J.C. Penney Does the Multichannel Mantra

As the Internet moves to the core of J.C. Penny’s retailing strategy, chairman/CEO Mike Ullman, declared at last month’s Shop.org’s FirstLook conference that the future of his company’s success is all about multichannel sales. Afterall, this is the man that helped lead the firm’s operating profit from 7 percent in 2005 to 9.5 percent last year. Overtaking catalog sales for the first time in its history, the Internet is a core channel for J.C. Penney. According to Ullman, however, that doesn’t deem the catalog irrelevant. Build it and they will come…in another words, they don’t care which way the customers come in as long as they come in. And that means building sophistification among channels that provides customers a seamless experience from the web to the sales associate. Hmm, it looks like employees are buying into this strategy too as a recent survey indicates 73 percent of J.C. Penny’s workforce thinks it’s a great place to work.