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Op also says it is “The Original California Lifestyle Brand.” When I realized that the brand on the swimsuit I bought at Walmart for the Panama Canal cruise comes from a familiar company, I felt, like, all mellow. Dude.
I closely non-resemble the brand demographic, representatives of which appear in the Op ad on this page. In fact, check out the Op brand site and you’ll see just how non-similar these happy youngsters are to moi.
That’s okay – there’s room for a lot of brands in the world. I’m just intrigued that Op is owned by Iconix Brands. The last time I wrote about one of this company’s brands, it was London Fog® trenchcoats.
This post’s about cool-dude-beachwear branding and I’m proud to have the chance to re-examine the brand-holder. Inconix bought the Op brand – Ocean Pacific – about four years ago for $54 million and has revived it rather nicely. But then, that’s what Iconix is famous for – being a licensing dynamo and all. The company has a whole bunch for great and busy retail marques, including the Joe Boxer®, Badgley Mischaka®, Mossimo® and Candie’s® brands – the current “Candie’s Girl” is Britney Spears.
The self-proclaimed Iconix biz-model is using licensing to generate predictable revenue streams (thanks to contractually guaranteed minimum royalty payments) combined with trendsetters in aggressive advertising and promotion. Good, bad or ugly, the beautiful people – Spears, Eva Longoria Parker, Madonna, etc. – do generate attention.
Iconix Brands also seems quite smart about keeping certain brands in strict channels and mindsets. Op is for Walmart. Mudd® apparel is available only at Kohl’s. Rocawear, per the website, “was established…off of the meteoric success of co-founder Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter…to fit the urban lifestyle and…street-savvy consumers.”
What happens in most all of the Iconix brand demographics hardly ever touches me and my life. And any suggestion that my Op swim trunks are too young for me will be met with knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud agreement.
For a marketer and advertiser, though, I applaud what Iconix Brands is doing at both wholesale and retail – you might want to look into just how brand-savvy the company really is. And cool or not, I’m running away to sea. Later, dudes…
They’re everywhere – celebrity endorsers for each of us and all of us. Now there’s a fresh Harris Interactive/AdWeek poll that says:
…one in five Americans (21%) say they find athletes to be most persuasive when they endorse a product, followed by 18% who say TV or movie stars are most persuasive, 14% who say singers or musicians and 10% who say former political figures are most persuasive.
When it comes to how other celebrities rank in the category of least persuasive, almost one-quarter (23%) say TV or movie stars are least persuasive, while 14% say business leaders are least persuasive. Just 13% say when athletes endorse a product they find them least persuasive and 11% say singers or musicians are least persuasive.
It’s clear that the pollsters took no account of the “Trench Coat Factor.” TCF ramps up the cool quotient – even for McGruff the Crime Dog. You knew that. Best for Sunday…
When I was growing up, trench coats did not look like this. Even London Fog trench coats didn’t look like this. Even so, I was shaken (if not stirred) to discover that the much touted Gisele Bündchen ads for this classic fashion line did not show up on the brand’s website.
Or maybe the print ads made it to mags like Vanity Fair; for general web consumption though, we get Eva Longoria Parker and her spousal unit.
So…it’s March 7, 1954: Saks Fifth Avenue becomes the first store to offer London Fog raincoats, in a New York Times ad. The new line of men's raincoats, from Londontown Clothing Company, is specifically designed to reflect the style of World War I trench coats – complete with epaulets, sleeve straps, and a belt.
The Saks ad describes the coat as “The perfect answer to everything a man can ask for in a raincoat. Remarkably lightweight and wrinkle-free ... it actually resists creasing even after packing.”
(The Londontown president, Israel Myers, has grudgingly used the brand name London Fog for the new line; he rejected it originally because he didn’t think it would attract customers. Saks’s 100 coats sold out immediately, even though the $29.75 price tag was more than double that of other men’s raincoats.)
Myers didn’t invent the trench coat – that’s down to the Brits in the Great War; as you can see by this 1932 Sears ad, the “durable trench
model” retailed for just $2.98. Twenty years and a miracle DuPont fabric later, Saks charged 10 times that.
Today, Dillard’s advertises the woman’s model London Fog “Long Trench Coat” in stone, garnet, chocolate or black, for $99 in The Houston Chronicle. I noticed that, oddly, there was no Bündchen here. (But plenty more of her here. Ah – advertising!)
Here it is Saturday and I’m wondering if business-to-business advertising is the last refuge of normal human beings? Unless you’re looking at a trade magazine, you’re seeing handsome, cool, good-looking people flacking products and services these days.
‘Course, this has been going on for years and years: Mary Pickford, one of the most famous movie stars of her day (which would be about 90 years ago) appeared for Everywoman’s World in 1919.
Celebrities both are and are not what they used to be. You can see one of the world’s largest advertisements for Maxxim featuring Eva Longoria here. Form-wise, this is a substantial mental distance from the famous Ms. Pickford; functionally, it is the same.
Reshaping spokes-celebrities continues among the brand icons, too.
Writing in Funny Times several months back, Lenore Skenazy bemoaned the glamorization of our advertising icons: “In Mr. Whipple’s day, there was no shame in being paunchy or plain or punching in at the kind of job you get straight out of high school.”
Another example: The old Dunkin’ Donuts guy is gone. But the younger, cuter, phenomenally richer Rachael Ray is gone as well – she was removed from the Dunkin' Donuts website some months back; her endorsement TV spots are off the air. For why? It seems she didn’t like the famous Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and wasn't shy about saying it out loud.
Fortunately, there’s Oil & Gas Journal or Offshore – just to name a couple of “regular” magazines. There’s nothing overtly glamorous about seeing a West Texas tool-pusher in these pages, an Asian pipeline engineer or a Scandinavian ChEng. None of them are too likely to let their star turns go to their heads, either. Still, I live in hope: “I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. deMille.”
