by Steve Stoute
With these trends reflecting the simultaneous darkening and lightening, the tanning and coming together, of the mental complexion of America, I think they also include, by the way, an acceptance of the right to feel and look sexy. By 2003, the bathing beauty on the cover of Sports Illustrated, deemed by many the most beautiful woman in the world (the same artist who would rank as the top-earning music entrepreneur of the first decade of the new millennium), was Beyoncé Knowles. The very singer who delivered the term “bootylicious” epitomizes the new definition of beauty—and is coming at you with hips, butt, lips, and an attitude of cool, sexy, and confident that other women are empowered to adopt too.
The next thing we all knew, J. Lo’s butt and body became cultural news. When Fergie of the Black-eyed Peas performed the song “My Humps,” which praised the power of her derriere and her breasts (“lovely lady lumps”) to draw luxury-brand gifts and attention galore, the code implied that it was a shared value, no color line dividing it. Today it’s Kim Kardashian and Jessica Biel as prime examples.
This aspect of tanning, I believe, has been a healthy change allowing women from diverse cultures to come to a place where they can meet and match and have common aesthetics. What I hear while listening to female consumers is that whatever makes you feel good about yourself is optimal and truly freeing as long as you can choose for yourself—Oh, that’s the hair I want, that’s the body, I want some meat on my bones and hips and lips. Or not. Those borrowed and then shared traits of women who are African-American, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Indian, you name it—and from cultural beauty standards and style borrowed from other countries—all come together to create a very feminine, womanly, self-loving aesthetic.
It has been a source of pride for me to know that urban culture has been one of the prime movers and carriers of these tanning changes that have taken place over the last twenty years. Likewise, it has been affirming to watch the far-reaching influence of the urban mind-set when it comes to defining what makes a man attractive, stylishly groomed, and well presented.
At first glance, the uninformed marketer might assume that these aesthetics were and are being adopted on an anything-goes, “whatever hip-hop says is cool today” basis. But in fact, as per the belief system that spread tanning, there are attitudes and reasons behind why a look or a trend is endowed with the power of cool—and why it isn’t. Understanding those reasons and the stories behind them, as we now know, is critical.
Cool Is . . .
In early 2003, the Associated Press put out a release that captured headlines in sports and business pages all across the nation. “Retro jerseys all the rage” was a snapshot in time of how forcefully hip-hop-fueled tastes were driving consumption of an item known for its dated popularity: throwback jerseys.
Though the trend extended to various sports, the main action was in basketball—where a retro jersey might run anywhere from $250 to $400. The press release noted, “Some of the retro buffs couldn’t care less about the history on their shoulders: they just want to look old school—or keep up with their friend down the block.” Stories of kids picking up, for example, a Celtics jersey and not recognizing Larry Bird’s name were all over the place. Because of throwbacks, one apparel company reported annual revenues jumping from $2.8 million to $23 million in just two years (even in what was then considered a down economy); another sports clothing manufacturer had seen a 300 percent rise in its fortunes in half that time. An explanation for the craze came from Isiah Thomas when he observed, “It goes back to the first principle of fashion—what’s old is new.” Others suggested that maybe it was the longing for a different era of sports—when legends like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were in their prime.
Sports jerseys in general had been in high demand for years and the throwbacks added a new element of scarcity. Just as in the days when we had to befriend the manager at Foot Locker to get our Air Force 1s, in Philly at a store called Mitchell and Ness that had the best collection of the rarest vintage throwbacks there was a guy named Reuben whom you had to know and who would alert you when goods came in. When that happened, insiders would race from NYC to Philly hoping to be the first to pay the four to five hundred dollars for the obscure Brett Favre numbered jersey that nobody else had.
In hindsight, I would say that rather than being about a longing for another era, the throwbacks were a last act of the sports jersey heyday that had begun in the late eighties and was now finally coming full circle with a grand finale. Why do I say that? Because eight months after that press release proclaimed athletic retro as the new cool, pumping the sales of throwbacks even more and further enriching league coffers (like the NBA’s annual $3 billion in receipts), Jay-Z released a record that signaled it was time for a new look. Simply entitled “Change Clothes,” Jay-Z (featuring Pharrell) talked about the need not to get stuck in a rut, not to become a prisoner of the trappings of success or the uniform of cool, not to forget where you started, and never to lose the aspiration to keep on moving. Literally what he said was “but y’all n***as acting way too tough / throw on a suit get it tapered up and let’s just change clothes and go.” In the story of a guy telling his girl that’s all they needed to do to stay fresh and go to the “top of the globe” the song was also empowering. Wow.
Just when you thought that urban style had gone as far as possibilities allowed, so much so that it had to go get something old from the closet and call it new again with throwbacks, the time for a reinvention had been announced. Because of the millions who were now part of urban culture, the minute Jay-Z said it and replaced his old look with a button-down collared and tailored shirt in the video, the legions followed suit.
