oren meets world: top marketing campaigns in history: brand strategy & analysis

Today we are going to talk about some of the best marketing campaigns and marketing initiatives ever. I'm going to cover a wide swath from fashion to liquor to cosmetics. What are those campaigns that resonate generationally? We'll talk about why they're so impactful and build out our toolkit as marketers and people understanding the world around us at the same time. Covering diamonds, Duolingo, Ralph Lauren, Lego, Absolute, Dos Equis, Kiehl's, all over. Let's lock in. And we're going to start with one of my favorites and that's Ralph Lauren. There's two standout things that I really associate with this brand that I think are perfect takeaways to have. And it all comes back to being an ambassador of the American lifestyle and the storytelling of that. So we've all seen these iconic print campaigns where they basically put this idyllic New York adjacent horses skiing American lifestyle on display for generations in print, letting the imagery talk for the brand. No taglines, just the basics of the brand or the line has become synonymous with the storytelling around the fabric of America and American fashion. But one of the campaign I feel really ties this all together that we see comes up every few years is Ralph Lauren's choice to be the Olympic provider, where when you see the clothes that people are wearing, the uniforms that they're wearing, what happens when we unveil anything, they basically say, we are going to spend our money sponsoring and making clothing for these Olympic teams. So that on a world stage, whenever everyone from America tunes in, they see us as the brand that is the ambassador. And when the world tunes in and then watches America win a disproportionate amount of all the contests, they're going to see our brand as an ambassador. And it's one of those marketing campaigns that is so high level that it is often kind of overlooked as to the power and impact it has generationally by having a choice to say, we have this huge anchor moment that we do again, again, and again, is synonymous with our brand story at the highest level. And being consistent like that over time has benefits, right? I think we've seen Olympic viewership dwindle, less and less people care in the internet era than ever. But then with viral moments, it comes right back. And by staying consistent with that, and all of a sudden, you know, staying through a downturn of less interest up into the hey, there's TikTok things happening constantly. And for any Olympic event that goes down, you begin to ride the waves of the potential of working through an initiative over time. But small brands can learn from this too. You can learn from having an anchor event at the highest scale that portrays yourself in your category. I want to bring up bandit running for this. So maybe not one of the best marketing campaigns of all time, but certainly one that could turn into it if continually executed is bandit basically said, we're going to participate in the Olympics as a smaller brand and in running with their unsponsored project, where they say any people that are competing for their own places in there that don't have a sponsor, we will give them unbranded clothing, and they promote the actual campaign itself. And they took this a step further, I think they actually sponsored two runners who lost their sponsorship from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And they said, hey, we're gonna inside this niche that we are in play above our weight class in an initiative that speaks to the goodwill promoted by the brand. And then make this a marquee that we go back to every Olympics, we have some variation of the unsponsored project, even though we're a small brand. And we're going to be able to play again at a global scale at a scale that's really recognized when the pros inside our community and leverage a similar strategy to what we've seen Ralph Lauren do now for generations. But shifting gears into something completely different. One of my most favorite recent campaigns I feel brands are really apt to learn from right now is what we've seen from Duolingo and the Duolingo Owl. So a few months ago, I was speaking on a panel at the Notion conference in San Francisco. And I was actually moderating with a social media manager from Duolingo and a social media manager from ARC. I think she's actually the head of storytelling was her title. But at Duolingo, the woman was talking about some of the workflows that happened there. One thing that stood out to me is they treat their content creation process more like a writer's room, where they really think of their content from a comedy angle. And so we've all seen this owl, right? This owl has permeated pop culture. It is somehow a part of the Squid Games rollout. It was at the Brat concerts when they were at their peak. It is on social media feeds in the way that any pop culture character or influencer is. And it has this ever perpetual association with anything going on in culture and navigated in a way a corporate mascot simply never has before. And the important takeaway that I have here is treating your marketing like entertainment, right? That idea of, hey, can we have our brand's mascot or our brand's influencers or our brand's content? How do we treat that like a writer's room? How do we make this episodic? How do we bring on more characters? How is our goal to be ubiquitous to this level that someone may never have associated with a language app with whatever it is you're building, as opposed to saying, oh, we need to make more videos walking through our brand's products. And I like to show that as a great example of a modern brand, of something that shifts and moves with the culture. But it's