- JCPenney wants to democratize fashion with a new fall campaign that stars real life teachers.
- The campaign pitches JCPenney as an affordable place to buy quality brands.
- The cross channel effort includes everything from a TV spot during Amazon’s Thursday night football programming, to social posts from the teachers down to a Substack aka “The Other September Issue.” Michief worked on the TV spot. FleishmanHillard worked on the Substack.
Catalyst Brands has been on a mission to rebrand JCPenney since it merged with the retailer last year. Last year, the company ran a holiday campaign positioning itself as a one-stop-shop for high quality products at the best prices and asked consumers to rethink the brand.
Marisa Thalberg, executive vice president, chief customer and marketing officer of Catalyst Brands said that this new campaign is the latest edition of this push calling it the “JCPenney 2.0 moment.”
“It’s the next evolution in the journey and what we want to do is be even more concrete in answering why we believe everyone should say Yes, JCPenney,” said Thalberg. “It is because we believe that everyone deserves a better deal.”
The “Other September Issue” is a nod to Vogue’s biggest issue of the year, featuring the fall fashion of high end brands. JCPenney wanted to playfully recreate this with their own more affordable offerings.
“We wanted to offer our alternative to that, where the models are real people, and in this case, teachers, who not only represent a meaningful percentage of our customer base but deserve to be inspirational both for who they are and how they dress,” said Thalberg. “A lot of things that the more traditional September issues feature are not relatable or attainable, but our edition is.”
The fall campaign runs a couple of weeks past the company’s back-to-school marketing campaign and the idea is to turn the attention to the adults who are shopping for updates, said Thalberg.
“It’s a good time to get people into those next seasonally appropriate items, but at the same time, we know they’re all working Americans and it has to be affordable,” added Thalberg. “Maybe they just did load up on back-to-school stuff for the kids and now it’s time to shop for themselves.”
Highlighting teachers is emblematic of who JCPenney’s customers really are. “Our customers are middle-class working families, moms, women, men who really want and appreciate having quality brands, selection sizing, but at deals that really make those things both attractive and attainable,” said Thalberg.
As the brand continues to fight for relevance, the company revamped their rewards program in June and connected it to Aeropostale – another Catalyst brand – and has seen enrollments grow by 14 percent. “We’re making sure that we’re continuing to honor and serve the people that have been our classic customers, but also building consideration with new ones,” explained Thalberg.
