Recently, I began researching The North Face for something I was considering writing. As an outdoorsman myself, The North Face is part of a category I know well. I was eager to see how my own perceptions about the brand and its target consumers would stack up against what came out during my research. I made sure to talk to a variety outdoorsy people, from casual campers to serious adventure seekers, from REI yuppies to hardcore gear-heads, and went online to check what people were saying on review sites, opinion sites, and outdoor specialty sites. In the end, I came to some simple observations.
Basically, The North Face is in a healthy place right now as far as brand communications are concerned. The North Face’s brand is the clothing equivalent of Clif Bar’s brand. They are both lifestyle brands whose core identity is built around the serious adventurer. This attracts plenty of people who, despite not being truly serious adventurers themselves, want to be part of that lifestyle, and that’s both natural and great for the brand. When it comes to their ads, The North Face does a great job of capturing the mythos of the serious outdoorsman, even in their springtime ads that focus more on training than summiting snowy peaks. The work that Mekanism has been doing is, in my opinion, top shelf. They won two CLIOs for it. Their “This Land is Your Land” spot was so good Jeep basically ripped them off for their Super Bowl spot (and got caught for it). There was one point of weakness that I found, though. While they still communicate the idea of gear for the serious outdoorsman, they are beginning to lose the serious outdoorsman market, which could be a disaster for the brand.
The number one concern amongst actual gear-heads was that the gear made by The North Face really isn’t what it used to be. Some felt that their most expensive equipment and clothing were still competitive with their high end rivals, like Arcteryx for example, but others didn’t think The North Face had anything to offer worth looking at, period. Older outdoorsman recalled a time in which The North Face actually stood for high quality gear, and were a go-to brand, but that changes in management had caused quality to slip and tarnished the brand’s image. One stipulated that, like many outdoor gear brands before them, The North Face had lowered the quality of their products to decrease prices, increase margins, and make “dumber” versions of their gear that appealed to more normal people. In effect, chasing the widest market share was ruining the niche that built the brand in the first place.
Now, I’m don’t own much The North Face gear, so I can’t verify these observations by personal experience. But I have seen a number of gear manufacturers go down the same road, and so these accounts absolutely rang true for me. It should also be a big worry for The North Face as well. When you build your brand on being gear for the serious adventurer, even when they cease to be your largest consumer, you still have to keep them happy, as their endorsement is part of what keeps the casuals, who buy the brand’s lifestyle image, as consumers. When the serious buyers begin dropping out, the casuals will eventually follow, and the end result is a hollow brand.
This has happened before. A great case study for this is White Stag. Like The North Face, they started out focused on making specialty gear for people headed to the coldest climates for outdoor adventures. White Stag started in skiwear. The North Face started in gear for ice climbers and backpackers, and later expanded to skiwear (and eventually general camping equipment). For a little more than thirty years, from 1931 to 1966, White Stag grew as interest in skiing grew nationally, and as they grew they expanded their product lines to include casual sportswear and camping gear. All this time, they were considered one of the best manufacturers in their category. In 1966 they were acquired by Warnaco Group. Things immediately began changing. White Stag’s corporate offices were moved from Oregon. The quality of their products began to slip. A couple decades later, a new company, Authentic Fitness Corporation, was formed to combine Warnaco’s activewear lines, including White Stag, to streamline the company and hopefully shore up the weaker brands. While some brands, like Speedo, thrived, others did not, and as a result of these failures, and probably many others, in the 1990s Warnaco filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, and during the proceedings the White Stag brand name was sold to Walmart, where they now make low quality, cheap women’s activewear exclusively. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
This is all potentially great information to give to The North Face, allowing them to shore up a potential weakness before it’s too late. The only problem is: this isn’t an advertising problem; it’s a business one. There is nothing wrong with The North Face’s advertising. Like I said before, the work that Mekanism has been doing is on point and on message. They are doing their damnedest to sell The North Face as an outdoor brand, and a serious one at that. But the insidious virus of “low quality gear” has infected the brand’s image among the category’s influencers, and only The North Face themselves can stomp it out with the anti-viral of better quality gear. Pardon the tortured metaphor. It is infuriating as a brand strategist, working from the communications end of things, to see this kind of thing and feel powerless to do anything about it.
In fact, it’s even more perverse than not being able to do anything. Making great ads for weak products is self-defeating for the agency. I wouldn’t necessarily call The North Face products weak, but let’s take a look at a brand that more exemplifies this idea: Kmart. Kmart is a bad brand. Their most notable feature is their terrible in-store experience. Everything Walmart does right, in the low-cost box store category, Kmart does wrong. Kmart’s stores are dirty, their employees are unhelpful, and they are constantly under stocked. And yet, Kmart has had top-notch advertising. DraftFCB, now just FCB, developed hilarious, provocative advertising in “Jingle Balls,” Ship My Pants,” and “Big Gas Savings.” They were getting nationwide recognition, both from advertising’s inner circle and the mainstream press, garnering loads of free, earned media. There was only one problem: it drove people to try a Kmart store. Every time someone went to buy something from Kmart, what they took home was a harsh reminder of why people don’t shop at Kmart.