also equally as interesting to look at campaigns that have lasted the length of time and have expanded the life of an industry. So perhaps the most prolific marketing campaign of all time is this idea of diamonds are forever. And if you pull up even these specific De Beers ads where they anchor the price, you know, basically two months salary, it's been the price anchor of what a diamond should cost when someone proposes to marry someone else. And this is interesting to me to look at in the face of what this achieved for them when Lab Diamonds came out, right? So for decades and decades, they cemented that this rock that came from the ground is now worth this enormous sum. That's a forever commitment. It's ingrained in our cultural essence, but also that it has a set price that really the minimum you should be considering is a two-month salary for the price point. So they anchored in price by playing to the emotion of the people that do it, by setting a standard of expectation between male and female, which is a dynamic that as much marketing that can take advantage of probably should. But then look at how that positioned itself for when Lab Diamonds came out. Lab Diamonds are diamonds. You can take them to a jeweler. They cannot tell them apart. They are chemically the same. They are significantly cheaper. They're for all intents and purposes. Every single person, there's almost no reason that they shouldn't be buying a Lab Diamond versus a regular diamond. But because of the marketing that this industry had cemented as a group, that took way more time than expected. Now, when you survey a group of people, you say you want a Lab Diamond, a regular diamond, you'll see a disproportionate amount say Lab. But they basically bought themselves years and years of this by having cemented themselves at this high price point and then also how they played the moments when those diamonds came out. Some of them released their own Lab Diamond lines at a significantly lower price. Again, price anchoring in the campaign and saying this is actually worth less than what we have is worth more. And again, it's consumer psychology. It didn't last forever, but it's extending the life of this industry versus watching it just die outright. And that's what a great marketing campaign and a campaign that potentially reaches across just your brand and into category, which you should certainly be thinking about as a category leader or a secondary in a category is how do we give that moat that gives us time to figure out what do we do with all these De Beers stores if diamonds are not worth as much or if the pricing has to change? What does that mean for our business model? If you need to figure that out in four months, then your brand is probably fucked. If you need to figure that out over the course of seven years, you can probably come out with a great plan. And that is literally what we are watching play out from the power of this Diamonds are Forever campaign. Another one of my favorites, a more specific campaign is Patagonia's Don't Buy This Jacket campaign. So Patagonia has lasted through generations as a brand people believe in, as a high quality product, as a mission-driven brand that people say, I see transparency in their supply chain. They put an ad out in a newspaper on Black Friday saying, don't buy our product. In fact, reuse it, sustain it, we'll help you repair it. They stand by their values. And people started using the wrong people to them. Venture Capital started using their Vestas merch. They cut their merch programs. They're a brand that stands by their values and stays consistent with them. As opposed to someone like a North Face, you know, who released that kind of like gibberish AI manifesto campaign, who's kind of lost a bit of the plot over time. And that has given Patagonia room to maneuver. So one of the most interesting things of this last year is Patagonia launching provisions. So they said after, I think they started in 1973, after 48 years or whatever of being a brand, 50 years, we're going to launch into a completely new category of food, not only food, but like tinned fish. And that's an interesting choice to say, hey, we have built this up, we built up this reputation, and we're going to very carefully move. When we move, we're going to move all in on it. They said there's an overlap between our customer, we can leverage our existing retail relationships, and we're going to be able to put this line out and succeed with it in a completely different market. And not only they've done that, they've now expanded it. Now they've got sardines and beans, all these things you wouldn't expect, but they come from having that cemented identity that has never wavered over time that builds an expectation with a customer and allows them to know their customer well enough to 50 years in be like, we're going to launch a new category. I want to talk about pans, one of my favorite topics. I've gone viral about pans on Instagram many times for some reason, but Le Creuset specifically. Le Creuset has used color as the anchor of their market. So when you go on their Pinterest, this is a great example of a legacy French brand using social media to their own devices very well. Their Pinterest has endless boards of color combinations where you can say, if you want to buy, if you own these three colors of Le Creuset already, or pans of these colors, you want to add one to it, here's how we match that, here's how you style your kitchen. So they knowing that they are a not a once a year purchase, a once every eight or 10 years purchase, that their customer cares about their kitchen, so they can allow them to get into that purchase decision and get excited about it. They've made these visual guides for how people can put together