 comments about why the apparel chain doesn’t carry women’s apparel in large and extra-large sizes.

Here’s what Jeffries said, “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny.”

It’s not a warm and fuzzy sentiment, particularly in an environment where nearly 7 out of every 10 shoppers are plus-sized. But is it bad brand management? That’s a conversation we should be having.

Be Your Customers’ Advocate

Abercrombie & Fitch’s critics have been quick to point out what the retail chain doesn’t sell, and the impact those omissions have made on the brand’s overall profitability. But let’s take a step back, and look at what the brand does sell, and how those choices have served Abercrombie & Fitch over the course of time.

The larger sizes Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t carry are readily available in other stores. But try finding the extremely petite sizes—0 or 00—that Abercrombie & Fitch’s loyal customers snatch up by the armful. You’re going to have a really tough time. The Ambercrombie & Fitch team has a clear vision of who their customer is. This vision has helped them understand what those customers need.

Customer needs are complex and multi-dimensional, but let’s stick to one simple need—specifically, clothes that actually fit. Abercrombie & Fitch provides clothing in sizes that their customers can’t easily get elsewhere. Customer advocacy, in terms of identifying this need, aggressively searching out solutions to the need, and making those solutions central to the brand identity, are all traits we see embodied by people universally considered to be exceptional brand managers.

The fact that Abercrombie & Fitch’s customers are members of a thin minority rather than a plus-sized majority doesn’t mean they don’t still have their own unique set of needs and psychological motivations. By recognizing this, Abercrombie & Fitch has carved out a sustainably profitable niche in the crowded retail apparel marketplace.

Jeffries’ business choices are being scrutinized now, as Abercrombie & Fitch is shuffling through a slow period, but if we take a longer perspective, looking at the chain’s performance over the course of a decade or more, Jeffries’ approach does seem to work. If anything, the chain seems to be positioning itself to be even more exclusive: stores in less-afluent demographics are being closed as part of a consolidation process.

It may seem counter-intuitive as a brand manager to consider what customers you don’t want in your store. But it is a valuable exercise. Knowing who your customers aren’t can help you refine your definition of who your customers are.

May 23, 2013 by

Mysteries of Retail: How To Remain Relevant In A Changing Marketplace

Do you remember the Magic 8 Ball?

The Toys R Us leadership team could certainly use one, as the once dominant toy retailer appears to be on shaky ground with no clear path to relevancy. A planned IPO was recently withdrawn; the chain’s long time CEO Gerald Storch has stepped down, with no new successor named. Sales slid 3.5% over 2012, and investors are looking at the company’s not-insubstantial debt.

Factors contributing toward Toys R Us slide certainly include competition from Wal-Mart and Amazon. Wal-Mart wins on price, while Amazon’s got both depth of selection and (for their Prime customers) the ability to put any child’s desired toy in their hands within a day. Given this, how can the once great chain expect to compete?

What Makes Customers Choose You First?

Before we can chart a profitable course into the future, it helps to have an understanding of the past. Let’s travel back in time to the late 1970’s and 1980’s, Toys R Us’s glory days. At this time,  the toy market wasn’t as crowded as it is now. Toys R Us was, for many locations, the only game in town. Geoffrey the Giraffe was a well-known and loved mascot. Children everywhere knew and sang the “I want to be a Toys R Us kid” jingle, which had an explicit call out to the desire to never grow up. The joys of childhood could go on forever, if you knew where to shop. It wasn’t exactly Ponce de Leon’s fabled Fountain of Youth, but for the American shopper, it was more than close enough.

Dominant retail brands achieve their position because they provide their shoppers with a compelling emotional experience that is so complete and satisfying that no other store could match it. Toys R Us was hitting many of the same emotional notes that have made Disney so successful. For the kids, that meant wonder, a sense of magic and delight. For the parents, Toys R Us provided something more: an easy-to-navigate route to making at least some of their children’s dreams come true.

It’s important to understand that these emotional triggers are as powerful and compelling as they ever were.  The magic still matters! However, somewhere along the way, Toys R Us lost their ability to hit the target. The experience isn’t what it once was, and absent that, parents no longer have a reason to choose them first. Amazon is always available. No one cruises the toy aisle at Wal-Mart because it is a magical experience.