The funniest thing happened next, something that opened my eyes to the ambivalence toward hip-hop still felt by many brands and organizations representing the status quo. It came up for me when NBA commissioner David Stern—noticing the steep decline in sales of licensed sports apparel—asked me, “Maybe you could ask Jay-Z if he would change clothes back again?” He was serious. And it’s hard not to love David Stern, who really does want the best for all the teams. However, Stern had been the one to first institute a dress code for players when not in uniform and to strongly discourage cornrows and tattoos, until he couldn’t do anything about them anymore, and to openly admit to feeling that the rap thing was always in danger of getting out of hand. All of a sudden, he’s asking me to tell Jay-Z to change clothes back again!
At that point in my career in marketing, it highlighted a generation gap that certainly could be expected. But it also prepared me to deal with brands and corporate executives who wanted the profitability of urban culture but didn’t always have the understanding of why it was bringing (or could be bringing) them in money hand over fist—and didn’t understand the motivations of the army of consumers who were paying the money.
What was getting lost in translation (phrase intended) was that defining what’s cool is less about the specific style of shirt and more about how wearing the style of shirt makes you feel. When hip-hop changed from a saggy-baggy, antiestablishment attitude to a more cultivated hipster haberdashery kind of feeling, it was very much like an overdue celebration of having done well and having earned the right to party. And as much as Jay-Z was the guy who put out the invitation to go there, the person throwing the party—literally, as an individual and an entrepreneur and as a brand unto himself—was Sean “Puffy” and/or “P. Diddy” Combs.
There’s no doubt as to what an important global driver of culture Puffy had been over the years. How about keeping everyone on their toes by taking over Broadway as an actor in the Sidney Poitier role in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun and, in spite of mixed reviews for his acting, helping rake in more money than any nonmusical production in years? How about then going off to Paris and suddenly becoming the toast of that town? Even knowing all that and remembering the days when P. Diddy had climbed all the mountains first—the first young African-American entrepreneur who could walk
into a club and happen to mention he had just gotten a check for $40 million—the moment when I really saw how far he had taken tanning was during Estée Lauder’s launch of the Sean John fragrance line.
John Demsey had known Puffy since the nineties and described him then as “a pretty glamorous figure around New York City. He was dating everybody and was in his J. Lo phase.” Those were the breakout years of Sean’s lavish affairs out in the Hamptons where everyone came dressed in all white and when he threw fantasy birthday parties for himself with guest lists ranging from rappers to Donald Trump and Oprah to foreign heads of state.
The reason Demsey approached Puffy to do a men’s fragrance line for Estée Lauder was, as he later noted, “One thing about beauty, especially fragrance, is you’re selling aspiration. You’re selling a lifestyle. And that’s one of the reasons that I think Sean has been more successful than a lot of people—because of the lifestyle and swagger he has.” John Demsey described Puffy as having an uncanny ability to make suburban kids want to be him and at the same time connect to kids in the urban neighborhoods where he grew up. In the ’00s with the millennial consumers, a celebrity who came out of hip-hop music was all the more powerful. How so? According to John, “Everyone defines themselves by the music they grew up with. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are. If you grew up in 1995 and you looked at seven of the top ten singles, you were defined by hip-hop. And that’s it, that’s your reference point.”
Launching the Sean John fragrance on the heels of Puffy’s Sean John clothing line, which was doing phenomenally well, was not a leap either. But in Demsey’s assessment, the most compelling reason for working with Puffy was that he was at the leading edge of the paradigm shift—the Thinnest Slice—of moving niche to pop culture all the way. Sean Combs had the advantage of being perceived as an entertainer, though he is so much more, in Demsey’s eyes, “a businessmen and impresario who had transcended brand, personality, and lifestyle.” When my Translation partners and I consulted with Demsey and his team at Estée Lauder, they made it clear that they were marketing a lifestyle mind-set that was Sean John Combs–esqe, and not a product.
What was the mind-set? It was cool that made you feel infinitely confident. Puffy, as Demsey put it, being the archetypal “guy who knows how to work a room,” exuded that drawing power, that ability to know what is press-worthy, how to harness the uses of media—to gain optimal exposure, creating controversy, and still maintain some scarcity. Moreover, Puff knows how to recover from missteps. John Demsey’s overview was this: “Just when you think you can count Combs out he reinvents himself. He went from Biggie Smalls and the whole West Coast/East Coast stuff, and completely transcended himself into the king of the Rat Pack. He rebooted himself. And successfully. The brand is him. It is completely driven by personality muscle.” Just when you thought he was not going to change his name again, he was back to Sean “Diddy” Combs and everyone had to write about that.
All of that thinking and decoding went into the understanding of why a stand-alone brand—Sean John—would work well for a holding company that offers distribution and marketing like Estée Lauder. It was the thinking that went into the naming of the two fragrances, Unforgivable by Sean John, and later, I Am King by Sean John. On the whole, men’s products were a small part of Lauder’s business. They had previously had great success with Tommy as a designer fragrance (with Tommy Hilfiger) but until the Sean John brand, there had been no attempt to go after New Generation male consumers.
