Tag Archives: luxury brands

How to save luxury brands (and American capitalism)

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amElizabeth Segran has a nice essay in Fast Company: The Decline Of Premium American Fashion Brands. What Happened, Ralph And Tommy?

As a teen, Segran admired ads by Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. That’s over.

Today, at 33, none of these brands interest me. They conjure up images of outlet malls.

The problem is widespread

I’m not the only one who feels that these iconic American brands have lost their luster. Many are on a downward spiral, hit by sluggish sales. Ralph Lauren is facing plunging profits resulting in the shuttering of retail stores. Coach is in a similar boat, having lost significant market share. Michael Kors recently devised a strategy of cutting back on discounts, since markdowns appear to have killed the company’s cachet. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which are owned by the same parent company, have seen decreasing sales in the U.S. market.

Luxury brands are, in short, a mess.

Segran consults several experts and they roll out the probable causes:

Luxury brands:

■ were pushed by Wall Street to grow
■ growth forced offshore manufacture and this created diminished quality
■ searching for larger markets lead to production overruns
■ overruns forced brands into the bargain and outlet channels.
■ finding Ralph Lauren in a discount bin at T.J. Maxx made it seem a little less luxurious

Other factors

■ new brands rose with a new, more social, sensibility, Everlane or Warby Parker

But something is missing here from this account. We are looking at a fundamental change in sensibility.

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amConsider the Ralph Lauren ad that Fast Company used to illustrate this essay.

Almost everything is now wrong with this image. But not one of these errors in the image is remarked upon.

Errors in the image: 

That this picture has a center to it.
(Younger consumers are social animals. They are networked creatures. They are distributed souls. Practically, for content creators, that means dump the “focus” and go for “foci.” See recent work by Fitbit and Android for the social “foci” view, and my thoughts here.)

That the center of the picture is a white male, apparently WASP and privileged.
(Do I really need to explain the rise of diversity and what it means to the models we want to see in our ads?)

That the male in question has a woman wrapped around his arm.
(This too should be unnecessary, but everyone is now a feminist. And this posture is absurdly subordinate and subordinating.)

That this woman has the strangest look on her face.
(It’s an expressive that appears to say, “This is all I want from life, to be by my man.” I mean, really.)

That there is a steely eyed friend.
(what is this guy dressed for? A trip to his place in the country, the ancestral home, all brick, beam and ‘old money made material’?)

That the surrounding group glows with youth, ethnic specificity, and privilege
(the first motive for luxury consumption used to be upward aspiration. A consumer culture fanned the hope that we too could rise in the world, into exalted social realms, away from the ordinary, “common,” “coarse,” “little” people. But this idea is now openly ridiculed.)

Attention, sellers! The single most important idea driving your market place is dying. This idea of status is dying. It is now a recipe for ridicule.

So let’s be clear. Yes, there are plenty of “internal” reasons why luxury brands are struggling. And thank you, Elizabeth, for discovering them. But there are external, cultural ones, as well.

These cultural changes are not recent. These have been in the works for several decades. And it is a perfect storm as we rethink our ideas of privilege, status admiration, upward aspiration, sexism, and the adoration of the wealth and privilege.

imagesWhat to do? How could luxury brands have prepared themselves for this cultural disruption? At the risk of repeating myself, the single simplest strategy is to hire a Chief Culture Officer. For instructions, read this book ➼.

There’s a ton of talent out there. A few names come to mind. Tom LaForge, Barbara Lippert, Steffon Davis, Ana Domb, Philip McKenzie, Sam Ford, Joyce King Thomas, Michael Brooks, Jamie Gordon, Monica Ruffo, Rochelle Grayson, Kate Hammer, Drew Smith, Rob Fields, Parmesh Shashani, Shara Karasic, Ujwal Arkalgud, Tracey Follows, Eric Nehrlich, Bud Caddell, Barb Stark, Mark Boles, Mark Miller, Helen Walters.

(For a longer list, see this Pinterest page filled with candidates.}

If only Ralph Lauren had had anyone noted above as their Chief Culture Officer. How much share holder value would have been protected? How many careers saved? How much more fun would it have been to work at Ralph Lauren?

