J.C. Penney has been around for more than a century, but just because it’s a staple in most American malls and one of the biggest online retailers doesn’t mean it’s safe from making potentially business ending mistakes. When the company hired Ron Johnson, former Senior VP of Retail Operations at Apple, there were high hopes for his input. He was now at the helm of a huge sinking ship, one struggling to stay afloat. His creativity and planning would save J.C. Penney, or so it was believed. Johnson convinced J.C. Penney to appeal to younger customers by revamping their store layouts, adding new brands, and removing old brands. The company adopted a new pricing strategy that did away with high-low pricing and “jumping through hoops” for good sales, opting for an everyday “fair price” model. Johnson’s strategy seems to have backfired, and in turn he was fired. In hindsight, J. C. Penney should have done more research into what satisfied customers, rather than so quickly changed its entire business strategy. Out with the old, in with the new! But, when it comes to customers, it turns out the old left and the new never came.

It's been a little over a year since I wrote this blog on maintaining customer loyalty, and wanted to revisit customer loyalty on new findings from Forrester on what builds customer loyalty.

It's not the first time we've blogged about cruise disasters (click here to read), but now that the weather is warming up I've been getting more emails on cruise deals. After the nightmare on the Carnival Triumph, the cruise ship that was stranded for days in February without electricity or plumbing, I've received emails from Carnival's President himself, Gerry Cahill on increasing customer satisfaction. He says...

It seems like only yesterday we were debating whether or not to join Facebook personally, much less as a business.  And occasionally we still see some marketing expert claim that social media is a passing fad and nothing to be worried about.  But social media is here to stay.  If you have any doubts, take a look at these statistics, compiled from various sources by Hubspot.

The future of manufacturing and product development may lay in 3-D printing. Though it has been around for decades, 3-D printing is leaving the labs of scientists and engineers and entering the world of commerce. Imagine consumers being able to personalize, tweak, and add unique adaptations to their favorite brands before making a purchase, and then printing that object right in their home. Talk about creating more customer satisfaction.

Polaris POV has explored pet parents’ seemingly endless capacity to shower their pets with the best of everything in a previous post.  But in that post we focused on premium food and health treatments.  Today, we want to shed light on a much more pressing problem: those ugly dog beds and crates that we have all over our homes.

Who's more stressed? Men or women? According to the second wave of our stress survey, 1200 online American adults were asked to rate themselves on a stress scale, where 10 is “very stressed” and 1 is “not at all stressed”.  Currently, 17% of online American adults say that their stress level is 1, 2 or 3, or quite low (Bottom 3).  On the other hand, 34% indicated their stress level is 10, 9, or 8, or quite high (Top 3).  That compares to 2012, where 19% of respondents rated themselves in the Bottom 3 and 32% rated themselves in the Top 3.  While overall stress levels among online American adults did not change between 2012 and 2013, men continue to endure higher levels of stress than females. 

A recent survey was conducted on the use of TV, smartphones, tablets, and laptops on people's news-consumption habits. The results show...

One place you would never think of to conduct customer satisfaction research is in a taxi cab, but how about calling to complain about one? Well, passengers of New York taxi cabs are doing just that with the city's 311 hotline and website for passengers to register a complaint or compliment. So what do the records show?

Retailers large and small are suffering the impact of showrooming. What is showrooming?