Where was the competition in terms of younger-mind-set marketing? On the super high end, there was Creed, an independent perfumer based in Paris, started in 1760, that prided itself on having been the private fragrance designers for ten royal families—and six generations later was experiencing a surge in demand thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood royalty. For young teens, there was Axe—which was in drugstore distribution that put it on the end of the spectrum that lacked aspiration. Then there was nothing else—other than “let me wear my dad’s cologne,” i.e. fragrances from established brands and designers such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, and Giorgio Armani.
In 2005, the marketing challenge wasn’t in proving how cool Unforgivable by Sean John really was. And it wasn’t in getting Estée Lauder to understand the mind-set of their target consumer. Clearly, they were paying attention. The obstacle they faced was setting up communication channels and creating a community that didn’t exist for their new offering, and that’s why the brand valued our input. Because the community wasn’t primed to be excited about a designer men’s fragrance that could be meaningful to their lives, there was going to be a learning curve for the consumer target. Therefore, some “edutainment” was in order. Without having to do full-on radical disruption, where you reinvent the wheel, we treated it like a movie launch—with the tag line “Life without passion is unforgivable.” Nor was it a shotgun approach, where you go as broad and big as you can and hope to hit as many consumers as you can. We were strategic and targeted in the building of community that was made up of different demographics but had a like-mindedness that came from being raised on the music that would have Puffy on its radar.
John Demsey gave us the power to really think differently about the intersection of consumers and their product, and really trusted my instincts—much as Paul Fireman had with sneakers—to do things that weren’t in their regular distribution channels. On radio, we marketed the fragrance as if it was a new record getting ready to drop and had DJs doing shout-outs and running contests with hot giveaways. Our media plan was to buy airtime not just when we knew our audience would be watching but, rather, when they would be intently focused, the watchwords for our campaign. Most advertisers usually just buy big media—playoff sporting events like the Super Bowl or the NBA championship. Those are usually great times to be noticed but I wanted to go a step farther. Instead of just buying a sporting event with X amount of millions watching, I wanted to go where the consumer target would be tuning in with excitement to watch their heroes—LeBron James going up against Dwight Howard or Kobe Bryant dueling Dwayne Wade. I wanted to buy those particular events that I knew the core consumer would be intently watching; I was confident that this way we couldn’t miss. And that’s how we ran the media. By targeting the media in a manner that specific, we hit multiple home runs with media buys.
As we saw with this campaign, the savings for spending advertising dollars this way is monumental. Instead of buying inventory that’s useless—when you’re just buying empty eyeballs (as most companies do)—you’re buying focus and passion from the audience. When I argued this point against the traditional approach, I started calling it a departure from “empty eyeballs.” When advertising companies recommend media buys all too often they are drawing from data that tells how many viewers their commercial is going to reach—when, in fact, those are empty eyeballs. None of those statistics provide a measure of how many people are actually paying attention. Digital campaigns are mounted on claims that a site gets millions/billions of hits. But how many coming to that site are paying attention and how often does that translate into sales? As I would later tell clients, by buying focus, we can avoid being in the empty-eyeball business.
During the discovery of this phenomenon with the Unforgivable launch, all I knew was that buying NBA alone wasn’t meaningful; I wanted to pay for what mattered. Because we knew what mattered, we could save a lot of money—buying local games and then using the rest of the money to buy more media that mattered. Avoiding empty eyeballs let us save money we could then spend on more targeted media and it got us a much better ROI than if we had tried to be in all places.
With that thinking for our TV commercial buys, we went directly to where our consumers were going to be watching intently with marketing worthy of their focus that aligned the Sean John aspiration with that of the athletes. How? With fun, risqué story lines in nonconventional formatting. One tactic came from Puffy’s idea to shoot behind-the-scenes footage of the different roman
tic settings used for the commercial and making that into a short film—showing him and two women in a ménage à trois and a flash of nipple, making it much too controversial for television. Next thing we knew the film had gone viral online and had become our ready-made digital campaign!
As obvious as this might sound, believe it or not, a lot of brand executives and advertisers don’t see the value in targeting a core community. The attitude is, Why would we speak to an audience that’s already made up their minds about what’s cool and what isn’t? As a case in point, I can recall a conversation with a very upset marketing executive for a major beauty line who wasn’t seeing traction after going through most of a multimillion-dollar budget on a fragrance being endorsed by none other than Beyoncé Knowles. After my advice was solicited about how to best use what was left of the budget, I had to ask what they had spent most of the money on so far. That’s when it became clear they had put everything into high-end beauty and glamour placement, but that wasn’t focused on her core audience.
In addition to producing a stunningly beautiful commercial, they had bought lavish spreads in Vogue and glamorous movie starts—ads shown on massive screens in movie theaters right before the beginning of the movie. But why hadn’t they targeted media where Beyoncé’s fans would be engaged?
Upon hearing the question, the brand executive shrugged and then said, “Give me an example.”
“I just listened to everything that you did,” I replied, and went for the example of low-hanging fruit by asking, “Why didn’t you run the commercial, let’s say, on BET?”
And the brand executive asked, “What’s a BET?” After I explained, the executive’s follow-up was, “She’s big on BET?” Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot to do at that stage of the game. It was a situation in which not understanding her core audience held back a terrific product from reaching its potential.