Target Shuffles Management Deck Chairs: Still Too Slow

It looks to me like Target is shuffling roles amongst the existing leadership team of Christina Hennington, Rick Gomez, and Lisa Roath. The one exception is CMO.

It strikes me that Lisa Roath, the current CMO, is primarily a merchant. The company apparently concluded that Target lacked depth in the marketing function.

Of course Rick Gomez, the one with the marketing background, is now in charge of merchandising. Whereas Christina Hennington is in charge of not only Growth now, but also Strategy. Christina with the merchandising background.

Isn't the Head of Marketing responsible for growth? Why does Target need a Head of Strategy and Growth?

The answer is straightforward. Brian Cornell has overstayed his welcome, and the organization is scrambling to compensate for it.

Streamlining and simplifying the management and organization structure needs to be the order of the day.

It's not that Target doesn't have a great consumer culture -- it does. It's more that the business culture needs to acquire speed and efficiency. Decisionmaking needs to be about 5x faster.

That often comes from getting leaders closer to the problems. This new leadership structure moves leaders further away from the problems. It's also out of step with a lot of the corporate streamlining and cash efficiency concerns that most companies are facing right now.

Let's start here:

Something must be done to adjust and evolve the Target brand for a new era of cheap, strained consumer which doesn't appear to be dissipating anytime soon.

The Target approach of "own brand-ing" your way out of the slump has not worked. Full stop. That is the current playbook.

What is the new playbook? It needs to generate consumer demand. Product is one component, but there is a worry the elevation of Christina Hennington could continue more of the same -- because we have another merchant as a leader.

Target needs a Marketing Leader as CEO, and the entire management team needs about 2-3 less people, and that likely applies to the 4-5 levels beneath that.

Speed kills, and currently Target is not only dying from strategy, which should come from the CEO. If Christina Hennington truly is that person, well, she needs to be the CEO sooner than later.

If not, Target needs to announce its CEO succession process has kicked into high gear -- I suspect you might start hearing about this as soon as the next earnings call.

The age of efficiency waits for no person, and no company. Brian Cornell has done an admirable job over his CEO tenure in the last 10 years leveraging those store assets, primarily with the help of former COO John Mulligan who built the playbook as Brian was assuming the CEO role.

Brian's tenure has been primarily about supply chain innovation. Target's next act truly needs to be about marketing innovation, but it starts from the top. A new CMO alone cannot move the mountain.