What Does Montgomery Ward Think They’re Doing?!

What’s cool about this

I vaguely remember Montgomery Ward because my grandma used to take me shopping there for clothes. I seem to remember a toothbrush with the Montgomery Ward logo on it. I definitely had some pants from there, too.

My first real experience with corporate bankruptcy as a child was when Montgomery Ward shut down the lower-than-expected holiday sales in 2000. That was the first in a long string of corporate bankruptcies that I can remember impacting my childhood in some way. It is very talking to be a little kid and then see a big box store get shuttered and abandoned within a short time when you had just gone there fairly recently with your family.

The brand was kept alive after the bankruptcy. It transitioned from being a big box retailer to going back to its roots of being a mail order catalog business after being acquired by an Iowa-based direct marketing company. The brand was then again acquired by colony brands in June 2010.

I’ve been a member of the Montgomery Ward newsletter for about 6 months now and I can assure you that they still sell the same sort of products that they did when I was a kid. (I haven’t looked for any toothbrushes, though.)

This time, I decided to take a look at the newsletter more in detail and I was shocked to find something at the very bottom. Take a moment to scroll back up to the picture of the newsletter and see if you see it.

That’s right. Montgomery Ward has display ads in their product newsletter.

I am a bit confused by this because I cannot see how an external advertiser but see value in having a completely unrelated placement in this newsletter. As a consumer, if I’m opening the Montgomery Ward’s newsletter, I am going to be looking for things for my house like bed sheets. I’m not going to be wanting to think about my IRA or investing at that very moment.

From Montgomery Ward’s perspective, I can’t see how it helps the brand to be so directly associated with clickbait and dubious landing pages. If I have my customer’s attention, I am going to want to do everything in my power to convert them into a sale. Sending them to an unrelated website will distract them and keep them from not purchasing anything from me. If they are hurting for cash so bad, they should look at fixing their marketing or some other business process issue rather than driving their customers away from their website.