Business Challenge:
Create the pilot program for a clothing brand called Underground, a licensed agreement with the iconic London Underground. This market’s unique age group, 12-15, is betwixt and between the usual major market ages, and so is darkly misunderstood for its complexity…its depth.
Target:
Youth clothing market, 12-15 years of age.
Customer Insight:
Kids 12-15 years old feel misunderstood and even resist wanting to be understood, for fear of making it worse. They feel and relate to being “underground” with their intense emotional stirrings that are building their lives, their stories, as they live them. But, there’s is a secret community that they might open to, if they feel it is real and not some tool to win their business.
Strategy/Brand Positioning:
Deep: Your Station is Your Story. Empathetic of these searching human beings at every station in their journey. Not so much a clothing/fashion label, as a sounding board, a town square for real stories coming from a real place. Keep it real, raw, uncensored.
Creative Solution:
Gave these customers an emotional platform, for expressing, by permission, their own hidden, turbulent feelings stirring and churning underneath…via Guerrilla or “Wild Media” to bolster or replace traditional means of branding a label. Created a physical and digital communal diary to be placed on school cafeteria tables, bus, school and park benches, music and fast-food outlets, etc. The customers themselves would be the social media communicators of the brand, through their own real, raw, honest stories. With hand-designed underground stations embroidered on the inside of the article of clothing.
Result and Business Value:
By first reaching this intensely deep and secretive group in a time of their lives so vulnerable, we could earn their trust and their own word-of-mouth. Result was interest by and meetings with the key parties: London Underground and a global leather manufacturer.
To set up a meeting and learn more, contact janzlotnick@gmail.com
To set up a meeting and learn more, contact janzlotnick@gmail.com