If the Oscars are synonymous with fashion trends and style, and jcpenney (JCP) has been the only retail sponsor of the Oscars for ten years, is jcpenney also automatically associated with fashion trends and style? It's a mathematical formula that jcpenney has seemingly believed in as Oscar's only retail sponsor for a decade. But if you judge branding success by media coverage, jcpenney didn't win big enough at the Oscars this year to outweigh the bad media buzz that started after the NY Times published an article in early February exposing the retailer's alleged scandalous blackhat search engine optimization (SEO) practices.
Just like the Oscar movie stars themselves, jcpenney is finding out that the public may forgive, but they rarely forget bad buzz. Marketing campaigns are just not as much fun to talk about as someone - or some company - caught in a juicy scandal.
First, let me just say what an odd decision it was for the retailer to start officially referring to itself as jcpenney instead of JC Penney last week. How does the company expect to stand out in a crowded retail marketplace when the company name no longer even stands out in a sentence? I'm just saying.
But that is a different issue altogether for the freshly rebranded jcpenney. The bigger issue before the company is still the SEO accusations. Just how scandalous was the alleged SEO scandal, really?
At issue is the integrity of the Google search results. As an avid searcher and a search engine consultant, I am compelled to ask who is trying to fool who about the "integrity" of Google search results? There is little purity or integrity in Google search results when commercial e-tailing sites are part of the search engine mix.
In the olden days if you wanted information, you went to the library. You went to newspapers for news, and you went to the Yellow Pages for ads. Now you go to Google for everything and information, news, and commercial marketing are all jumbled together. There's no way in that search stew to get a "relevant" search result. Google search results are always polluted by the biggest companies that have allocated the biggest budgets for search engine marketing (SEM).
Every Google search result that returns a for-profit commercial result is more of a "paid" result than an organic result. No matter what combination of proactive SEO strategies a company uses, they paid for them somehow. And if Google expects any company to just sit around and hope that bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers will organically mention their company name and products without the company doing anything proactive to get the attention of bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers, then the Google search engineers are living in a virtual dream world.
In Google's view, the "illegal" and junky links that were hooked up to jcpenney.com skewed the "relevance" of the search engine algorithm, and inappropriately moved jcpenney to the top of Google page one results for search terms like "bedding," "skinny jeans," "furniture," and "samsonite carry on luggage." The fact of the matter is that jcpenney does sell bedding, skinny jeans, furniture, and samsonite carry on luggage. So, what's so "irrelevant" about jcpenney being associated with any of those products?
One of the search terms that the media focused on as being inappropriate for JC Penney was "little black dress." At the writing of this blog, here are the companies that show up on Google page one organic search results for "little black dress," along with the number of little black dresses that they have for sale on the landing page linked to those Google page one search results:
- edressme.com - 145 little black dresses
- Dillards.com - 118 little black dresses
- JCrew.com - 37 little black dresses
- Ann Taylor - 18 little black dresses
- Boston Proper - 12 little black dresses
- BananaRepublic.com - 7 little black dresses
(Those are probably the only unsolicited, truly organic, non-affiliated incoming links those six e-tailers have received this year.)
These are the websites that the Google algorithm tells me are the most "relevant" to me when I'm searching for a little black dress. However, the jcpenney website has 29 little black dresses for sale, so doesn't that make jcpenney.com a more relevant website than Ann Taylor, Boston Proper, and Banana Republic?
Really, if I was standing in any average mall and I was looking for a little black dress, would Banana Republic be one of my top six destinations? Would I look there before I looked at jcpenney? Doubtful. So how come the Google algorithm thinks Banana Republic deserves a spot on page one and not jcpenney?
Reportedly jcpenney currently has no little black dress page one placement because jcpenney - or someone associated with it - allegedly crossed the fabricated Google out-of-bounds line and got manually removed from page one. Google is its own judge and jury with the unbridled authority to decide that the 108 year-old company on the Largest U.S. Retailers list with 29 different style of little black dresses in inventory can no longer have a place in the little black dress page one search results.
