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A word of advice. If you’re planning to use innovation to move attention and traffic in your favour, avoid January.
As well as hosting key industry events in fashion, sport, consumer electronics, furnishings, gifts and watches, the January consumer landscape is equally dense, with offers around rituals like the Super Bowl, Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day crowding out other, more unique stories.
For all the high activity last month, January offered little in the way of cutting-edge campaigns. Nonetheless, there were several interesting stories that pointed to growing pains in the new frontiers of promotional marketing. Most audible of all were the increasing calls to regulate social influencers, especially in the wake of the Fyre Festival. There was also a piece of legal reporting from PUMA’s copyright case against Forever 21 that cautions against brands playing fast and loose with terms like ‘collaboration’ and ‘Creative Director’.
At Crescendo Campus, writing and speaking assignments in January made it difficult to keep up with all the reading. As well as delivering brand copy, articles and a Master's class, the past weeks also saw the fourth edition of the Halo Licensing Survey go out to subscribers. It seems the decision to begin publishing this report a year ago was a timely one. Throughout 2018 it captured nearly one thousand licensed campaigns and showed many properties making significant gains, particularly by functioning more as catalysts of remarkability than as simple beacons of attention.
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THEME: CHANGING THE SCRIPT
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Nike x Kyrie Irving x Nick Kyrgios
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Few would dispute that Nike is a gold standard brand. Its spectacular rate of innovation is exceeded only by the panache and consistency with which it sets standards for technology, storytelling originality and campaign execution.
But if its recent fluid style of brand stewardship is a sign of future branding practice, then things are about to get very confusing.
The Beaverton brand’s recent activation around the Australian Open adapts its signature Kyrie Irving basketball shoe into a line for tennis player, Nick Kyrgios. This comes after forty years spent carefully constructing crafting performance and storytelling tropes around individual sports.
The latest move follows other code-switching feats from Nike in recent times, including Jordan Brand outfitting Paris Saint Germain and NBA logos appearing on skateboard shoes. Another technique at play is Nike’s style of using its brand ambassadors’ traits and interests to build bridges to other cultural waypoints. After roughly fifteen years of pushing its brand out in every conceivable direction, Nike now has the freedom to set its own rules.
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Automotive brands have long been closely linked to the world of watchmaking. Shared values like prestige, performance, reliability and engineering are credible and easy to discern, meaning that watches and cars are to the prestige licensing world what maple syrup is to pancakes. Rarely, however, have we seen the roles reversed, with the watchmaker in the position of influence. This is the case with Aston Martin’s new TAG Heuer Edition DBS Superleggera – a limited edition, carbon-bodied supercar that arrives with its own matching wristwatch.
Fashion and lifestyle partnerships have been a standard in the car business since the sixties, but always with an emphasis on styling and accessorising. By comparison, it is rare to find names on cars that could reasonably be construed as governing performance – unless they are deeply embedded in the automotive industry (e.g. Pirelli or Pininfarina).
Yet performance is somehow implicit in TAG Heuer’s engagement and it only seems to add to Aston Martin’s proposition. Years of messaging around superlative engineering have surely elevated perceptions of watch brands’ capability, as has TAG Heuer’s strong presence within motorsport. While this latest example of reverse influence is an isolated one, expect to see it emulated many times over in the coming years.
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When it comes to brands that manage multiple collaboration and licensing projects every year, it’s common to see unorthodox and obscure references being used to generate new attention and affinity. Often this is because the most intuitive ones have already been featured in past initiatives. By comparison, it’s unusual to find a brand instigating a partnership so obviously compatible with its DNA, yet never used before.
January featured a number of programmes that did just that, bringing brands together with names seemingly cut from the same cloth. A particular standout was the see-now-buy-now Scarface collection by the never-boring Philipp Plein. The Swiss/German label’s hedonist manifesto could have been written by Tony Montana himself, yet for some reason these two names have never shared a stage before.
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Images: Scarface x Philipp Plein; Sex Pistols x Dr. Martens; Dragon Ball Z x Naked & Famous; Yellow Submarine x Stella McCartney; Humphrey Bogart x Borsalino; Renault Twingo x Le Coq Sportif; Sebago x Pendleton; SoulCycle x Lululemon
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My normal attentiveness to special releases for Chinese New Year received a helpful boost this year when I had the chance to spend a few days in Hong Kong. But with this year’s zodiac taking the form of the pig, it wasn’t only beauty brands who found it more challenging than usual to connect to the event without doing more harm than good. In fact, innovations in dependable travel categories like cosmetics, spirits and watches were consistently drab this year.
By contrast, fashion, sports and accessories brands found themselves with more creative latitude, thanks in particular to the availability of the colour pink, as well as different variants of pigs, including licensed characters such as Porky and Piglet. Ornamental Chinese designs and partnerships with Chinese brands also featured strongly, indicating growing global interest in exotic names, and a taste for maximalist motifs and patterns.
With the pig due to be succeeded by the rat in 2020, it may be another two years before beauty brands can find their zodiac footing again.
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Images: Longchamp x Mr. Bags; Tod's; Vans x Purlicue; Starbucks; Louis Vuitton; Dior; Maharishi; K-Swiss; Porky Pig x Moschino; Three Little Pigs x Gucci: Louis Vuitton; adidas Originals x Pharrell; Nike; Givenchy; Peanuts x Dover Street Market; Kate Spade; Victorinox; Rimowa; Panerai; Jaquet Droz
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THANKS FOR READING AND SHARING!
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