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Customers didn’t say they were going to “Target.” They were going to “Tarzhay,” the faux-French pronunciation that captured something real: This wasn’t just a discount retailer, but a brand people felt good about. You went in for paper towels and left with a throw pillow, a candle, and a pair of shoes you didn’t need. Somehow, you felt great about it.
That brand is gone. The story of how it disappeared is an instructive leadership case study because of Target’s leadership failures.
Target has posted roughly flat annual sales for four years. Comparable store sales fell 3.8% year over year in Q3 2025. Foot traffic dropped 2.7% in the same period and by nearly 8% at some locations.
On Feb. 1, the company replaced its CEO after 11 years. The new chief executive’s first public statement acknowledged the company had to earn back customer trust. And in February 2026, Target announced it would cut approximately 500 jobs to reallocate dollars back to frontline store workers because customers had been complaining loudly about long checkout lines, messy stores, and employees who were nowhere to be found.
Target got so top-heavy with corporate structure that the actual stores where the brand promise is either kept or broken didn’t have enough people to run them properly.
You cannot cut your way to a great customer experience. But you can neglect your way out of one.
The media narrative has focused on the DEI controversy, including the back-and-forth on Pride merchandise and diversity programs that alienated customers on both sides and triggered boycotts. When you make a values-based promise to your customers and reverse it under pressure, you lose the trust of everyone watching because they learn that your values are negotiable.
But the DEI controversy was a spark, not the fire. The fire had been burning for years.
Former Target CEO Brian Cornell acknowledged in a 2025 earnings call that the company faced “five consecutive months of declining consumer confidence” and named the boycotts as a headwind. But analysts had been sounding alarms before the controversies arrived. Customers reported that the stores felt messier, the merchandise was less inspired, and the service was less attentive. One analyst said, “Target seems to be experiencing something of an identity crisis.”
An identity crisis. In a brand that built its entire competitive position on identity.
In The Relationship Economy, I write that every brand makes a promise to its customers that goes far deeper than product or price. That promise is relational. It says, “This is who we are, this is what you can count on, and this is how we will make you feel every time you walk through our doors.” When that promise is kept consistently, you build relationship capital, the accumulated trust and loyalty that make customers choose you even when a competitor is cheaper, faster, or more convenient.
Target had enormous relationship capital. “Tarzhay” was relationship capital made visible. And leadership spent it down, year by year, decision by decision, until the account was nearly empty.
Your brand does not live in your marketing department, your strategic plan, or your executive suite. Your brand lives on your store floor in every checkout interaction, every question answered, and every customer who couldn’t find an employee.
Target’s new CEO understands this. His first organizational move was to cut layers of regional management and redirect that money into store-level payroll and new guest experience training for every team member at every store.
Here is the hard truth: You cannot train your way out of a culture problem in a memo. What Target is attempting to do now (restock the front line, retrain the team, rebuild the in-store experience) is what should have been protected for the past decade. The checkout lines didn’t get long overnight. The stores didn’t get messy in a quarter. These are the slow, visible consequences of leadership decisions that treated the front line as a cost to be minimized rather than an asset to be invested in.
The best leaders are obsessed with the front line. They know that the gap between a customer who becomes a loyal advocate and one who quietly stops coming back is almost always a single human interaction: one employee who genuinely saw them, one problem that got solved without friction, one moment where the customer felt like they mattered.
Target got distracted by strategy documents, corporate restructuring, and the politics of the moment. And customers felt it. Something that used to be special had become just another errand.
The front line is the strategy. Every other decision in your organization exists to serve those customer-facing moments, or it shouldn’t exist at all.
When a brand loses its customers’ trust, the instinct is almost always to offer lower prices, discounts, sales, and loyalty points. Target launched back-to-school discounts, cut prices on 3,000 everyday items, and did everything the finance team could model in a spreadsheet. It didn’t work.
It never does. Customers who have lost emotional connection to a brand don’t come back for a deal. They come back when they trust you again.
John DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies such as Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestlé, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at 216-839-1430 or info@thedijuliusgroup.com.