Jcpenney's willful or unwitting culpability aside, does it make anyone else uncomfortable that the sole manipulator of the search engine rules also gets to act as its own omnipotent judicial body and unrestrained executioner? I think that it should. The Google corporate autocracy not only impacts a company's revenue stream, it also manipulates the information that is and isn't easily accessible to the world. Isn't that something that Google fought against in China? In ways, Google itself is doing the same thing.
Here's an idea... Why doesn't Google just create a separate commercial search engine and let companies pay their way to the top just like they used to do in the Yellow Pages? It seems to me that has much more integrity than the current cat-and-mouse game where websites work to beat the Google algorithm, and then Google changes the algorithm in response.
The search engine game is just that - a big game. And it's the pursuit of winning that game with its constantly changing rules that created the space for unscrupulous SEO firms in the first place.
This is not to imply that using blackhat search engine strategies is an acceptable business practice. It's smarmy at the worst, ineffective at the best, and it smells of either dishonesty or desperation, none of which are good business practices.
But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that IKEA is a more relevant #1 result for "furniture" than jcpenney. Both sell furniture. And jcpenney has been selling furniture in the U.S. for a lot longer than IKEA, so it seems like jcpenney had dibs on relevancy before IKEA even crossed the ocean. But IKEA can beat out jcpenney for furniture search "relevance" not by having a bigger furniture selection, or better furniture, or by selling more furniture, but by allocating more resources to its "furniture" SEM efforts.
Whether or not Google's search engine game is as relevant as it could be is one issue. The other issue is whether jcpenney knowingly broke the rules of the Google game as they stand today.
It would have been so refreshing if CEO Mike Ullman would have taken the opportunity last week when reporting fourth quarter earnings to address this SEO scandal while he had the attention of the press. By ignoring the issue, he left the integrity of the retail brand that he has been working so hard to transform tarnished.
I believe that a direct denial from the top leader of the jcpenney organization, a simple apology for the bad perception the scandal created, and a plan of action to ensure that it doesn't happen in the future would have laid the whole matter to rest. Perhaps all of that is still to come, but it's unfortunate that a word from Ullman didn't clear the air before the retail chain's "modern, flowy, flirty" spring fashions were broadcast to an international fashion-loving Oscars-viewing audience.
Although it is standard PR practice to disassociate corporate leaders from scandals, Darcie Brossart's public statements as spokesperson for jcpenney are not really satisfying. She's been blaming the NY Times for characterizing the company wrong, blaming Google for not sending an official notification of the alleged SEO wrongdoing, and with the firing of the SEO firm that it has been using since 2004, jcpenney is obviously shifting blame to them.
Ultimately, though, it is jcpenney's responsibility to know what's going on, and exactly what their SEO dollars are paying for. It has been my experience in corporate America that when managers and executives don't know what's going on, it's because they don't want to know. You don't ask the questions that you don't really want to know the answers to because if you don't know, you can't be held responsible. Those are the unwritten rules of the corporate Blame Game.
Taking responsibility seems like a reasonable expectation to have with a company whose founding mission statement was the Golden Rule. It also seems like taking responsibility is an essential step for Ullman, since he has been the leader of the "Winning Together" corporate culture program since 2005.
The jcpenney Statement of Business Ethics refers to founder James Cash Penney's original guiding principles which asked the question, "Does it square with what is right and just?" Today's jcpenney employees are told "These words express the integrity that we all believe is fundamental to our business and are still what governs our decisions today."
That is what we want to believe about jcpenney and in order to continue to believe that, we need to hear from the top jcpenney leader that those aren't just words in a corporate document, but rather, actionable standards. It's always so unusual and refreshing to hear a corporate leader put principles before profits.
We want to know how Mr. Ullman feels about about all of this, and how much value 108 years of consumer trust has to the company today. The consuming public needs to hear it from the leader, not from the company mouthpiece.
And after you tend to that, Mike, can you please reconsider part of this corporate identity thing? A retail company that's survived for more than 100 years deserves at least one upper case letter in its name, don't you think?
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