Playground →
Boot Barn (0.87) and Hot Topic (0.87) form two distinct poles at the top of JCPenney's similarity graph — a footwear retailer and a general apparel chain pulling in nearly identical directions, with a meaningful gap before the rest of the field follows.
The shape here is two-peak: those two neighbors sit noticeably above the next tier, which opens around Torrid (0.84) and then steps down further to Tom Holland (0.81) and The Mandalorian (0.80). Tallying the top 10 by subcategory reveals a cross-kind pattern: three of the ten neighbors are Apparel entities — Boot Barn, Hot Topic, and Torrid — but the remaining seven span Actors, TV Shows, Reality TV Stars, Jewelry and Accessories, Car Wash and Detailing, Department Stores, and Hobbies Gifts and Crafts. Dillard's (0.78) is the only other Department Store in the top 10, meaning JCPenney's nearest audience shapes are drawn more from apparel and entertainment than from its own retail category. Corinna Kopf (0.79), Claire's (0.78), Mister Car Wash (0.78), and Spencer's (0.78) round out a cluster that mixes mall-adjacent retail with celebrity and entertainment properties — a combination that points to an audience navigating both physical retail and pop-culture consumption simultaneously.
The two-peak structure, anchored by Boot Barn and Hot Topic, suggests JCPenney's audience bridges a country/workwear-leaning segment and a youth pop-culture segment rather than sitting cleanly inside either one.
