Can J.C. Penney Recapture Digital Leadership?

J.C. Penney has gone through some tough times, and that’s an understatement. People tend to forget that the company has done more revamping and restructuring than just the Ron Johnson era, however brief it may have been. It was a company that was struggling before Ron Johnson came, and while it has found a certain amount of stable ground today, it still struggles on the digital front. There’s a certain irony in that. Catalog retailers were some of the first to grasp the need to present one face to the customer across channels, or “omnichannel retailing.” And J.C. Penney was one of the first among catalogers to get it.