Levi Strauss & Co.: They Go On campaign Encyclopedia of Major ...

Unfortunately for Levi's, its market share with the consumer group of 15- to 19-year-olds dropped from 33 percent in 1993 to 26 percent in
1997. Levi's learned that this statistic was not a fluke when a yearlong research project indicated that the "echo boomers," children of baby
boomers, considered Levi's passé. Steve Goldstein, vice president of marketing and research for Levi's USA, told BusinessWeek, "Kids say
they love the Levi's brand. But if you ask them whether it's 'with it,' they'll say no." Sixteen-year-old Irma Cruz stated in the Columbian,
"Levi's are too straight, too plain … None of my friends wear them." Levi's needed to present a fashionable and modern campaign that
would win over these consumers.
COMPETITION
As more players entered the lucrative denim market in the 1990s, Levi's faced growing competition. According to the 1998 Market Share
Reporter, VF Corporation, the maker of Lee and Wrangler jeans, held 30.1 percent of the U.S. market, compared to Levi's at 16 percent.
Designer labels also infiltrated the market, with Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein's CK, Nautica, Diesel, and Ralph Lauren's Polo among
the high-end labels fighting for market share. Gap, along with its Old Navy clothing line, also posed a threat. Private-label jeans, such as
J.C. Penney's Arizona line and Sears, Roebuck's Canyon River Blues series, also entered the market and gobbled up valuable jeans
dollars. According to the Tactical Retail Monitor, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, private-label jeans experienced a rise in market
share from 3.2 percent in 1990 to 19.1 percent in 1997.
Alan Millstein, a New York retail consultant and editor of Fashion Network Report, told Advertising Age, "Levi's is in a pincers from the
private-label and specialty brands in department stores and the designer brands." According to the Los Angeles Times, Tony Cherbak, a
Deloitte & Touche retail-industry analyst, agreed with Millstein and stated, "For a long time, they were the only game in town … They were
able to demand prices and dictate display. But as other brands ate into their market, retailers could turn elsewhere or make their own
private label brands."
MARKETING STRATEGY
To boost its popularity with the younger market and to lure customers, Levi's chose to launch the $90 million image-building campaign
based on the strength of its brand. Levi's Fanoe was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, "The ads will be built around what the
Levi's brand stands for: originality, independence and Levi's as an American icon." The biggest and most expensive campaign instigated by
Levi's, "They Go On" included six television spots, five of which lasted 60 seconds and one 90 seconds. It debuted in August 1997 on
prime-time network television and during telecasts of National Football League games on Fox as well as on MTV. The spots were also shown
in movie theaters across the nation. The print and outdoor portions of the campaign began in October with print ads in magazines such as
Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated. Levi's home page on the World Wide Web provided additional ad information, and the campaign
included bilingual spots in Spanish and English for viewers in the Los Angeles and Houston areas. Levi's expected 94 percent of its target
consumers to see the campaign an average of 15 times each.
CELEBRITY CAMEOS
Several of the spots in the Levi's "They Go On" campaign featured appearances by celebrities. Author Quentin Crisp
appeared as a patron in a nightclub, and musician Lenny Kravitz was the rock star stuck at a gas station's pay phone. The
bag boy in "Bag Boy Fantasy" was played by Brian Vaughan, the actor who had portrayed the young Brad Pitt character in
the film Seven Years in Tibet, and the riled agent of the rock star was played by Bodhi Elfman, son of Danny Elfman,
musician and member of the rock band Oingo Boingo.
The six television spots shared a loosely interwoven narrative. Common elements linked the spots, but the elements were often random,
and viewers had to pay close attention to notice the connections. As Amy Rosenthal, the senior marketing specialist at Levi's USA,
explained to the Dallas Morning News, "We call it dream logic … There's no beginning, middle or end, just a series of little vignettes. Nothing
much happens, but they are connected in interesting ways by interesting things." The strategy was similar to those adopted by competitors
Lee and Guess, both of which produced television spots that were like minifilms that told stories, albeit nebulous ones, designed to push an
image rather than a product. It was believed that this soft-sell approach would appeal to teenagers who had become jaded about pushy
advertising. In the Dallas Morning News James Twitchell, author of Adcult USA, commented on the Levi's campaign by remarking, "It's the
ultimate super-soft sell, so soft there's no sell at all … Advertising has become so omnipresent, the only way to cut through it is with
something that doesn't look like an advertisement."
Levi's hoped that the target consumer would be engaged by the spots and encouraged to view all of them. Unlike other episodic campaigns
that televised one spot at a time, Levi's chose to show the commercials in groups of two or three in an attempt to draw in the viewer and to
signify that the spots were indeed related. Andy Berkenfield, Foote Cone & Belding account manager and vice president, told the Dallas
Morning News, "You do worry with this sort of episodic storytelling that it will be confusing, so you try to make it pretty obvious, especially
early on."
The first spot, the 90-second "Impala Man," featured a man wearing a cowboy hat who drove a Chevrolet Impala filled with stuffed animals
to a diner. In the diner he talked to D.J. Marcus, a New York-bound disc jockey, and gave away a stuffed dinosaur. The following spot, "Car
Chase," starred a Kojak-obsessed cab driver employed by a plainclothes policeman to chase a thief making a getaway on a moped. The
cab driver engaged in a high-speed chase, with the nervous officer in the backseat. In the third spot, "Ice Cream Man," the disc jockey
from the first spot returned as a disc jockey in a trendy nightclub, an ice cream man would not hand over ice cream to young children
unless they correctly answered difficult trivia questions, and a rock musician spoke on a pay phone at a gas station. "Bag Boy Fantasy"
showed the agent of the rock star on a cellular phone in a grocery store while the bag boy daydreamed of being a rock star. "Test Drive,"
the fifth installment, included a girl who took a car on a test drive, with the dealer in the backseat making sales claims. She stopped to pick
up her boyfriend and then drove to a coffee shop. The final spot, "Car Wash," featured a goggles-clad man who drove an AMC Gremlin
through a car wash with the windows rolled down, thus washing the inside and outside of the car. As he exited the car wash, the Impala