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I was very apprehensive when Chuck inherited Kmart and its creaky operations. But he did the right thing by diverting hundreds of millions to the stores in cleaning them up. Trouble was, he failed to let 270 million shoppers know that Kmart is a new store for the American family. Meanwhile, 270 million American shoppers kept nursing the image that Kmart was a dirty place and had too much stock.

Whether or not Kmart will be able to recover from bankruptcy and take on its stronger-than-ever rivals remains to be seen.

In December 2003 Sears, Roebuck and Co and Kmart Holding Corp had two things in common: both were outgunned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc, and they had the same major shareholder financier Edward S Lampert who owned 45 per cent of Kmart and 12 per cent of Sears. In November 2004 Lampert bought Sears and rolled Kmart into the mix. Lampert has an enviable track record in the investment business, with returns averaging 29 per cent a year since 1988, bringing with him investors such as Mr Dell, the computer billionaire. By the final quarter of 2009/10 the combined business was making profits of $430 million.

Lessons from Kmart

Realize that price gimmicks won’t win long-term customers. ‘The problem was that Wal-Mart and Target were out there pitching low prices, broad inventories, hip products, and pleasant shopping experiences while Kmart was banking everything on random in-store discounts,’ reported Business 2.0 magazine. Kmart needed to communicate a reason for consumers to shop there – and shop often.

Don’t neglect advertising. A retailer undergoing a great deal of change needs to tell the public about it on a regular basis. Instead, Kmart cut its newspaper advertising.

Be better than the competition. This is a tough challenge. Wal-Mart is a retailing giant, while Target has been called ‘quite possibly the best run company in the world,’ in Sam Hill’s book on branding, The Infinite Asset.

100 The Cream nightclub

Last dance saloon?

In the 1990s Liverpool nightclub Cream grew from being a small intimate venue catering for around 400 clubbers every Saturday night, to being one of the UK’s first ‘super clubs’ regularly attracting thousands of devotees from all over the country. It quickly capitalized on its success by launching merchandising material, setting up its own record label in partnership with Virgin, touring nationally and internationally with a variety of sponsors, and even embarking on a series of dance music festivals called Creamfields, catering for around 40,000 clubbers. By the end of the 1990s there were regular Cream nights in places as far afield as Buenos Aires and Ibiza, as well as the brand’s native Liverpool.

Yet in September 2002, Cream co-founder and boss James Barton announced that the Liverpool club was closing. Although Barton said the reason for the closure was to concentrate on other aspects of the company, he also admitted to Radio One that ‘if the club was doing the sort of numbers it was doing four or five years ago we wouldn’t be making this decision’. The media responded by saying that the decision not only signified the imminent death of the Cream brand, but of club culture in general. Whether or not Cream manages to survive without its spiritual home remains to be seen, but the closure certainly indicates tough times ahead.

So why exactly did it happen? How could a club that became a household name for a generation suddenly lose its appeal? The reasons, as you might well expect, are numerous.

One argument was that as Cream expanded it gradually lost its cool factor. In 1992, the year James Barton and Darren Hughes set up the club, Cream was immediately viewed as a welcome antidote to the business-minded approach of the London club, Ministry of Sound.

Word of mouth helped to fuel its early growth, along with celebratory pieces in dance music magazines such as Mixmag, which named Cream its ‘club of the year’ in 1994. Around this time Cream decided to expand its operation, moving the club to a larger