[0:02]In case you weren't paying attention in January, let's take a quick look at the campaign.
[0:44]I saw a bunch of people lean forward. I saw one person with her hand over her mouth. Um, that campaign clearly still resonates. So Jonathan, thank you for taking time to join us. I will forget that moment in January when the campaign dropped and kind of the internet stopped. But and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But first, you know, Calvin Klein has this incredible history right here in New York. Um, people of my generation, they remember the 1990s when Calvin Klein was putting out all that incredible imagery. Um, can you talk a little bit about how you've evolved the way this iconic American fashion brand communicates and what's your like the pillars of your strategy for marketing to a global audience in the digital age, in this digital culture? Sure. I mean, um, I think one of the obvious things is I'm I'm not from New York, so that's probably an evolution. Um, but, you know, our the foundations of what we do are really deeply rooted in the brand DNA, and and those things don't change. Um, so, you know, the way that we think about the brand, Calvin Klein, you know, timeless values of confidence and empowerment and sensuality. But also, absolutely, about cultural impact. I think that's something that was always true of the brand that it's best. I think what's changed, and a lot of people have talked about this today already, is, you know, the culture around us.
[2:27]Um, and the culture continues to change at such pace, particularly the way that we as consumers, not just professionals, but consumers engage with that. And I was very struck by what Kyle was saying, right, which is in ways that we kind of can't see, but I think that we feel. You know, technology, algorithms, filters are flattening the culture. So the question that we've been asking ourselves for a while is kind of, you know, in a culture that's very flat, how do you create those spikes? Um, and the way that I would summarize that is that we adopt what we call kind of an entertainment mentality. And, you know, it doesn't mean we're going to pivot and become an entertainment business. It's still about creating desire for the iconic products, but an entertainment mentality. So firstly, what you observe that lean forward effect, right, we put a lot of intentionality. Ben, our creative director is sitting over there. Uh, we put a lot of focus on creating stories and creating content that people are going to want to spend time with, right, really spend time with. Um, the second thing is we think really hard about the talent, not just in terms of reach of engagement, but the opportunity to create a cultural character. Show them in a way that maybe you haven't seen them before, and then the third thing is media. We work with real intention to blend the medium mix to try and game the algorithm and and really to cut through. So let's now talk about Jeremy Allen White as a case study. Um, when you're thinking about selecting an ambassador like that, when you're thinking of conceiving a campaign like that, most of us saw him in the bear. You know, with the chef's uh, uniform, uh, not in his underwear, but like, can you just walk us through the behind the scenes of like, how you guys conceive of a campaign like that, how you select the ambassador, how you decide how do you want to show them, and then how you deliver the campaign? Sure. So, you know, we do the ambassador is obviously a very important part of the mix, but and we do a lot of research and analysis on that. But you know, a big part of it is also instinct. And so, obvious thing to say, you need to find people that really embody the values of the brand, there's that authenticity. What we try to do in addition to the data is find people that we that we think kind of have a cultural velocity, right, that are traveling fast. They're moving quickly through culture, they're becoming part of something bigger. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing, but it's growing, and um, they're on the cusp of breaking through. And that's really important because what you see around those kind of cultural phenomena are a cohort of people fans that really support it. And they're important when you launch because they're the ones that will get there first, that will say, see, I, you know, I knew this already, and you know, they'll talk about it, they'll share it. They'll make it go viral. I think, you know, we tracked Jeremy for a while, you observed the bear. What was interesting about Jeremy was as his editorial started to pick up, he very often was appearing in Calvins. So I don't know if you spot that, but he, you know, he's a good looking guy with a great physique. He was very often that white t-shirt, that Calvin's aesthetic was the way that magazines and others showed him. So we picked up on that. Um, and I think what we also try to do is think creatively. Um, again, it's not just about reach and engagement. We think a lot about the character that we want to create, and I think that's a very Calvin thing to do. Um, and, you know, the bet that we make is that one and one can kind of equal three. What exists in people's minds already and then what we do with them can show that person in a way that maybe you've never seen before. And when you pull that off, which I think we did with Jeremy, um, you know, it really, really works and that content itself, that character itself takes on a life of their own. You know, I felt a bit for Jeremy, which is the his big night, and he's standing there with the Golden Globe, and all the questions are about Calvin Klein. Um, did you really feel bad about that? He looked so awkward, you know, he was a bit like, really, this is, you know, um, not that bad, obviously, but, um, but that, but, you know, in a way, that was the dynamic that we were trying to create. Um, and it just really worked in that instance. Yeah. How much of the way, when you're conceiving these campaigns, is linked to knowing that, for example, he's up for a Golden Globe and he's potentially going to be a winner, and therefore we're going to time the campaign to drop just before all that happens. Yeah, no, that means right. I mean, so, you know, we've been thinking and talking to Jeremy for a very long time. And I think, um, the timing of this was really important for two reasons. The first was we knew this was the first big award season after the strike. We knew everyone was showing up, it was back on TV, so it was a big deal. And we thought very carefully about the opportunity to take him from underwear to evening wear in three days. We dressed him for the awards.