American capitalism has become a bit of a punching bag. There are so many cultural disruptions in play. A crisis now haunts CPG and Hollywood. So that’s three of the great workhorses of the American economy. And it’s at this point when we can see a crisis running right through our economy, touching things as diverse as luxury brands, CPG brands and Hollywood pictures, that’s it is time to rethink what we’re doing.

Take a smart person with good credentials, give them resources and give them power. It’s time to make our marketing, design thinking, branding, and innovation intelligence responsive to the simple truth that’s visible to most cultural creatives and virtually every Millennial. It’s time to make the organization as responsive to culture as it is to everything else in the near environment. All other options are stupid and embarrassing.

 

Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts and the next generation

She listens intently.  [She] has trained herself not to interrupt or seem rushed. Her eye contact never wavers, and while she insists she couldn’t function without her briefing folders, she never seems to need to look at them. [She] mixes folksy sincerity and laser focus […] effortlessly. Unlike corporate chiefs who favor an inaccessible, imperial style, Ahrendts seems comfortable with dissent; her executives joke easily with her, and aren’t afraid to press their points.

This is the stuff of managerial grace, isn’t it?  A boss who solicits staff opinion.  A boss who listens well.   

Listening is a good idea for lots of reasons.  It is the signature of corporations in which information moves easily and well.  it is the stuff of candor which is the stuff of transparency which is one of the vital signs of the corporation (Bennis, Goldman, and O’Toole).  

But listening well matters for Ahrendts especially because she is, as every CEO is, an exalted creature.  She travels and lives in a well upholstered, carefully modulated world. Limos, corporate jets, luxurious homes and hotels.  

This doesn’t matter much if you make electronic components, but it matters a lot when you are the CEO of a luxury brand.  Burberry has survived aristocratic lows, licensing lows, and it will flourish now only if it learns to run the rapids of contemporary culture.  

And the trouble is that there is some kid in Norway, or maybe it’s Cheng Du, working on music, software or a video that will help shift our culture.  This kid is extremely hard to see from the deep comfort of a corporate limo. 

Now, of course, Ahrendts is not without resources when it comes to staying in touch with culture.  Christopher Bailey serves as her brilliant Chief Creative Officer.  Her kids create and curate culture.  She lives in the American heartland so there is no island (i.e., Manhattan) captivity to worry about.  Burberry has experimented successfully with social media and cocreation. Plus, it sounds like Ahrendts can pick up the phone and call David Bowie any time she wants and that has to be quite a good thing.  

The trouble is it’s not just that kid in Norway.  The malls of America are a Petrie dish.  At the moment they are nursing a new set of values.  These values won’t matter directly to a luxury brand like Burberry, but they will matter indirectly and that’s the question in its fully difficulty. How will they matter? How will they concatenate into the world Burberry must master? America is having one of its periodic thinks on the ideas of fashion and luxury. This is hard to conger with from the inside the world of fashion and luxury (and a corporate limo).

And this is why it is so very critical that Ahrendts listens well.  Because she is surrounded everyday by a small army of young people who are a little less cushioned and a little more connected.  (It’s not perfect, but hey…as they say.)  But this body of information, opinion and pattern recognition is only available if you are the kind of boss who invites people to insist on what they know.  These kids are the aquifer out of which Ahrendts can and plainly does draw great things.

I believe it’s true that most corporations are a little less inclusive.  Most corporations ignore the great stock of knowledge that generations X and Y bring to work every morning. Occasionally, from the precipice of a decision, someone will say, "run this down the hall and see what the intern thinks."  Tthis is listening very badly indeed.  I keep hoping that new  generations will find a way to insist on their inclusion, that they will stage a palace coup if necessary.  Indeed, I hoped Chief Culture Officer might serve as a rallying cry. But so far I’m not seeing any evidence of a fifth column.  Just the noblesse oblige of a CEO listening well.  

References

Bennis, Warren, Daniel Goleman, and James O’Toole. 2008. Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. Jossey-Bass.

Hass, Nancy. 2010. “Earning Her Stripes: Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts Balances Life and Work.” WSJ Magazine, September 9 http://magazine.wsj.com/features/the-big-interview/earning-her-strips/ (Accessed September 17, 2010).

