Penney 's Five Forces Theory Essay

Porter’s Five Forces is a framework that consists of five competitive forces, threat of entry, power of supplier and buyer, threat of substitution and competitive rivalry. These forces facilitate the analysis of the task environment of an industry or company (Wheelen and Hunger, 2009).

In the retail industry, it is hard for a business to abandon all its previous strategies, such as locations and advertising strategies to make a fresh start. However, that is precisely what JCPenney and has been able to accomplish numerous times. Founded over a hundred years ago, the firm has undergone mass renovations with each change in leadership. Moreover, recently, JCPenney, has been reinvented once more, under the leadership of President Michael Francis and CEO Ron Johnson.

Porter's Five Forces is a simple but powerful tool that consist of 5 different forces to understand the competitiveness of your business environment, and for identifying your strategy's potential profitability. The five forces are degree of rivalry, threat of entry, threat of substitutions, buyer power, and supplier power. Each force is helpful in their own way to get to know your rivals a lot better and get to know what can happen in your market.

In January 2012, newly appointed CEO, Ron Johnson introduced a plan to rebrand the department store chain into a 21st century retail powerhouse. Launching of the new J. C. Penney brand identity was set to occur over four years and would include a new logo, a new in-store experience featuring new and transformed brands, and most importantly, it would change the way that the company priced merchandise. Unfortunately, J. C. Penney suffered a 25% sales decline in the first year and Johnson was fired after only 17 months.

In the early Millennium, between 2004-2009 CEO Mike Ullman started J.C. Penney on a trend that would lead to their massive debt and near failure in 2012. Ullman’s leadership started strong, “For three years, Ullman was hailed as the man who was remaking a legendary retail brand. Not rescuing it. Not saving it. Just remaking it. Making it more nimble. More hip. Not your mom’s department store. Not any more. Now it was the department store of the future. Sephora, Mango and Liz Claiborne,” (Guinto, 2011). Ullman was known for reimaging brands and gave J.C. Penney a seemingly bright future with strong brand partnerships they are still known for such as Sephora and Liz Claiborne.

In this segment, the retailer J.C. Penney will be analyzed against the department store retail industry, with particular emphasis placed upon their competitors, Macy’s and Kohl’s. The major components to be discussed will include the general external environment (i.e. demographics, economics, politics, legal requirements, technologies and global expansion), the industry environment, the competitive environment, the driving forces and the key factors for success within the industry. In terms of the general external environment, the retail industry is a multi-trillion dollar business in the United States alone and maintains operations primarily due to consumer spending. Such purchases rely upon the disposable income of

As one of the major retailers in the United States, JCPenney has 1,104 department stores in 49 states and Puerto Rico as of February 2, 2013. The key success of its business is tremendously depending on the sales performance. However, the retail business is highly competitive, with low barriers to entry and low profit margin. Due to large sales plunge in 2012, the company is in financial trouble. The thorough analysis of JCPenney’s financial statements is vital to judge the future performance of its business.

At this specific time, the economy was coming out of Great Recession. JC Penney sales continued to decline like melted off ice cream falling off an ice cream cone. JCP’s should have stopped their bad marketing train years ago. Based off of personal experiences their merchandise was cheap, fall apart cheap up until the point where I repeatedly kicked myself for making such horrible purchases. I used to shop at JC Penney a lot, but the t-shirts didn’t survive washings; cheap China stuff people tend to shy away from.

JC Penney Co. Incorporated was founded in 1902 in Kemmerer, Wyoming by James Cash Penney and William Henry McManus. Today JC Penney offers a range of family apparel, jewelry, shoes, accessories, and home furnishing products through a chain of department stores and their company website. JC Penney, headquartered in Plano, TX, operates in the United States and Puerto Rico, with a total of 1,108 stores. JC Penney also offers its products through a catalog channel. Each channel serves the same type of customers and provides generally the same merchandise mix. JC Penney’s business is conducted through a single segment, but revenues are reported by product category. In addition to their product categories, the

Porter’s Five Competitive Forces Analysis is a framework developed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School for study of industry analysis by analyzing five competitive forces which define industry and its business strategy. These five competitive forces determine the competitive advantages, disadvantages and attractiveness or profitability of industry.

Background J.C. Penney was founded in 1902 by James Cash Penney, and by 1907 he had purchased full interest in three locations, moving his company headquarters from Wyoming to Salt Lake City in 1909. By 1912, there were 34 stores in the Rocky Mountain State areas. By 1928 Penny's had opened 1000 stores and by 1941 had 1600 stores in all 48 states. Penny's began national advertising in 1956, offered in-store credit cards in 1959, and acquired The Treasury discount stores in 1962. By 1963 it issued its first catalog, expanded to Alaska and Hawaii, acquired Thrift Drug and by 1969 was a major feature in most American cities. By James Penney's death in 1971, the company had revenues of over $5 billion and peaked with 2,053 stores in 1973. Continuing on an acquisition mode, the company purchased First National Bank of Harrington, Delaware and began offering its own Visa and MasterCard, boosting its profits. By 1992, such phenomenal growth caused the company to move its corporate headquarters to Plano, Texas. In 1998, Penny's finished launching three television shopping channels and its Internet store was one of the largest home furnishing and home stores on the Web. To continue its fiscal growth, the company decided to close 44 underperforming stores in 200 Curry, 1993; jcpenney.com).

Porter 's five forces framework assesses the competitive pressures a company faces within the industry. The five forces of competitive pressure include: competition from rival sellers, competition from potential new entrants to the industry, competition from producers of substitute products, supplier bargaining power and customer bargaining power. The model helps us determine the strength of competitive pressures and profitability of an industry. [3]

JCP is a company which consistently maintained a 100 year old tradition. JCP is a dry goods and clothing store established by James Cash Penney in partnership with his employers and merchants. It started expanding its stores since then and by 1930 the number of stores were 1452 and the number of associates (employees) were about 25,000. The core growth strategy adopted by the company was ‘decentralized merchandizing’ when its competitors adopted ‘centralized merchadizing’. This started showing up problems for the company as their strategy could not show the daily updates of the sales of individual products unlike its competitor’s strategy. Weak inventory management system also added to the problems. Despite such operational inefficiencies, the company

The Porter`s five forces are threats of new entrants, the bargaining power of buyers ,product substitution and intensity of rival of rival among competitors .These forces measure the competitiveness of the market and also helps the company to identify strategies to use to penetrate such and gain market share.

In our essay we are going to examine Pavlides/kraft Foods Company and proceed in an analysis of Porter’s Five Forces model. Afterwards we comment upon generic strategies that a company is able to pursue and indicate which is the appropriate strategy in our case. In addition a wide range of tables, graphs and charts are included in order to support our thesis and indicate the existing data in relation to chocolate industry.