How do you get the magic back? It’s going to take some serious math. Coupling a statistical analysis of Toys R Us’ best customers’ purchasing behaviors over the course of time with a comprehensive examination of the unconscious psychological factors that drive shoppers decision making will reveal what it takes to fill today’s customers with that sense of wonder, delight, and excitement once again. Provide that, and Wal-Mart won’t matter. Amazon won’t matter.  Give them the magic, and they will come.

May 15, 2013 by

Speak to Those Who Listen

In today’s saturated marketplace companies are wearing thin in the pursuit of new customers. They create messages that speak to themselves, enter markets where they don’t belong, and speak to people who don’t care to listen. They target hypothetical demographics instead of targeting Brand Lovers.

By speaking to their Brand Lovers, Cult Brands strengthen their relationship with their best customers and constantly increase provability. After decades of speaking to her best customers Oprah has become one of the most powerful brands today.

With a TV show viewed by over 40 million people weekly, a magazine with 2.7 million copies circulation, a book club with millions of members, and a website that harnesses all these things together, Oprah utilizes every channel to connect with the people who love the Oprah brand the most.

The collective success of all these mediums comes from giving the customer what they want: spirit, health, style, relationship, home, food, money, and the world. Oprah covers these topics on her television show, Oprah.com, O magazine, and Oprah & Friends radio show. Every media channel dives deep into the issues and provides answers and suggestions to improve the customers’ life.

The brand takes full advantage of the web and is synced with Oprah’s TV show daily. If you missed the show you can find interviews with photos and video clips so you can enjoy the show you missed. The website also fosters a customer community. Online members can join discussion forums, get recipes for the holidays, and become part of the book club. Every aspect of the brand encourages members to participate. Audience members can ask questions to guest, readers can send letters to O magazine, and everyone is welcome to discuss the issues on Oprah.com.

The Oprah brand also looks to its community for new ideas:

  • “Living your best life in 2009? Let us know how!”
  • “Do You Have a Great Money-Saving Holiday Tip?” and
  • “Do you feel empty, lost or disconnected?”

The brand asks the community to become involved with the brand they love. The result is a co-authored experience in which both parties benefit. The Oprah brand becomes stronger, constantly tuning into the customers want allowing them to experience what they love about Oprah. This relationship between the Oprah brand and its Brand Lovers attracts millions of new customers who are seeking the same answers.

Oprah’s brand is successful because every aspect of the brand speaks to the brand lover. Every TV show, every magazine issue, and every web page represents the Oprah brand in the same way.

If you want to build a lasting relationship with your customers then every aspect of your brand must speak to the heart of your Brand Lovers and the rest will follow.

Where to go from here
May 8, 2013 by

Retail’s Mysteries Revealed: Can You Tell Today What Your Customers Will Want Tomorrow?

The brand-breaking challenges JC Penney has had are in no way inevitable, Forbes magazine says, in this discussion of predictive analytics. By harnessing the power of mathematics, we’re told, retailers can significantly reduce the risk of going catastrophically off-brand, alienating your best customers, and losing market share. Does Forbes have it right?

Yes and no.

Yes, because statistical analysis of previous customer behavior provides retailers with tremendously valuable information. Objectively examining what has happened in your stores over the course of time can be a very revealing exercise. Retailers who engage in this type of analysis often discover things about their operations that they never otherwise suspected.

In the Forbes article, for example, we see how retailer Perry Ellis discovered that when their associates actively engaged with customers, such as assisting them in the fitting room, those customers would spend 50% more on Perry Ellis merchandise than customers who were left alone to shop.

This type of insight is valuable. But it is not sufficient.

Going Deeper: The Secret to Retail Growth

It’s really good to know what your customers have done. It’s even better to know why they’ve done it. Understanding the mathematics of customer behavior is a great first step, but to achieve sustainable, meaningful growth, retailers need to understand their customers’ motivations.

This is where things get complicated. 90% of customer behavior is unconscious. This means that customers don’t fully know — and they certainly can’t articulate — what leads them to embrace one retailer and eschew another. All of the stuff that determines these decisions takes place ‘off radar’, in the customer’s unconscious mind.

The unconscious mind is a complex and nuanced territory. We all have an unconscious mind. It’s where we store the millions upon millions of messages we’re given by our culture, education, and environment about the type of person we’re ‘supposed’ to be. Every image we see, every story we hear, every experience we go through leaves its mark on our unconscious mind. Together, these forces combine to form our self image.