[9:00]Um, and so that was a calculation. And you're taking a bit of a bet on whether he's going to be front and center, and as it turned out, I think we contributed a bit to that, and then, yeah, he won the award, so it helped. I think the other thing specifically on this and timing counts in both cases, right, it's about what your partner is doing in culture, but. Thursday, January the fourth was a really important, we thought really hard about that because it was that long week, that awful week where you're back on a Tuesday, and you're thinking, what am I doing here? And we thought a long time in advance, like that not Tuesday, not where Thursday, you're back, you're not really, you need something, and you need Jeremy, and you need him in his underwear. And so we really tried to time it from that respect. So it was those two things that really came together. Yeah. Almost every day now, I get an email from a brand announcing they have a new brand ambassador. Yeah. Um, and this is happening on a global level now. We saw the wave of Korean celebrities, there's now a wave of Thai celebrities. The coming wave of Indian celebrities has already started. So how do you take this strategy on a global level and how do you cut through from just being just another ambassador? Right. So Jeremy Allen White's like a great example in the US market, great. Resonates globally. But you're doing this all over the world now. Yeah, that's right. And it's it's it is the same approach. And, you know, how do you make it feel like something that's important as opposed to just another thing? And so the approach about authenticity is the wrong word, but can we really turn them into a character that feels like one of our, you know, if I think about June Cook, I think about Jenny Kim. The Calvin versions of each of those celebrities are very different to the BTS and the Blackpink version. I think Idris, you know, in eternity, that's not an Idris I've seen before, but it and you have to believe that you can create a version of that ambassador that feels like it's your brand and that it's talking to your bit of culture. So that's super important. Um, and I think also you have to think strategically and long term, it's not tactical and it's not transactional for us. We are looking to do more, we are looking like we did with Jenny last year to do, you know, curations of our core assortment. Um, we are looking to dress people in a very specific way that can endure with them. Um, I think actually the the the globalization is hugely helpful. Um, hugely helpful because I think it the the non-westernization of of of the ability to really tell a story and to talk to many different cultures gives you I think a lot more potential actually. Sometimes when you launch these kinds of campaigns, it can create controversy. So around the time of the Jeremy Allen White campaign, I live in the UK and there was this FK Twigs campaign, which you know, created a whole other kind of conversation online. And many, you know, they they sometimes say, you know, if you're in the conversation any press is good press, but you know, encoring controversy or, you know, doing these kinds of like creating these kinds of cultural moments, how do you manage some of the risk associated with that? Yeah. I mean, we don't aim to court controversy. I think, um, you know, there's an authenticity to what we do, which is partly, you know, the DNA of the brand. This idea of sensuality and empowerment, they go together, and those specifically on twigs, that was a campaign that ran last spring. It was in February, March last year, and it was picked up this year because of an ASA judgment, which has since been overturned. Yes. And so the judgment came out just around the time. And you could never have predicted that. By chance, yeah, I mean, I think, I think literally a couple of days after. And so, you know, and again, we're not aiming to court controversy, and very specifically with Twigs, um, you know, again, that was she, she created that persona, um, with Ma, with Ben. You know, if you look at the video that accompanies it, it's, it's beautiful performance art, and she was incredibly, it was her music. It was her putting something that she really believed in out there, and I, I'm not sure, you know, that's why we were very proud of it. And I, and so I think it's less about risk management, it's much more to do with like partnership and creative expression, and this idea of a character that we feel is going to work, but that our partner really believes in, right? And Jeremy really believed in that, and everyone we work with feels part of the creative process. But when something like that happens, what's the strategy for Calvin Klein as a company to figure out, okay, well, how are we going to respond to this in this real time moment? As a marketer, that's, you know, probably quite keen to have your brand in the conversation, but also needs to mitigate. Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is we, we work very hard to make sure we're not doing things that we believe are incorrect, um, or that pose risk. In this case, um, Twigs felt very strongly about, um, the the judgment and spoke herself. