What Can JC Penney’s Marketing Mishaps Teach Us About Appointment Setting?

JC Penney, one of the biggest clothing and retail stores in the United States, is slowly becoming a fine example of what you should not do in business. Considering just how fast they are losing customers, not to mention those occasional marketing gaffes that made them the butt of jokes in social media, JC Penney is in a real uphill battle. For all of us in the appointment setting profession, JC Penney can provide us several interesting lessons in marketing and in generating sales leads. What they did are precisely the things that you should be avoiding in our own campaigns. 

First mistake, they apologized for their change in brand and approach. While this, in itself, is not bad at all, apologizing to your sales leads prospects about the changes can be troublesome if you do not properly adjust for these changes. To put it simply, your customers do not really care about the changes you make. All that matters to them is how the change will affect their current lifestyle. This is where the store made the mistake: they apologized, yes, but they did not properly prepare their customers for the change. This is one mistake that you should be avoiding as well. 

Second, the upper management of JC Penney thought that they knew what their customers needed. Now that is one bad assumption that cost them. You see, in today’s highly customer-focused lead generation campaigns, you need to listen to what your customers are saying. Unlike Steve Jobs and his team of forward-thinking designers, your business is still at the point of looking for a foothold in the market. If you want to sell, make sure that you have a really good market-monitoring team (try using telemarketing surveys to do that job) who can provide you with the latest information about customer behavior and buying habits. Adjust your marketing efforts according to what you learn. 

Third, and last, JC Penney never had a united front. The different people running the company also had different approaches in solving the problem. This will only confuse the audience, since they are receiving different information from different places, and will just make your business lose customer and investor confidence. Try not to make that mistake. As you may have learned about in previous marketing campaigns, you need to make sure that everyone is supporting your stand. It is just a simple gesture, being consistent and united in all fronts, but it can do wonders for your marketing efforts. 

Well, to tell you the truth, JC Penney still has a lot of potential in serving customer needs. What really messed them up were these simple marketing gaffes. If you truly want to be successful in your appointment setting campaigns, then you should take these lessons seriously. There are a lot of things that you can do for your business to expand, but the most important point that you should never forget is your customers. Remember, you are in business to serve their needs, so make sure that whatever you are offering lives up to what you claim.