Vera Wang's Brand now at Kohls - Vera, have you ever been inside a Kohls?

Implications: The news that Vera Wang is hooking up with Kohls reconfirms a few things: •Pairing a bad brand with an iconic one only leads to at best a hasty failure and at worst irreparable damage to the superior brand's reputaion.  •As hard as it is to kill a great brand, people always seem game to try •Vera Wang needs better counsel

Analysis: Most bad marriages are consummated for the wrong reasons....money, status, convenience, desperation.... you get the picture.   For Vera Wang, it's hard to imagine the motivation for hooking up with Kohls.  Status, convenience and desperation wouldn't seem to be apparent reasons. Maybe money's tight.  If so, I hope Kohls dowry is very significant because the damage this experiment will have done to the Vera Wang brand will require a lot of time to repair.  One has to only picture all those Calvin Klein jeans sitting on pallets at Costco - that brand has never recovered. 
Vera Wang has built a brand and a fortune by selling fashion to people who could afford it or at least finance it - not to people that couldn't.  I would venture to bet that Vera Wang's brand name doesn't rank high in awareness or aspiration among Kohls regulars.  Sure there are some more approachable fashion brands like Isaac Mizrahi who can sell down stream at a place like Target.  But let's be clear, Mizrahi is no Wang and Kohls is no Target.  Vera Wang and Target would have been a precarious enough combination, but more understandable given Target's badge value built around it's innovative "affordable fashion" strategy.....but Kohls?  I guess Kohl's can be given some credit for duping Vera Wang into the adventure that is the Kohls shopping experience - I wonder if Vera or her people have seen this link?
http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com/hee_haw_marketing/2006/12/
hurricane_kohls.html..........oh my Vera.

Kohls "let's be Target" strategy shows strategic and operational laziness, a lack of creativity, and a general contempt for the consumer's intelligence.  Kohls selling Vera Wang is as a believable as the notion that Tiger Woods drives a Buick.  In terms of setting the table, Kohl's is no more prepared to sell Vera Wang that it was to sell Daisy Fuentes "line".  Kohls is a brand whose experience is broken at almost every critical touchpoint - starting with it stores.  For Kohls, the way to brand salvation is not through tricks, but through an understanding of their target, their needs and an ability to deliver against both in an authentic and consistent manner.  As for Vera Wang, one can hope that this will be over before anyone noticed and more importantly, that her traditional demographic had a greater awareness of Helmut Kohl and not of the stores themselves.