JCPenney today (April 17) launched a recent loyalty program that might deliver half a billion dollars to its consumers, per details shared with Marketing Dive, representing one other major investment by the retailer following the $1 billion turnaround plan it announced last 12 months.
With the launch of a revamped JCPenney Rewards and Credit Program, the retailer is delving into considered one of the 4 core areas it established with last 12 months’s launch of its “Make It Count” brand positioning, alongside accessible fashion, community support and a commitment to positive change.
The rewards program, which already counts 20 million members that shop at JCPenney a median of 5 times per 12 months, looks to make every dollar and each trip to the retailer count, with faster point accrual and other ways to earn CashPass points — a recent reward structure paying homage to the one popularized by rival Kohl’s.
The free-to-join program guarantees $20 in CashPass rewards, with a $10 reward earned after each $200 of spending and a faster rate of accrual for JCPenney credit cardholders. To promote the launch, the retailer is hosting a More, More More Event on May 4 that challenges shoppers to make a three-point shot — a feat achieved by brand ambassador Shaquille O’Neal just once during an NBA game — right into a shopping cart for a likelihood to win more rewards. A related social media hashtag challenge gives consumers a likelihood to satisfy the popular culture phenom.
Katie Mullen, who was promoted from JCPenney’s chief digital and transformation officer to chief customer officer last April, detailed the rewards program and associated marketing plans during a press briefing and interview with Marketing Dive.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: It’s been a couple of months since JCPenney announced its billion dollar plan. What has the marketing strategy been since then?
KATIE MULLEN: What we did in September, from a marketing perspective, was use the reinvestment moment to re-establish our brand value proposition, talking more explicitly about the 4 pillars of our brand, that are making fashion truly accessible, being genuinely rewarding, standing with our communities and doing for others what we would like for ourselves, given our history as “the Golden Rule store.”
September through December was really about ensuring that the customer was seeing and hearing from us about accessible fashion. We spent lots of our internal time in terms of content creation and dollars in terms of amplification really ensuring we were getting credit for the amount of fashion, newness and innovation, each from an inclusion standpoint and from a price standpoint. We were talking about making one and all count, and really making an announcement about inclusion and the range and breadth of our customer needs.
What you will see from us starting now is far more of a balanced message about rewarding and standing with our communities. We felt like we needed to play through that fashion message, reestablishing some expectations for the consumer, before we could start so as to add more messaging complexity. So now you may hear our fashion plus rewarding plus standing with our communities in a far more explicit way. This was the launching point for us to start out talking about rewarding [customers].
How do you market a loyalty program and use all the physical and digital levers at your disposal?
MULLEN: Anytime you do anything related to rewards or loyalty, it’s incredibly complex. We needed to go construct greater than 250 unique and distinct sets of assets — those are the ones that our team built, versus influencer assets or creator content. The messaging is unique to the specific audiences that you might have, and you might have to do credit-specific messaging to credit audiences and general market messaging to other audiences.
The last three months has really been about ensuring that we were getting the relevant message in front of the right customer through the right channels. We are doing a broader-based amplification of this message to ensure that that customers who may not have considered us in a while actually hear and see a few of the advantages of the additional simplicity that we’re adding into our [rewards] structure. We know that our model, and the proven fact that we’ve got a lot of different promotional offers and deals, can at times be harder for the customer to know what value they’re getting.
We use this as a possibility not only to talk specifically to discrete audiences … but in addition to exit and do a broader-based national marketing push to ensure that that we’re helping customers understand the revived and recommitted JCPenney. You’ll see us show up in national media and in paid social, in addition to organic and influencer, after which all of our owned channels as well.
Moving forward, how will loyalty feed into your efforts, especially at a time when marketers are coping with increased signal loss?
MULLEN: We’ve had a loyalty and credit program for therefore long that it actually predates lots of the modern learnings around [personal identifiable information] and what you are attempting to do there. As we’re relaunching, you will see things like the birthday reward, which is a possibility for us to offer a CashPass reward to each member on their birthday. It also is an try to return and rectify a few of the data challenges that we had from individuals who enrolled in our program 10, 15, 20 years ago that we have not necessarily worked with to maintain all of their account information up so far.
There are some moments where we’ve got each a “customer engagement” objective and an “improving the quality of information” objective. But if you might have someone’s email address that is from the AOL days, we probably must ensure that that we’re still communicating with you via the right mechanism. Cleanup of first party data is not the reason that we did this, but definitely, as a marketer, I’m delighted for that group data quality.
We know after we are communicating with our customer, with the latest and best information, we see a couple of two-times effectiveness increase in our targeted messages to those customers because we’re talking to them about what’s most relevant to them. It at all times starts with the customer profit: If we will stop talking to you about stuff you do not care about, and begin talking to you about stuff you do, you are inevitably going to have a greater experience with us.
You’ve spoken previously about a personal company like JCPenney with the ability to focus more on long-term engagement than the short-term results required by public corporations. How do you achieve the right balance of short- and long-term efforts?
MULLEN: I spent the previous couple of days traveling with our chief merchant. I’m liable for telling the story of all the merchandise that her team selects, designs and builds. We were talking so much about hitting the right balance between brand messaging and either product-lead messaging or offer-lead messaging. For us, that is really an everyday conversation.
I sit with my teams every week, we take a look at performance data — marketing response, click-through rates, all those varieties of things — on our messages which can be more brand oriented, versus the ones which can be more acquisition oriented or performance oriented. We are optimizing or re-optimizing weekly on whether we’ve got that right balance.
All marketers wish to have their hands on the steering wheel; making minute adjustments every week is probably not the right answer. But it is an issue that we take really seriously, because we’ve got to ensure that that we’re continuing to do the things that add engagement and relevance in the broader sets of conversations, but in addition ensuring we’re pulling customers down the funnel and never just stopping with relevance or cultural marketing only.
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