Building a Retail Brand in 2026, When Anchor Stores Don't Anchor Anymore
By EPR Editorial Team · Retail & eCommerce
Originally published October 2023. Updated June 2026.
The American department-store anchor — the brand that defined a mall, drove the leases of the smaller tenants around it, and underwrote the regional shopping ecosystem of the postwar economy — is structurally broken. JCPenney, Sears, Macy's, Kohl's, and Dillard's are operating inside a category where the foundational economic model has been unbundled by Amazon, by category specialists like Ulta and Sephora and Lululemon, and by direct-to-consumer brands that skipped the department store entirely.
What the anchor model was supposed to do
Drive traffic. Anchor stores were the gravity wells. The mall ecosystem worked because Macy's, JCPenney, and Sears collectively dragged ten thousand cars a weekend into a regional center. Smaller retailers leased the in-between space and paid for the traffic the anchors generated. That entire arrangement assumed the anchor was the destination. By the late 2010s it stopped being one.
What replaces the anchor
Three patterns are visible in the categories that have moved past the anchor model.
Specialty as anchor. Ulta is now the apparent traffic-generator in many shopping centers. Lululemon, Sephora, and Apple Store function as smaller anchors in others. The destination has been unbundled from the department store and rebundled around the specialty category that captures the highest-margin attention.
Experience as anchor. Top Golf, Pickleball facilities, restaurant-cluster developments, and entertainment formats are filling space the anchor stores vacated. The retail-real-estate logic shifted from products-as-destination to experience-as-destination.
E-commerce as the structural alternative. The buyer who used to drive to a department store now buys online and treats physical retail as the supplemental layer. The communications work for retail brands in 2026 is figuring out how to be useful inside the digital-first buyer journey, not how to recreate the anchor model that no longer functions.
What retail communications has to do differently
The brands that survive the structural shift will be the ones that can name a specific customer, occupy a specific retail moment, and tell a brand story that does not depend on the buyer walking into the store first. The communications work moves up the buyer journey — from the in-store moment to the AI-engine research moment, from the bag-in-hand to the search-query-typed. Brands that own that earlier layer enter the consideration set. Brands that do not are absent from the answer.
The AI Communications layer
Retail buyers now research brands across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews before walking into any store. The brands that appear in those answers entered the consideration set before the visit. The brands that do not appear lost the buyer at the research stage — long before any in-store experience could matter. Citation Share is the new pre-anchor in retail discovery.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
Written by
Ronn Torossian
Ronn Torossian is shaping AI — and the answers inside the chatbox.
He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release — the practitioner's guide to modern public relations strategy. He has been an industry leader for decades. Now he's building the AI Communications era.
Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, launched in 2003 — the AI Communications Firm, combining public relations, digital marketing, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and AI-visibility research for B2C and B2B clients across beauty, technology, entertainment, corporate reputation, and crisis communications. An Inc. 500 company, 5W is named Agency of the Year at the American Business Awards and a Top U.S. PR Agency by O'Dwyer's.