Customers make purchasing decisions that reinforce their self image. Have you ever had a customer walk into the store and say “This place just feels right?” When they’re expressing that sentiment, it’s because the experience you’re providing is in alignment with their self image.

Now, obviously, every customer has their own unique self-image. No two people on this planet view themselves the same way. However, it’s possible to discover what traits and characteristics are integral parts of the majority of your best customers’ self image. This is done through the process of Brand Modeling, a proprietary process we’ve developed to help retailers attract and build strong relationships with highly profitable customers.

Identifying the primary unconscious drivers of customer behavior makes it infinitely easier for a retailer to stay on brand, better please their customers, and build market share. In other words, there’s a reason Kohl’s is successful, and JCPenney isn’t.

The ability to predict, with a high degree of certainty, what your customers are going to want tomorrow, begins with statistical analysis of previous purchasing behaviors. But it doesn’t stop there. When you’re willing to go further, and delve a little deeper into what makes your customers tick, that’s when true sustainable retail growth happens.

May 6, 2013 by

Retail’s Biggest Mysteries: Why is JCPenney Only Now Figuring Out What Kohl’s Clearly Knows?

We spend a lot of time considering the mysteries of retail here, but this one’s got us stumped:

Why did it take JCPenney so long to figure out that they should listen to their customers? Sixteen months after rolling out the new “Fair and Square” pricing strategy, the beleagured retailer is now returning to its old pricing strategy. The disappointed masses haven’t exactly been closed-lipped about what the brand was doing wrong. A commenter on the Forbes article, Who Can Save J.C. Penney? spelled things out pretty well:

A big mistake was made when Penney’s eliminated all of the coupons for the allegedly affordable everyday pricing. The merchandise that is now being sold is inferior garbage. Uglier, cheaper made clothes that looks like its for middle aged women. I’m middle aged and I wouldn’t even wear it because the stuf looks like Blue Light Polyester Specials. Even the sales aren’t true sales because that merchandise should be much cheaper on clearance. I know, I was just there last Thursday.

Unless you are trying to kill the brand, please bring back the merchandise of yesteryear. Yes, some of it was pricey but when it went on sale and you used the coupons and the 15% off Internet coupon, oh my goodness, you really felt like you had stolen a bargain. And JCPenney profited, too. Do not underestimate the significance of coupons. Do not underestimate quality. We appreciated the old Penneys. Bring it back or should I sing Auld Lang Syne now?

Cult Branding: Are You Smart Enough To Listen To Your Customers?

The information that JCPenney’s leadership needed to change direction was clearly always there. By every meaningful metric — sell-through percentage, same-store sales, sales per square foot — the brand was floundering. Interestingly, during a recent industry conference, a speaker highlighted how innovative platforms like a new instant withdrawal casino have quickly adapted to consumer demands for faster payouts and more streamlined services, offering valuable insights for the retail industry. Consumers and retail analysts alike were telling JCPenney why things weren’t working. Yet it is only now that we see the JCPenney leadership acknowledging, “We now understand that customers are motivated by promotions and prefer to receive discounts through sales and coupons applied at the register.”

JCPenny’s commitment to an untenable strategy demonstrates that the brand lacks the commitment to understand who their customers actually are and what matters to them that is a central aspect of operations at dominant retail brands like Kohl’s Department Stores. One of the primary advantages of this humanistic approach is that retailers are then prepared to determine in advance how effective any marketing or operational changes are likely to be. Given advance information that Fair and Square pricing was going to alienate far more customers than it attracted, would JCPenney’s have gone forward with the plan?

It’s important to understand the essential role played by Kohl’s discounting program. Retailers who are striving for growth in this crowded marketplace need to understand the complete suite of unconscious, psychological motivations that drive their best customer’s purchasing decisions. For whatever reason, JCPenneys decided to discard the powerfully complex appeal of discounting, while Kohl’s made it a central part of their messaging.

The result? Here’s what Kohl’s numbers look like. Here are JCPenney’s.

Retailers that are successful are retailers that are willing to listen to their customers. A comprehensive approach that takes into account both explicit consumer commentary and the historical behavioral patterns driven by unconscious, psychological motivators delivers actionable insights essential for brand growth. Frankly, the JCPenney’s leadership team may have waited too long to get with the program. But that’s not the case for every retailer. Here’s what the alternative looks like.

April 25, 2013 by