Target bets on brand love as it plots its next 100 years

Target Australia is using its centenary to sharpen what the retailer stands for, launching a refreshed brand platform designed to rebuild distinction around quality, style, value and trust as it enters its second century.

The new platform, Feel the Love, was developed internally by Target’s creative and marketing teams and focuses squarely on reasserting the qualities it believes continue to separate it from competitors.

The retailer has spent much of the past decade being reshaped within Wesfarmers’ Kmart Group, including a major rationalisation of its store network and a push to create clearer differentiation between the two brands.

Target now operates 124 stores across Australia, compared with more than 300 Kmart stores across Australia and New Zealand, with Wesfarmers positioning Target around quality at accessible prices rather than trying to match Kmart’s scale-led low-price proposition.

Last year, Kmart head of marketing Rennie Freer expanded her remit across the group, taking on responsibility for marketing both Kmart and Target across Australia and New Zealand.

Freer said the centenary offered an opportunity to celebrate what had made Target enduring while making the brand more relevant to a new generation of Australian families.

“Target has been part of Australian family life for 100 years and there is an enormous amount of affection for the brand. Our focus is making sure we continue to earn that trust by delivering quality, style and value in a way that feels relevant for today’s families,” Freer said.

“Feel the Love is a reflection of who we are at our best. We’re not trying to become something different. It celebrates the qualities customers have always valued about Target while giving the brand a more confident and contemporary voice for current and future generations.”

Freer said rather than chasing an entirely new position, Target is leaning into accumulated brand equity, using its history with Australian families as a point of difference while modernising how that promise appears across marketing, social content, stores and digital channels.

The approach aligns closely with the strategic distinction Wesfarmers has increasingly drawn between Target and Kmart.

Wesfarmers has previously described Target’s future as smaller, more focused and more digitally enabled after years in which the business struggled with an oversized store network and insufficient differentiation from Kmart.

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Today, Kmart Group describes Target as a destination for apparel and soft home products, while its broader strategy gives Target the distinct proposition of putting quality first at low prices. Feel the Love gives that commercial strategy a consumer-facing expression.

Developed using customer insight, the platform centres on quality products, considered style, accessible prices and Target’s long-established relationship with Australian families.

Freer said developing the work internally also gave Target greater ownership of both the strategy and its execution.

“There is something incredibly powerful about this work being created by the people who know the brand best. Our team understands our customers, understands our products and cares deeply about where Target is heading,” Freer said.

The platform launches alongside the return of Target’s Kids Quality Promise, which offers to replace eligible Target-branded children’s clothing if it wears out before the child outgrows it.

Target is using the initiative as evidence that the new positioning extends beyond communications and into product and customer experience.

“The strongest brands deliver on their promises, not just talk about them,” Freer said. “The Kids Quality Promise is a practical demonstration of the confidence we have in our product and the value we want customers to feel when they shop with us.”

Target traces its history to a single Geelong drapery business founded by George Lindsay and Alex McKenzie in 1926.

A century later, the brand faces a very different retail environment, with online competition, international retailers and the extraordinary growth of its own stablemate Kmart all reshaping the value retail market.

Wesfarmers’ response has not been to abandon Target, but to narrow its role and make its reason for existing clearer.

Feel the Love now puts marketing behind that proposition: not a new Target, but a more deliberate version of the one the retailer believes Australians already know.