their array of pans and colors. That's not where their color strategy ends. They introduce new colors every year. It's a new Le Creuset palette. And they exit colors every year. So now these are going away. And they've built into their distribution and their channels, both online and in stores, how to actually take advantage of that. So when you see new Le Creuset colors get released, all of your Williams-Sonoma and all these places will have their displays of the new Le Creuset colorways. Then at the same time online, you'll see all the Bon Appetits and all the kitchen blogs all release, hey, here's all the new colors that are coming out. And then at the same time, you'll see all of them promoting this as your last chance to get these three colors that are going away. And this cycle happens every single year and gives the brand an extra four or five touch points from announcing it, to them actually releasing, to these are going away, to here's your final chance, to oh my god, like Lime is coming back this year, to actually have that marketing talk. And what's worth noting is those affiliate links, those news sites that you see, they write about this. Every one of those, they're making a percent on those sales. There's a whole clickback economy of brands and blogs, newspapers, major publications getting paid by Le Creuset per one of those purchases by reporting on these colorways. And this campaign is powerful because it gave people the framework to do it, a framework for merchandising in store, for consumers to engage in social media, and for writing in the kind of content creation establishment to work around it, and it is absolute genius. And a brand that's often replicated this is Yeti, that's a separate conversation. Next, I want to bring up two campaigns that didn't last, that probably should, both in alcohol. The first is Absolute. So in my era, the Absolute ad was peak. People had these posters on their walls, they cut them out of magazines, and it was genius. They took the silhouette of the bottle and they gave locations, and artists, and cultural figures, and their art direction team a canvas with which they could work in advertising that had the ability to appeal to everybody, from specific regions, to the fans of specific artists, to just certain and specific lifestyles. It was immediately recognizable as Absolute, one of the best brand building plays of all time. And now, you see they have the remnants of that decades later, but it's gone. But I don't think it would have to be in the social media era. If they used that same exact framework today, but it was in video, it was in TikToks, it was in carousels, it had artists, it had locations, it had that nostalgia, it wouldn't have to be gone anymore. Which brings me back to another liquor brand that's worth talking about, Dos Equis, and the most interesting man in the world. By far the best beer campaign of all time, I'm not afraid to say. Put Dos Equis into the purchasing stage in a way that nothing else would, but eventually became so big it almost was bigger than the brand. It was associated with more than just Dos Equis. They became afraid of the campaign and eliminated it. Had problems with the guy, tried to bring the guy back, just not lasting. But again, another one of the social media era that, if you were thinking through it from a social media perspective, has the opportunity for pure genius. Because nowadays, you don't need to make a mascot for the most interesting brand in the world, you can go find those people. Find the most interesting folks all around the globe, have them tell their stories, have those intimate human moments on social media of who the most interesting person in whatever town is, and begin to kind of leverage that into its own life and series. And always in their hands, a Dos Equis. Outside of liquor, I want to talk about one of the best brand collaborations of all time. It's one that I think is a little unthought of, because collaborations are a campaign. Sometimes can last a test of time. So Kiehl's, very long-time standing cosmetics brand. Lotions, soaps, shampoos, that kind of thing. Sold in department stores forever. Sampling was one of their key programs. You could always get your free sample, always have your trial, natural to that niche. But their collaboration with Equinox, where up until last year, this was all the products you would find inside of an Equinox, would be Kiehl's, is to me one of the most legendary co-benefiting collaborations of all time. Because it's a product that most guys I know were introduced to that product through Equinox. And guess what? If a guy finds a soap they like, or a soap that's reputable in whatever way, and they like it, and they buy one, they're going to buy it for the rest of time. Especially if women then note that it was a good choice, then they are locked in. And that introduction for the vast majority of those male clients was through Equinox. They said, this is a great product. It's in my Equinox. It's ambiguously branded enough. I'm going to get compliments on it after I am locked in. Shut up and take my money. But same thing for their entire customer base, right? Female customers, whoever it is, they're betting on Equinox. And then Equinox blowing up to the level it was. And that luxury association of the Equinox brand, the luxury association of their brand, and this just basically massive sampling over years across the globe by the association of the two of them, is in my mind, one of the best collabs for both. It brought a level of credibility to Equinox in terms of their choices and their taste making. And it brought the introduction of a brand associated with this new luxury for an old luxury brand to an entirely new level. It's about new channels and new