Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:

The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.

Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal its passage.

In my last post, I discussed the process of buying school supplies in preparation of going back to school. In this post, we take a look at another kind of purchase: jeans. September is jean-selling season. Retailers gear up for the hordes of teenagers (and their parents) doing back-to-school shopping. I look at two retailers, one that uses ritual and one that does not.

The Gap: No Ritual
The Gap has traditionally been a jeans-driven brand, re-inventing “business casual” in the ‘90s. Their take on the jean, this season, is a curious position:

I took this photo through the window of Toronto’s flag-ship store on the tony Bloor Street West (the same street that will be thronged with Chanel-hunting Hollywood starlets during the Toronto International Film Festival).

Notice a few things about this woman:

1.        She’s blonde
2.        She has impossibly long legs
3.        She is wearing 2.5-inch heels with a pair of “casual” pants
4.        She is parting her mouth sexily

The caption, which you can’t quite read is “Putting the it in fit.” The copy is telling us that Gap jeans will fit. The picture is telling us that women are supposed to look like tall, blonde, sexy models who wear high heels with casual jeans. I find it hard to believe that jeans that fit her will actually fit me.

How might this positioning relate to autumn rituals? If you’re having difficulty explaining that, it’s because it doesn’t. This campaign is the tired, uninspired advertising laziness. Creative ad workers likely relied on the notion of the “aspirational” product. People will buy this product because they want to look like that model, this logic goes.

It’s the same logic that continues to market household cleaners only to women (even though men are doing more housework). This is what we “should” aspire to as women: being tall, skinny and blonde, and having a clean house.

Children going back to school, and their parents who bring along their wallets, are in back-to-school mode. This campaign says nothing about this ritual of rejuevenation, re-invention, “buckling down,” and getting “back to work.” The end of summer is irrelevant to this campaign.

Levi’s: On-Ritual
Contrast this with the Levi’s fall campaign. Levi’s has had its share of downs in the last few decades. Its simple, Coca-cola, American-as-Apple-Pie brand image worked during the big-hair ‘80s, but their relative underinvestment in either design on brand dragged down their sales throughout the ‘90s and the ‘00s.

But take a look at their most recent jeans campaign:

I took this in the subway in Toronto that is connected to the city’s mid-market shopping Mecca: Eaton Centre.

Other images of this subway campaign portray the jeans as “worker” jeans. Average-looking beautiful people (instead of beautiful, beautiful people) are featured in sepia-toned, 1930s-inspired photographs. The images evoke the waning sun of summer and the “back to work” spirit of “back to school.”

What’s strikingly different from the Gap campaign is the focus on “work.” “We are all workers” is an interesting take on this back-to-school time. The ritual of beginning a job often involves getting equipment or tools. The jeans are not positioned as “aspirational,” or something that will make you look beautiful. Instead, they’re positioned as necessary to “get the job done.”

The images are evocative of the iconic Depression-era photos of “Okies” working in California:

The brand has even played up the “workers” aspect on its Web site: http://explore.levi.com/news/we-are-all-workers/ with YouTube interviews with “workers” of the depressed town Braddock, PA.

What is the message of this campaign:

1.        People are hurting economically
2.        Jeans are for working in
3.        There is redemption hidden inside the lessons of hard economic times

Analysis: Ritual Still Needs Substance

These contrasts are stark. The Gap chose to rely on “features” (i.e., fit) and “aspirational” imagery. But Levi’s focused on the timing on the campaign, making it far more interesting and nuanced.

I personally am very intrigued by Levi’s campaign. The interviews in the videos are earnest, without guile and a little sad. But I find that more comforting than the pleasant fiction of the Gap campaign. In fact, I find the image of yet another 6’ blonde in a pair of jeans a little enraging.

If brands were to be honest, they would acknowledge these hard economic times. Notably, however, Levi’s stops short of acknowledging where its jeans are made. As a company, they must bear some responsibility for the end of work in the US: their jeans are made in China and Mexico. These jeans are not made by American workers, even those in Braddock, PA. And clearly that town could use a few jobs.

I loved it when I first saw it. Brandtags.net invites users to look at a logo and type in the first thing that enters their minds. I found it fascinating — until I realized it’s yet another example of poor research perpetuating negative stereotypes of women.

