Branding the man: why men are the next frontier in fashion retail

After a nearly three months, it’s hard to say if anyone is entirely clear on what the call to action is with the Occupy movement.  Have they lost their mojo after that initial demonstration on Wall Street?

Their most tangible and visceral message, encampments in cities around the country and the world, have not only lost their clout, they’ve become a health hazard and tiresome cliche.

The various demonstrations and marches that tepidly disrupted Black Friday  felt ragged and messy. In many cases signs are illegible. If you’re going to go to that much trouble to write on a piece of cardboard, at least make it so people can read it.

On numerous occasions, demonstrations and encampments have become almost embarrassments with random nitwits, vagrants, and hooligans coming in and confusing the situation.

So the question is: now what?  I say some branding is in order — that’s because a political or social movement IS a brand. It requires the same development and marketing that one would apply to anything where one hopes to gain a following.

1) Cultivate leadership. As much as many in the movement have decried the need for a leader, it seems like leadership is just one part of what’s missing in making Occupy truly revolutionary.No matter how anti-establishment, any organization looking to build momentum and grow its constituency must find its leaders who can help give a unified voice and message.

2) Craft a manifesto. The fact is, every great revolution or political movement has had leaders and a clear manifesto. The Civil Rights movement of the ‘60’s had Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; the Women’s Liberation movement had Gloria Steinem. These were grassroots movements that targeted demands and, while sometimes violent, were able to clearly voice a process for change.

A clearly articulated manifesto would unite all Occupy movements around the country (and around the world) with a strategic call to action and program for coordinated demonstrations, speeches, as well as open forum discussions with city, state, and financial services organizations.

3) Develop a marketing and brand strategy. A movement like Occupy must have a clear strategy that includes how it is branded as well as its key marketing messages and deliverables. What does it stand for? What will it accomplish?

In the case of Occupy, it has become unclear just what they are doing and what it is they want.  We understand that the movement— quite correctly — places much of the blame on the banks. However there has not been a strategic plan for how the movement will continue forward, with a cohesive message that everyone from the elite to the proletarian can understand – whether they agree or not.

4) Communicate a call to action. I get it – you’re a “startup.”  That doesn’t mean the medium is not critical to the message. As with any marketing campaign, there is a tagline, and then what follows is a series of other memorable messages that are tied to action. How is that going to be communicated, beyond bedsheet banners and scraps of paper? Why hasn’t social media been used as the powerful (and free) tool that it is to drive home a manifesto and call to action?

5) Be bold. Embrace dissent. Spearhead measurable change. Hanging your hat on the encampment can’t be the single means for communicating your message — one that is powerful for a growing number of Americans who are finally realizing that they are indeed the 99-percent. Unfortunately in the minds of the media and the general public, the encampments are simply a passive sit-in that lacks creativity and doesn’t give confidence in its inhabitants to truly generate positive ideas for the evolution of our economy. Champion discussion and create visible change that proves what you’re doing is right. Start your own credit union. Create a socialized marketplace for goods and services.

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In the past several years, politicians, marketers, entertainment personalities, and just plain ordinary people have waxed poetic about their “authenticity.” To be authentic is to be grounded, honest, and unabashedly sincere — or so one might believe from any number of pundits on the subject.

Even when I worked at an architecture firm, a client meeting was not complete without at least one reference to “authenticity,” but this was in regards to design principles. We would deliver a store design that “spoke authentically of the brand” and gave customers an “authentic experience.”

In a recent New York Times article, reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom writes that the digital age has caused an increased preoccupation with what it means to be “authentic,” with even the Pope himself weighing in on the subject, saying that life in the age of social media “inevitably poses questions not only of how to act properly, but also about the authenticity of one’s own being.”

Authenticity is now applied to people, events, brands, causes, and art; to be branded “authentic” is essentially a ne plus ultra that ultimately means that one’s purity and integrity cannot possibly be called into question. “Hey, I’m just being me — the real me.”

The truth is, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic, perhaps because it has become easier and easier to masquerade as authentic. In the world of branding, that’s pretty much the message that so many brands are beating to death. It certainly makes a marketer’s job easier.

All those “designer collaborations” with the likes of Levi’s, LL Bean, Carhartt, and a countless other so-called heritage brands? Thats the work of celebrity-designer starpower bringing cachet to a dull, drab brand you had long-since forgotten about [Read my previous post on designer collaborations.]

Consider how many brands have dug up their “vintage” labels and reused them, or simply invented a vintage label altogether (Hello Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and even Banana Republic.) Or how about a store that features antiques, reclaimed wood (yawn), and archival photographs. Gosh, which store were you thinking of — Confusing isn’t it?

Maybe it’s that old feels good. Old feels “authentic” because it existed before everything became disposable, redundant, and insincere.

Before a brand twittered.

The fact is, as much as one might want to believe one is being authentic, the culture of social media has potentially made us entirely too self-conscious to actually be truly “authentic” — and that goes for most brands too. In short,  authenticity has simply become another word for, what Rosenbloom calls, “stage management.”

Which might mean, judging from what one sees on facebook, that some people might need a bit more stage management than others. Joe Pine of Strategic Horizons LLP, a guru of sorts for those who preach at the altar of TED seminars, puts authenticity this way:

1. Don’t say you are authentic unless you really are authentic

2. It’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic

3. If you say you are authentic you better be authentic

If you understood any of that then you must be really authentic. But don’t tell anybody I said so. Afterall, my facebook page is nothing more than a stage-managed version of me. But you knew that — right?

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If you blinked, you missed it. Hordes of fashionistas and just plain ordinary people bewitched by all those bold Missoni prints and colors, descended on Target stores this morning long before the 10 A.M. opening time.

At dawn, the Target website was already crashing from so many people trying to grab any one of the pieces from the sizeable collection. Compared to other collaborations (last year it was Liberty of London), the Missoni for Target collection is one of the largest, with 400 pieces in total. The collection was slated to sell at all 1,762 Target stores in the U.S. and online through Oct. 22. Whether Target will restock is yet to be determined, according to one customer service employee.

By the time we got  to the Target at the Serramonte Mall in Daly City at a little after 10:15 A.M., the shelves were completely bare and the store oddly quiet.

Staff reported that within minutes items were torn from shelves and some even damaged in scuffles that included raised fists. In housewares, a martini glass was all that was left — it had a chip on the rim.

Latecomers picked over the lonely leftovers, which included one dishtowel and three eyemasks. A women’s wide-wale corduroy coat was left hanging in the candy aisle, while a pair of Missoni print ballet flats were discarded near the umbrellas.

Two fashionable women sauntered in at 10:30 trying their best to look only casually interested: one wearing all black, a large black sunhat, and black glasses, while the other wore her own Missoni top with a Louis Vuitton Suhali bag. After a brief tour through the empty shelves, they smartly went to customer service, where carts of “go-backs” held a few discarded Missoni pieces. They fingered the baby jumpers and left.

Meanwhile at the Target in Colma, A posse of five young women were just finishing a solid two hours of trolling the aisles and were now idling before checkout deciding what to keep and what to toss. Their cart was heaped with Missoni goods from virtually every department.

Those less fortunate circled nearby like sharks, eying any items which might get tossed away. “This was worse than Black Friday,” said one sales associate. “It was just crazy in here.”

By 11 A.M., Target staff were already pulling down the Missoni displays and filling shelves with other miscellaneous merchandise from their own in-house brands. Missoni accomplished.

See what you missed. View the entire collection here.

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