We Need To Talk About Target

Everybody knows Target’s hurting. You can feel it. In the aisles. In the ads. In the energy. Something’s off. So I ran the numbers. Pulled their CRI—the Cultural Readiness Index—to get a real read on how deep the shift is. What came back? Wild. Their CRI dropped from 80.4 at the end of 2024 (Stable) to 58.45 by mid-2025 (High Risk). That’s a 21.95-point drop in six months. I’ve never seen a score move that fast in a company this big. That means the system isn’t just stressed—it’s volatile. Like, structurally unsound. The kind of instability that doesn’t show up in earnings yet but tells you collapse is in motion. Here’s exactly how it happened.

Leadership Stability & Change Management (Score: 80 → 65)

Target didn’t have some explosive scandal at the top—they had a quiet fragmentation of clarity. Long-tenured execs stepped down or were reshuffled during the most culturally volatile stretch of the last five years. And the transitions were technically smooth, but culturally misaligned. Because this isn’t about job titles—it’s about narrative tone. The company needed visible conviction. What it gave was executive musical chairs. CRI reads that as a vacuum. Not chaos, just absence. And absence in leadership, especially during moments of social pressure, reads like consent to drift. 15-point drop.

Workforce Alignment & Demographics (Score: 85 → 58)

This was one of Target’s strongest pillars. The workforce was majority women, majority people of color, demographically aligned with the communities they served. But when they pulled back their DEI commitments—with no real replacement structure or story—the trust broke. Not loudly. Quietly. Engagement dropped. Alignment frayed. Employees stopped extending the benefit of the doubt. And that disengagement isn’t theoretical. It’s the loss of relational force between people and brand. When you ghost your own values, your people stop fighting for you. CRI clocked a full 27-point collapse here. Not from outrage—from erosion.

Brand Image & Narrative Control (Score: 78 → 50)

Target used to sit in the middle of the cultural Venn diagram. The trusted brand that could thread joy and relevance without getting dragged into polarization. But they’ve completely lost control of their frame. Pulled Pride merch “for safety,” quietly ended REACH and DEI, then tried to patch it all with a nostalgic feel-good commercial. It didn’t land. When a brand stops leading and starts reacting, the story becomes external. That’s what CRI caught—a shift from authorship to defensiveness. The public’s no longer hearing from Target. They’re hearing about it. That 28-point narrative fragility? That’s the sound of silence where purpose used to be.

Crisis Handling & Strategic Direction (Score: 75 → 45)

The thing about crisis management is it’s not about how fast you clean up—it’s about whether people believe you understand what broke. And Target didn’t respond like a company trying to stabilize. It responded like a company trying not to make it worse. No public reckoning. No directional reframe. Just avoidance, tempered by a hopeful ad campaign and some soft PR. CRI saw it instantly—because crisis isn’t a PR problem, it’s a structural one. A 30-point drop here signals that the company hasn’t just failed to respond. It failed to rebuild internal coherence. And once a system breaks belief, recovery without intervention is unlikely.

Market Performance & Stakeholder Trust (Score: 82 → 68)

On paper, Target’s still doing okay. But CRI doesn’t care about paper. It cares about trust—and that’s what’s eroding. Customers aren’t mad. They’re detached. That’s worse. In the last six months, we’ve seen foot traffic drop, brand loyalty among core cultural groups (Black shoppers, LGBTQ+ allies, value-driven Gen Z) decline, and general investor wariness creep in. None of it catastrophic. But all of it cumulative.

This is what we call a slow leak of belief. Stakeholders—whether consumers, employees, or investors—aren’t necessarily pulling out. They’re pulling back. They’re watching. And the more a brand tries to reassure them with light commercials instead of real re-grounding, the less they trust what they’re being sold. Target still has assets. Still has presence. But when CRI sees the score dip from 82 to 68, it’s tracking a loss of alignment between sentiment and structure. Once that gap opens, it’s hard to close without a major internal re-sync.

So what actually happened?

Target didn’t collapse because of theft, or tweets, or politics. It collapsed because its internal, consumer, and cultural systems all de-synced at once. When workforce trust goes, leadership clarity softens, and narrative control slips—all in under two quarters—you’re not looking at a reputational issue. You’re looking at a full cultural unraveling.

So here’s the real question: What’s your CRI score? How much have you gained (or lost) this year?

And if you don’t know… what makes you think you’re not next?