Type in “Oprah” and see what happens. The top three most entered words? Fat. Black. Bitch. Yes, that’s right, Oprah, the maven of women’s media landscape is nothing more than a fat black bitch. How valid a representation of Oprah is this?

Oprah’s media universe is worth a fortune. She earned $260 million in 2007 and is worth $2.5 billion. Her daily talk show alone gets 7.3 million viewers (that’s compared to 2.9 million viewers for Grey’s Anatomy).

So I got to thinking. How is Brand Tags so wrong? So nasty? So racist? (Type in NBA or Citibank and you’ll see what I mean). Researchers are Harvard have shown how stereotypes work. We know that people rely on implicit stereotypes when they make snap judgments. This is the downside of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

We live is a complex social world. We try to make sense out of it by looking for patterns. Theorists Berger and Luckman call these “typifications” or roles that we take for granted. Typifications help us because they allow us to know what to do in social situations without really thinking about it, or, as Berger and Luckman explain it, they alleviate us from making “all those decisions.”

All Brand Tags really does is tell us what those typifications are for the people who visit their site. Who is visiting their site? We don’t really know. The first rule of sampling is to ask yourself, are the people who participate systematically different from the people who don’t?

People who participate in Brand Tags are obviously Web savvy. Someone forwarded them a link and they filled it out. Perhaps they read business media because Brand Tags has gotten some press. They have the time to enter text. They are also anonymous.

Is this what you would consider a “representative sample”?

Brand Tags has promise (I myself have used it to gain insight about a few things). But it mostly has the worst of our stereotypes. Is that insight? Perhaps. But it’s not insight about Oprah — it tells us a lot about the people who are talking ABOUT Oprah.

Brands have few opportunities to come alive, and the Web is one of those opportunities. Make sure the brand gives off the right impression. Researchers have found that a company’s Web site particularly shapes how a person views that company’s innovation and concern for its customers. In other words, the Web site is even more important in “giving off” the right impression.

Brands introduce themselves to people much in the same way that people introduce themselves to people. And just like for humans, brands often “give off” more information than they explicitly mean to provide. This is especially true for Web sites: the brand online is the same as a “self,” and must manage its impression just as people do.

We have all experienced this: you meet someone and develop an immediate sense of what they’re about. You have figured out that this person works in, say, finance, and he has money and children and likes nautical sports. You also find him curt, arrogant and a bit full of himself. Is it something he said specifically? No, not specifically. He did snap at the waitress. And he did mention something about a regatta. He also casually tossed his credit card down when the bill came, rudely brushing aside protestations from the most senior person at the table.

One of my favourite theorists, Erving Goffman, tells us there is an impression you GIVE, and then there is the impression you GIVE OFF. “Selves,” as Goffman puts it, engage in impression management using subtle symbolic signals.

Designers often implicitly think of their particular product — whether it be a kitchen product or a print ad — as something that “gives off” an impression. But this is much more important for immersive experiences like Web sites. A company’s Web site in particular is an immersive experience that gives off countless symbolic cues.

Some observers call this phenomenon “cross channel synchronicity,” or simply just “user experience.” The Web site is key to “giving off” the right impression for a company and its brand because it is the living embodiment of that company.

How should graphic and interaction designers create their products? Keep in mind the following:

• The brand is a “self” on the Web. This is a great opportunity but designers also run the risk of “giving off” the wrong impression immediately through interactions that suggest a stand-offish, arrogant, or selfish brand.
• Brand-critical interactions must be done right: I have had many clients who appear unconcerned about appear small interaction problems of their Web site. But if these interactions revolve around mission-critical symbols of your business, make sure they’re done right. If your brand identity if “fun,” ensure that interactions are full of fun, not hard work. If your brand identity is “trustworthy,” over-communicate that message in interactions.
• Provide the expected “props”: In an earlier post, I showed how individuals use symbolic cues, or “props” to manage impressions. Doctors use stethoscopes, for example, despite the fact that fewer than 40% of them know how to use them properly, mostly because patients EXPECT them to carry them. Web site designers should remember what users expect in terms of “props.” Does your brand really need AJAX? Are visitors surprised to find their is no flash element? Are visitors expecting form fields to have in-line editing?