The 'failure' reasons of Clinton Cards PLC: a brokers' notes analysis approach

Awareness of corporate failure has recently increased, as many have realised that understanding the reasons for the failure of a company can, ultimately, have positive effects due to companies can learn from these negative experiences and turn them into future success. By integrating the classic consequence framework and the five stages of company decline model, this study considers both organisation internal factors and external environment factors, and addresses such issues using a UK greeting cards retailer company Clinton Cards PLC as a case study and explores its significant failure between 2003 (prosperous time) to 2012 (failed). Through an in-depth analysis of the brokers' notes, it is concluded in four reasons that resulted in failure of Clinton Cards PLC, which are management denial, aggressive expansion, management tenure and homogeneity and ignorant of customer's needs. The study seeks to disclose the dark side of this once prosperous retailer and identify how it became a failure, and it makes further operational suggestions to retailers.