After low profits, low sales, and other financial disappointments, Sears has announced its plans to sell its brands to its competitors.
The reliability of the brands that Sears sells is one of the company’s strengths, and in order to soften the recent financial blow, it will start selling those brands to competitors while charging a Sears brand association fee.
In doing so, Sears hopes to boost brand loyalty so that customers will buy more of its products, even if the products are not bought directly from Sears.
Although experts believe that this method will be successful in the short-run, they are unsure of whether this method is a long-run solution as well.
For the most part, customers seem to buy products from certain places based on convenience. Sears is not as accessible or widespread as a department store such as Wal-Mart, so it’s difficult to see how Sears is promoting its own sales through its new plan. It seems as though Sears would only make money off the brands they sell to competitors; in other words, the plan does not promote sales for Sears itself.