What Retailers Can Learn From J.C. Penney’s Turnaround — And Lands’ End’s Turn For The Worse

Re-building a brand isn’t easy. For every Old Spice — an aging male grooming line made new again thanks to a series of delightfully oddball, millennial-friendly television commercials — there’s a Sci-Fi Channel, which in 2009 renamed itself “Syfy,” apparently unaware it’s a slang term for syphilis in many parts of the globe, leading to ridicule on social media and across the media landscape. Retailers are no strangers to the brand revitalization process: Target, J. Crew, RadioShack and Burberry are just a few of the companies who have overhauled their images in recent years, with varying degrees of success. J.C. Penney and Lands’ End are running the reinvention gauntlet now, and executives from both retailers took the stage at last week’s Shop.org conference in Dallas to tell their stories. “The biggest barrier to change is the impetus to change,” Mike Amend, executive vice president of omnichannel at J.C. Penney, said during his keynote speech. “As retailers, we’ve got to have the courage and foresight to adopt change.” Read more at Retail Dive.