Post Script

On the listening question, there’s a nice opportunity to compare Ahrendts’ style to that of another CEO in the garment industry.  Here’s how Paumgarten describes Mickey Drexler, the CEO of J. Crew.

His inquisitions have an auctioneer’s temp and a depositional intensity, but they also project an ease that derives from the pleasure he seems to take in them, and the pleasure, albeit of a wary and poised kind, that his employees seem to take in him.  Some combination of self-possession, insecurity, good humor, and good tailoring makes him approachable.  His command of a room is sneaky; it is unexpectedly fortified by curiosity and self-effacement.  

References 

Paumgarten, Nick. 2010. “The Merchant.” The New Yorker, September 20, p. 79.

Art of the Trench coat: unexpected lessons from the luxury brand

Thanks to Eminence Grise, I recently had a look at Burberry’s Art of the Trench.

It’s a lovely, brooding site, the kind of thing you browse with the restless, deeply jaded eye of a French cafe dweller, especially if you are like me an ancient roue.

I was too jaded to do a full reconnaissance.  (Plus, my view was sometimes blocked by American tourists.  Why must they torment my city with their graceless parkas and athletic shoes?  I mean, really.)

But I noticed this much..

In the beginning, the world of fashion was inhabited by models, impossibly tall, thin, elegant and beautiful, who were shot by professional photographers and then edited and air brushed by sharp eyed editors as a result of which transformation the models became still more tall, thin, elegant and beautiful.  Our job: to look on with drooling admiration, our face pressed against plate glass, a bitter autumnal wind tugging at our unforgivably unfashionable outfits, get-ups (and parkas).

The Art of the Trench marks two departures from this world.

The website features lots of photos of people in the Burberry trench.  Most of these photographs are taken by a professional photographer but they show "real people."

The notion here is that Burberry trench is no longer one perfect idea in Plato’s cave.  Actually, thanks to it’s must-have status in the world of the officer, the spy and the detective, it always had a second life as a friend of romance and adventure.  But typically Burberry ignored this tradition, and presented the trench the way the fashion world presented most everything…for our drooling admiration, our face pressed against etc. etc.

Burberry is wrestling with Plenitude and the fragmentation of taste in our culture.  There is no longer one single perfect Trench.  It is understands that if Burberry no longer controls the Trench, that it has to share authorship with the rest of us. Burberry has in other words discovered cocreation.  And not a moment too soon.  To live in the new world, brands are no longer missiles fired into the night air.  They are now what we make them on the ground, or they are nothing much at all.

But the website here goes a step further.  They accept photos from real people.  The photos are bad.  And the people are, well, really real.  Warts and all.  And for me at least this is a step too far.  I don’t actually want to see really real people.  It turns out, shame on me, that I still want my luxury brands (and the models who bring them to me) to have a certain exalted status.  I am happy to be forgiven the long climb up Mount Olympus, but I have now discovered that I don’t really want to make that trek all the way down into the really really world.

This is just a little too authentic for me.  (And for others, I’m guessing.  You tell me.)  But then I’m an ancient roue who insists that the world, my Paris, present itself as something stage worthy and perfectly crafted.  Otherwise what’s a Paris for?   Luxury brands deliver an exaltation.  This is one of the things they do for us.  No?

Post script:

This praise for Burberry is perhaps too tame.  Seconds after finishing this post, I read Cathy Horyn’s "Reflections on a Weird Year" in the New York Times.

I’m … completely fascinated by the potential for fashion companies to really use the Web and digital technology in much more interesting and purposeful ways than they so far have. I don’t mean Facebook and Twitter and 13-year-old bloggers (isn’t she 16 yet?), but rather rethinking a brand in terms of digital and making it as important a consideration as design and print advertising, which is still what most brand managers trust. Some companies plainly “get it” (look at hermes.com), but more brand chiefs need to inform themselves and make digital a top-down priority.

References

Anonymous.  2009.  Model Citizen.  Eminence Grise.  December 22.  here.

The Burberry Art of the Trench website here. 

Horyn, Cathy.  Reflections on a Weird Year.  New York Times.  December 23.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Grace Peng.

Note: this post was lost due to Network Solutions incompetence in December of last year.  I am reposted it, today, December 24, 2010.