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K-Mart Not Cool With the 18-34 Demo Just Quite Yet

This article is more than 10 years old.

To combat falling sales, discount retailer K-Mart is attempting a bold tactic: be cool. The company has partnered with celebrities to launch custom collections, improved its website and expanded its participation in New York Fashion Week.  Yet as brand perception data from YouGov BrandIndex shows, the company hasn't quite reached "it"-status yet: the company has made little improvement in the 18-34 age demographic  and still ranks well below its competitors.

While K-Mart is a well-established brand with national penetration--75% of Americans live within 15 miles of a K-Mart--it has faced problems in recent years. The company has seen decreasing same-store sales in five of the last six years and has developed a reputation for less-than-stellar store quality. A recent Wall Street Journal article on the chain, for example, made sure to describe the disheveled state of one Manhattan store.

Confronted with these problems, the company has embarked on an ambitious plan to add new flavor to a brand previously associated primarily with value.  One component of this reinvention has been a new series of celebrity clothing collections. Selena Gomez and Sofia Vergara both unveiled collections and appeared in TV spots this past Fall. The brand has also inked deals with Adam Levine and Nicki Minaj, whose collections will debut later this year. The company has expanded its profile in the online realm, as well. It now maintains an attractive fashion blog and is introducing a feature that will allow users to put together complete outfits online.

Most intriguing of all are K-Mart's attempts to increase its presence at New York Fashion Week. While the company has been sponsoring Fashion Week for five years, the company this past year, introduced the "Kmart Concierge" service, which delivers, upon request, small essentials to fashion designers, editors and bloggers during Fashion Week. Exemplifying this bridge from mass-market to high-fashion is a video that K-Mart put together advertising the "service". A self-aware infomercial-parody, shot in fashionable NYC locales and featuring a number of high-profile fashionistas, the video is undeniably cool.

Despite all these efforts, however, the brand hasn't seen a sustained improvement in perception scores among the key 18-34 demographic--at least not yet. The brand's Recommend score among the age group has hovered between -30 and -10 since September 2012, a fact which indicates that more people than not in the demographic are still rating the brand negatively. In comparison, many of its retail competitors rank well above that, with scores ranging, for the most part, from 50 to 80.

Yet even if K-Mart has not been able to shift its brand perception so far, it is probably too early to start worrying. The process of recasting itself as a source for affordable fashion will likely take time. Two of the celebrity collections mentioned above have not yet even been released, after all. And its Fashion Week plans, designed to individually win over the hearts of the fashion elite, have a much longer horizon in mind, anyway. As Business Insider explains, "when Kmart delivers emergency pantyhose to a fashionista wearing a pair that has a run in it, hopefully that same blogger or editor will consider featuring Kmart's trendy fashions in the future."

K-Mart, H&M, Target and Kohl's were rated using BrandIndex's Recommend score which asks, "Would you recommend the brand to a friend?" The scores for this article were generated from a nationally representative sample of consumers age 18 to 34.

This post was written by Ted Marzilli. He is senior vice president and managing director of BrandIndex.