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, I think that's the ideal outcome. Okay. So once you've created a cultural moment, I now wanted to move on to like how you measure the impact. Yeah. You know, we had a conversation earlier today, uh, on stage here, um, between Soan and Robin, and they were talking a little bit about metrics, you know, and I see this quite dubious metric of earned media value or media impact value. Sometimes, the other day, by the way, I found out that one of these metrics, they actually, the way they decide what earned media value is, is they they say every like is worth $1. And they just add up all the likes, and therefore, it's worth like, you know, some of these metrics feel quite blunt. Yeah. You know, for a for a company like yours that's investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these kinds of cultural moments, these kinds of marketing moments, how do you measure success? Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, I think, you know, at the core of what we're doing is trying to create desire, and brand desire is something that we measure through a tracker that we trust. Um, and it's a slow moving metric. And we measure that simply because we really believe in that in that dynamic. Brand desire, you know, generates revenue, generates profit, and and it does that over time, and that's long-term value creation. Now, you can't measure that, you know, in a way that's meaningful in terms of did this work or did that work from an investment perspective. So we have a very connected set of metrics. We have our own internal systems to do that. For us, consideration is really one of the mo brand and and product consideration is really one of the most important metrics. What do you mean consideration? As in, are these are are people genuinely considering going out into the market and buying our products, right? And, um, does that translate then into demand? For me, you know, there are slower moving metrics like desire and consideration, and then there's the fast moving metrics that we do trust, right? It might be search and share of search, it might be traffic. Um, it might be actually the level of real engagement that we get on our platforms. Those are the fast moving metrics that we really trust, but in the end, they're all proxies for the way that we're driving the business, and we believe in a connected set of metrics that in the end get us to, I thought so the the the econometrics piece earlier was fantastic because actually what you're really talking about here is not just the acquisition of the consumer, but in a way that's going to be valuable to you over time. EMV is interesting. It's not the metric that we first look at, but it's interesting because it's out there and it can be benchmarked. And I think it is some form, whether you believe in the billions, which none of us do, it's a way of helping you understand, did people pick it up? Did people share it? Did people drive the conversation on your behalf? And I think that's important given what we're trying to do. It's not the only metric, but it's an interesting one in the mix. It helps to determine or measure the conversation you're creating in other media, basically. Yeah. But one, there's one thing you didn't mention in that list of metrics. Like when I did, you didn't. Oh, okay. Uh, which is like you have Jeremy Allen White in white Calvin Klein boxer briefs. Do you see a massive spike in the sales, like when you drop a campaign like that, can you actually track it back to your website and they're like a massive spike in white boxer briefs? So, so we're in a as I said, we're in a blackout period right now, so I'm not going to comment on that one specifically because I'm not allowed. But, um, what we aim to do is yes, we're very specific about, I mean, we, we are lucky's the wrong word, but we benefit from some very iconic product. And that means when we're out in culture, on the biggest stages, we tend to use the icons. White cotton boxer shorts, you know, the same, similarly for women, but also some jeans, truckers, things like that, right? Um, the suit, the black dress. So what we aim to do is use those emblems to drive traffic, and we absolutely see, we're investing more because we see that as being a very positive, a very positive cycle. It's nice to have a product and a business where you can actually see the direct measure because of the nature of some of the products that you're promoting through these campaigns. Yeah. And I think, you know, sometimes we get very curated, right? When we did with Jenny Kim for example, there was a very narrow curation of products that you feel very familiar, and we sold through those in three days, so, yeah. Okay. The other topic that's been front of mind for marketers lately that you and I chatted about as well, um, earlier, is this idea of the balance between brand marketing. Yeah. And performance marketing. Um, earlier today, you know, Robin cited some of the the data that, you know, we surfaced to our annual executive survey for the state of fashion report that we do. And more than 70% of executives told us last year that this year they were spending planning to spend much more on brand marketing. So, you know, as a as a brand marketer and a performance marketer overseeing kind of the whole operation, how are you thinking about that balance? What do you think is, you know, important in each of those areas and how do they feed off of each other? Yeah, I mean, that it I mean, it is a a billions of dollar question, isn't it? I I think the way we think about it is that everything is brand and everything is performance, and that sounds like a glib answer, but what I mean by that is, uh, it's not channel-based, right? And