Creativity, Flawed Creativity: Apple Inc. Research Paper (Essay Sample)

FLAWED CREATIVITY
Name:
University
Lecturer:
Date:
FLAWED CREATIVITY
Apple Inc. is one of the few companies that have succeeded in the tech world. This has come about by the desire of the company’s board to make products that are too attractive to be real. Of equal importance is its Apple store, a mobile application that was designed to help shoppers by Apple product such as iPhone, Mac and Apple watches; product that Ron Johnson helped Steve Jobs build it during his tenure as retail chief. After the success story of Apple store, the management board of JC Penney appointed him as CEO to help bring back a retail firm that had lost its glory as US shoppers favorite.
The new CEO embarked on implementing strategies that massively rebranded the JC Penney brand, most of which he had used to spur sales while at Apple. He began by training employees to help people do their shopping and also developed brands that were exclusive to JC Penney. In addition his tenure was marked my introduction of low fair prices in place of the traditional inflated prices with high tempting amounts of discounts and coupons. All of which were good well thought out strategies, little did he know that they were bound to fail. Eventually, he was forced out of office after the stock value of the retail dropped by a whopping 55 percent, a situation the shareholders could not tolerate any longer.
One might wonder what Johnson did that was disastrous enough to cost the fortune of such a company. With all the brilliant turn around strategies he had implemented, one might want to conclude that he didn’t deserve such a humiliation. Actually a number of factors contributed to his spectacular failure at JC Penney and they include: misreading shoppers; alienation of core customers; misreading the JC Penney brand and rolling out ideas without testing them.
After taking over as the new CEO of the retailing firm, Johnson completely overhauled the pricing system. He introduced the low fair and square pricing approach for everyday shopping to replace the inflated prices used to lure customers through massive discounts that seemed tempting. Little did he know that shoppers are not drawn to shop by logic or fair pricing rather by the need to get deals via coupons and massive fake discounts! As a result sales began to drop massively; even Johnson himself acknowledged that they had made a terrible mistake abolishing the coupons.
With the removal of coupons Johnson alienated many of JC Penney’s oldest and most loyal customers. They felt that they were no longer part of JC Penney target market and so they had to do their shopping in places where they could still hunt for coupons and massive discounts. This resulted in small customer base to support the company’s brand name.
Johnson’s inability to understand what JC Penney’s old customers wanted stemmed from the fact that he did not want to test his ideas on a limited basis. His reason was simple, "we didn’t test at apple”. Take for instance the introduction of low fair prices without coupons, Johnson simply rolled out the strategy without even asking for views from the shoppers themselves.
Finally, Ron Johnson totally misunderstood what the JC Penney brand was. Un...