One of my favorite quotes in advertising is from Bill Bernbach: “Nothing kills bad products faster than good advertising.” Kmart thought they could put an advertising band-aid over their festering wound of an in-store experience, and of course it didn’t work. The irony is that in making great ads and drawing attention to the brand, FCB helped remind everyone what a god-awful mess Kmarts really were, hastening the company’s decline. The cherry on top of this irony sundae was that FCB’s inability to turn around Kmart’s sales numbers led to their account being put into review.
Strategists run comprehensive diagnostics as part of their path to insights, and in the process reveal diseases which they would like to help the client treat. Unfortunately, advertising agencies are speech-language pathologists, and clients don’t trust them to identify liver failure, so the drinking continues. Obviously, this is not an ideal system. But ultimately the patient shouldn’t care where the diagnosis came from, only that they don’t end up dead. So what are advertisers to do?
I think this may be where brand experience comes into play. Whatever its origins, the idea of brand experience is hugely beneficial for agencies looking for a way to influence the direction a client company is headed. Since brand experience covers all of the ways in which the consumers interact with the brand, it opens up things like in-store experience, product design, and website usability, all of which might have otherwise been seen as the purview of business consultants or as issues internal to the company exclusively.
Under the guise of improving the brand’s relationship with the consumer through image management, pressure can actually be put on other aspects of the business. Starbucks famously spends nothing on traditional advertising, focusing all its money on promotions and in-store experience. If you had a Kmart-like client with dingy stores, you could try to sell them on the amazingly positive effect of Starbucks’ clean stores and cheerful staff on their bottom line. Similarly, if you were dealing with a North Face type client, you might try and convince them that higher quality, more durable gear is better for their image, because it will lead to fewer negative reviews on e-commerce sites and more favorable impressions on social media. As a high-end outdoor gear maker, when people think of your clothing you want them to think of skiers out surviving the winter slopes, not rich girls in Uggs, even if that’s who buys most of your fleeces.
Another way you could try to answer a business problem with an advertising solution is through brand restructuring. Since the structure of brands is considered a part of communications, agencies might be in the position to recommend to the company new strategies for naming, packaging, and projecting different brand values for their various products. If a strategist at an agency notices that people don’t put as much value in a luxury car company because of their low-end automobiles, they could recommend that they split that division off into its own brand. This is essentially how Volkswagen Company is structured. They own Volkswagen, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and many others, each of which fills a unique position in Volkswagen Company’s portfolio, while appearing separate to everyone but those in the know.
If we think back to our The North Face problem, this might offer a solution. Rather than trying to warn The North Face of the dangers of losing their gear-head clientele, you could pitch The North Face on the opportunity to expand their brand portfolio. Like I mentioned earlier, a couple of the people I talked to mentioned that the very high end North Face gear was still quality stuff, but that their impression of the brand is more influenced by the lower end product. This presents an ideal situation under which to rearrange the brand’s structure. The North Face has a very profitable line of clothing, especially their fleeces and jackets. These could be spun off from their serious camping gear, the former keeping its name recognition with the latter taking on a new form. Depending on how tightly it made sense to tie the new brand for high end gear with The North Face name, this could be done with an endorsed brand, a sub-brand, or a completely independent brand that would be added to Vanity Fair’s (The North Face’s parent company) roster of brands.
There are probably other ways that an advertising agency can help a client with a business problem, despite their specialty in communications tools, that I haven’t thought of yet. It is no accident that Jim Collin’s superb “Good to Great,” a business strategy book focused on turning moderately successful companies into thriving ones, is one of Advertising Age’s recommended top ten books on media and marketing. But it also no accident that top planners often leave advertising for jobs that offer more depth in the kinds of recommendations they can provide clients. Some go fully independent. Some go corporate. Some even go to found their own agencies. Gareth Kay, one of my contemporary planning heroes, left west coast power agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners for a job in the much more encompassing world of business and marketing consulting, first as a cofounder of Zeus Jones’ San Francisco office and then cofounding his own agency: ChapterSF. ChapterSF’s motto is: “We exist to solve wicked problems facing pioneering businesses.” No mention is made of how they do that, leaving their methods open ended, and giving them great freedom in how they approach their clients.
While account planning is often exclusively focused on identifying insights on which to hang an ad campaign, the kind of intimate familiarity with the brand, consumer, and category required to get to that insight comes with an understanding of what might be broken about more things than how the company communicates its brand message. Sadly, these kinds of problems, and their related solutions, aren’t always something that can be addressed with 30sec spots, billboard ads, or social media campaigns. Brand experience may offer a way in. Same with addressing brand architecture. But it is frustrating for strategists to feel powerless to address some issues, even with these tools, and so it is common to see top minds leave advertising, not necessarily for the stability found outside consultancy, but for a different kind of agency.
Maybe that is just the direction the industry is going. Some strategists will be content applying band-aid advertising solutions to the gaping wounds of their client’s business problems. Some will be forced to by their junior status and a need to get their foot in the door. Some planners get their pleasure from supporting brilliant creative work, even if it ultimately is undone by their client’s own internal problems. And for everyone else, there are design firms like IDEO, consultancies like Zeus Jones, and branding firms like Red Scout, that are structured for people of a planning mindset to get to work on cool, creative work which solves problems for their clients and helps those clients build better businesses. And really, that’s all people like me want to do: take our weird, unique talents and wells of information, and put them towards solving problems for people.