I think, you know, we have the concept of the funnel, but consumer behavior is not linear, it's not time-based. They don't come in in the order that we believe we're building the journey. And so, you know, brand inspiration or or something that really inspires you to go buy a product can come from the center of a store. It can come from, you know, a fit guide, it can come from the promotional email that says there's X percent off this Memorial Day weekend. And so for us, I think the mistake is to bifurcate and say there's one and the other, and this one does one set of metrics, and this one does the other. In the end, and I think particularly if you're interested in building desire as a commercial metric, the brand has to show up, no matter what you're doing. Uh, the brand has to show up in PDP, it has to show up, you know, what's PDP for people who don't know? Product description page. So, you know, well over 80% of people come into websites kind of bottom up, right? They come in directly through Google and they look at, you know, what is the product I actually want to buy. So they've searched white Calvin Klein trunks. Yeah, and they come directly and then, you know, hopefully we've gained that algorithm. So our trunks hit at the top versus someone else's, right? But when they come in, that's their experience of the brand. So the way that you show up on those product description pages, the tone of voice, the quality of that image, that's the brand. And so the conversation that we have all the time is, you need to be investing in the brand at every stage. And then you must you've got to be super focused on the metrics of whatever you're doing in order to perform. Performance isn't just about, you know, your search kind of investments. Performance is about, did you really generate the cultural impact that you believed you would, and did more people become kind of willing to get into the brand, did more people search for the brand? So, you have to blend those two things, and my, my instinct on 70% of of CMOs or even see, you know, are you going to increase brand investments? I don't think that just means brand media. I think it means across the mix where you can, you know, improve the brand experience for the consumer.
[25:53]Because sorry, just your point on matches, farfetched, et cetera. I'm not, I'm not up here to be critical, but it's, you said it, it's like it became an increasingly undifferentiated experience, and then all you have left is the price. If that's what happens to you as a brand, you're really in trouble, right? You have the brand is about a difference, and and it can't just be about price, and that's why you have to invest in that way. So just concluding on that point, um, you know, Kyle gave this, you know, really interesting talk to start us off today about algorithms flattening culture, and we saw the ceramics and the reclaimed wood and all of the stuff that's just become like, as a marketer, if that's what the algorithm is rewarding, how do you think about hacking that algorithm so you can break through? It's the same question I asked Kyle. I think there's two things. One is, you know, you'd be mad, the benefit of an algorithm is that you can see and you can measure, right? And so I think you'd be mad not to see where is the culture going, and how can we learn and adopt that. But I think the the the imperative of a brand is to lead, and is to say from within the confines of where culture is going, how can we step outside that and excite people with something? And I think you have to do that. I think the second thing is, we haven't talked a lot about media, but we lead often with social media because it's a great channel. We have 25 and a half million followers, it's been growing rapidly. Um, but you also need to get to the people you can't have. So that dynamic between what you have and what's being driven by an algorithm, and then using paid media to say, I'm going to deliberately target this group of people with something that maybe they didn't know. For Jeremy Allen White, we, we made a very intentional choice to partner with the New York Times, to put Jeremy right up at the masthead of their site, to make it feel like news and to talk to that more qualified consumer. And so I think it's a blend between observing the culture, leading, and using media to get to those places you weren't naturally get to. And then there's the added side benefit of everyone talking about the campaign. So like the number of people that raised that campaign with me in conversations that terrible week of January four, you know, second or whatever it was. I mean, it really dominated a conversation, not just social on social media, not just on the pay channels that you might have purchased, but just in real life conversations, everybody was talking about it. That is what a cultural moment is. Yeah, and I think that's where the algorithm, that's what you're aiming to do with all the things we've talked about. And so when it works, the algorithm suddenly works massively in your favor, right? Because it's just forcing that massive conversation up to the top of everyone's feeds, whatever they are. So now we felt very, um, I don't know, there was a lot of intention put into it, but it yeah, it felt good to see that. It's it doesn't happen very often. Well, it clearly still has impact here based on the reaction from the people in the room, Jonathan. Thank you so much for taking time to sit down here.
