The original marketing strategy worked for them for a number of years. As the times changed Mervyns failed to keep up with it. Mervyns, the seller for all sorts of apparel, housewares, and other department store favorites began to crumble from the ground up. Much of the company's failure was pinned on three different firms that bought the company off of target. It was said that instead of boosting the company's image it destroyed it financially. The Firms; Cerberus Capital Management, Sun Capital Partners, and Lubert-Alder, that bought Mervyns stripped its real estate assets, upped the price of rent. This put the company in eight hundred million dollars of debt taking four hundred million in personal cash (Thorton). In retrospect the poor money management was just one flake in the snowball crashing into Mervyns.
As the brand was closing doors left and right, Mervyns tried to change its marketing environment by opening some stores in undeserved markets such as Hispanic markets. However this demographic move happened to late. Mervyns had a great idea in its hands, the company was able to create its own niche in the market, the store had lower priced merchandised compared to their competitors because they sold items that were deemed second had, due to minor undetectable flaws (mervyns). As the marketing environments changed, Mervyns didn't. The niche market that they had originally created became to large of a market, diluting the identity of the company. Trying to target to many types of consumers; from moms, Latinos, teens, suburbanites...etc forced the company to have perpetual clearance. With the varied customers, and trying to compete with retailers out of their league they managed to devalue the brand and caused their marketing budget to plummet (atomic). Which is how the company failed in its product positioning, how the brand stood in relation to its