discovery in a way that is more than just a couple videos online. So I'm gonna talk about one more iconic campaign. Then we're gonna talk a bit about kind of modern marketing and people that are rolling all these together. This last campaign I want to talk about is the revitalization of Lego. So forever, Lego was a staple toy. It was slightly falling off. It lived in its own world. There were no Star Wars Legos or Marvel Legos. They created their own characters. They had Ninjago. They had a few that they were trying to create their own lore, but they stayed away from, we are going to let other IP crossover with our IP. Then one day they said, you know what? **** it. We're letting the cannons loose. We're doing everything. And now literally, you can go buy a Fortnite Lego set, a Batman Lego set, Dungeons and Dragons, any cultural thing you can humanly think of is now available in Lego. And it was the right time, right? Maybe it wasn't the right time prior or years before to do it, but when they actually opened the floodgates to say we're going in major, was in the right timing of the world niching down, of fandoms becoming popular, of people's identities becoming more and more wrapped up in the game they really love, the TV show they enjoy, of purchasing those things. And all of a sudden it allowed these experiences to cross over in a way that has revitalized the brand, has led into literal movie channels, like all these things that would not have happened for Lego without the ability to actually then put all this other IP in place around its platform, which is the right term for what Lego had built. And I like that it took so long. I don't think they should have been running Star Wars and Star Trek like in the 80s necessarily. But when they did it, they went completely wide with it, they put it across channels, and it led into one of the most interesting conversations ever. And licensing is a huge conversation. I think more brands should talk about it. In terms of you have a popular product, like for instance, I sell shoe bags. People on teams buy my shoe bags. I'll get 10 or 15 bought at one time. People will be buying them for their team or whatever that looks like. And to me that means, you know what, one day as this product grows, this brand grows, I should be doing NFL versions of these. NFL logos on it, whatever, tied into it. That is a thing that's attainable. If you had a certain amount of money, a certain amount of reach, you could pitch that right. But certainly a level back being like, hey, I could do this cross-branded with smaller leagues, or we could do it with rugby or whatever it is. That licensing is a tool for marketing and branding where, look, it's usually a flat fee and like a 10 or 12% royalty of sale. If you can build a business that works around that, it's a massively powerful tool. And every time you see a Lego, you should be reminded of that for your brand. Now, the last brand I want to talk about is one that kind of has pushed all these together, which is a really interesting session. And they've done that to disrupt a massive traditional industry. We're going to talk about the new generation of soda, and we're going to talk about Poppy. Because Poppy has done something interesting. They've basically hit every single note of marketing they've struck on. And they've basically been able to say, hey, for a fraction of what Coca-Cola spends on marketing, we're going to just do all of these things that they participate in, but do them well, and do them in a modern fashion. And then use that to basically disrupt an entire category. And it's interesting, I was speaking at a brand the other day, and I do this anytime I do kind of walk through a Poppy or something similar to that, I will survey people, hey, how many of you drink traditional soda? How many of you drink this new wave of soda, the Poppy Olipop? And the younger the crowd skews, and even now middle age, the more people just drink these modern sodas. The market for that bigger soda is shrinking in a way that I would be absolutely terrified if I was those companies. But then you look at the marketing canon of what they've been able to do. So Poppy is a great example, because the founder is in the content, and there are creators in the content, and the founder is a personality herself, where they have taken personality from the start and associated with the brand the way Coca-Cola never has, we got a polar bear, that's it. And they also have those same celebrity collabs at the highest level, Post Malone, Paris Hilton, where they're activating on social, they're doing TikToks that are going viral, and they're inside of the mainstream campaign, something that the big brands have not been able to do, right? They'll still put a lot of Britney Spears in the TV campaign, they'll have their modern version, but they have not been able to cross that over to successful social at the same time, while also activating in store, while also activating in branded activations, while also making sure they're present inside sports stadiums. There is this kind of war coming on by saying, hey, we are going to do everything a traditional brand does, but more cost-effective, with more personality, with more social reach behind it, with a product that speaks to a better lifestyle, that is basically the blueprint for disrupting any big category that came before. So anyway, this was some of my favorite marketing campaigns of all times, of all different types. If you like this series, please let me know, because I have a laundry list of kind of 50 or more that we could walk through inside all different types and categories, but we'll keep it a little shorter here today than just some of my favorites. Hope you learned a ton, and I appreciate y'all watching.