JCPenney (JCP now?) is SEVERELY lacking a vision. And they have been for years. In my undergrad, I was on the school advertising team competing for NSAC (<a href="http://www.aaf.org/default.asp?id=123" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaf.org/default.asp?id=123</a>) and JCPenney was our client. We were tasked with creating a $100,000,000 integrated marketing campaign. All along I knew that this money absolutely did not need to go to a marketing campaign. It needed to go to top-down, business level reinvention. New branding would have to be part of it, obviously, but a culture change inside the company was a lot more necessary.<p>This was during the time when "New look, new day, who knew?" was their tagline. Which was utter shit when every time you go into a store it looked like it was in shambles, and telling people you had a new look when they could clearly smell the same pile of dung from a block away doesn't increase customers. It was bad.<p>Then about 4 weeks from competition, they release a new logo and a new tagline (honestly we were rebranding towards a JCP moniker during our ideation phase anyways), basically throwing us under the bus. We had to make something for their rebrand - it had been 10 years since they did anything previously.<p>It's no surprise to me that anything unconventional was discarded quickly, and Ron was booted. These people are short-term thinkers, that are entrenched with the big-box department discount store mantra. They were getting close with store-in-a-store ideas like MNG by Mango and Sephora taking up space inside. It's just unfortunate that they're so worried about providing discounts and racing to the bottom with cut-rate merchandise (even their self-created brands like St. John's Bay had a ~4% profit margin).<p>The market is huge, but they are stuck in the stone age.