Retail & eCommerce
JCPenney: One of the Most Expensive Rebranding Failures in Retail History
Ron Johnson at JCPenney, Nov 2011 to April 2013. Sales fell 25%. $4.3B revenue gone in one year. The Apple Store playbook applied to the wrong customer.
Tag
AI Communications — Tagged Articles
Insights & Strategy
Visa vs. Mastercard: The PR Battle
For thirty years the question was who issues more cards. Today it is who owns the stronger brand. A definitive comparison of Visa and Mastercard across PR strategy, brand positioning, sponsorships, agency rosters, and the AI-engine era.
Research
The Insulated 10: Who Wins When AI Eats Search
The other side of the Vulnerable 50. Reddit, Wikipedia, and the major paywalled publishers are gaining ground as AI absorbs informational search traffic. The ranking, the framework, and the playbook for getting on the list.
Research
Chegg: The Canonical AI Casualty
Chegg is the first publicly traded company to attribute revenue decline to AI — stock down ~99% from its 2021 peak, more than half the workforce cut in 2025, and a lawsuit against Google. The Vulnerable 50 case study at #96.
Beauty
Beauty: Brands, Skincare, Fragrance, Retailers
EPR's Beauty PR pillar — nine sub-specialties, the press pool, the wellness-beauty convergence, and how brands win Citation Share inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Generative AI
How PR Teams Use AI in 2026: The New Public Relations Agency Services
In 2026, AI is standard infrastructure in PR agencies — embedded across research, media targeting, content creation, monitoring, measurement, and Citation Share tracking inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. The full playbook.
Research
The 35-Prompt Citation Share Audit
35 prompts organized by query type — brand identity, category, comparative, buyer-intent, founder, and geographic — with scoring instructions for running your own Citation Share audit.
AI Communications
Media Won't Save You: Why Press Coverage No Longer Guarantees AI Authority
Your press clips are not your authority anymore. They are raw material. The brand in the answer wins the first impression. The brand absent from the answer is invisible.
AI Communications
Christian Media's New Pecking Order: Archive Depth Over Audience Size
Christian media is undergoing an authority reshuffle in the AI era, where citation by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews now dictates influence. This article examines how traditional Christian outlets are faring, highlighting the importance of archive depth and structured content over audience size for AI-driven synthesis. It identifies leaders like Christianity Today and Religion News Service, outlets losing ground due to thin archives, and predicts future trends for Christian media in the age of AI.
AI
The Communications Lessons of OpenClaw/Hermes
The Anthropic Hermes incident was a three-week crisis triggered by a billing bug that went viral. This case study examines the communications strategy—what worked, what failed, and operational lessons for AI platform teams managing technical crises in public.