JC Penney : Dividing to rule

Corporate information seekers are isolated and marginalised.

The Site

JC Penney, a leading US retailer, spreads corporate information across separate isolated sites.

JC Penney’s dotcom site is retail-focused and features footer links to corporate content under the heading Company Information. Clicking any of these links – careers, about us, media, investors – opens the selected corporate section in a new secondary window. All sit on separate sites or sub-domains; for example, ‘investors’ leads to ir.jcpenney.com/, while ‘media’ links to jcpmediaroom.com.

Three of the corporate sections are isolated from other corporate content, with no Company Information menu or cross-links. Only careers features a set of links to other corporate sections, and only on its home page. Content reflects the standalone development: investors and media each has its own version of the annual summary report, while there is shareholder information on the Media site.

The Takeaway

Many companies treat their dotcom address as a sales and marketing site, excluding corporate sections from the main navigation and providing a subsidiary route to them. For major retailers such as JC Penney this has increasingly made sense as e-commerce has blossomed; what defies sense is the way it organises the various corporate sections into single strands rather than knitting them together as is common, through a common portal or degrees of cross-linking. The result is an exaggeratedly fragmented environment in which corporate information seekers other than job candidates are funnelled immediately into tight silos.

Why would JC Penney restrict cross-department browsing on its website in a way that it never would in one of its stores? Most likely it’s a sign of how the site is governed: sales and marketing runs the show and asks each corporate department to set up a site for its information in return for a link to it. None of the departments seems to be on the same ‘corporate’ floor, so they don’t talk to one another. As a result, corporate information seekers are left to feel confused, marginalised and frustrated with the site and the company.

First published on 26 June, 2012