3 Brands – Experiment with the Largest – Adapt Winning Elements for the Other Two
Today I’m taking a look into Tapestry Inc’s recent branding and product campaigns. Tapestry is a holding company for 3 luxury fashion brands – Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman. When it comes to media spend, it looks like Coach receives the majority of ad dollars and has the largest overall social following. The Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman brands may receive a smaller portion of ad spend but Tapestry is aggressively growing these brands on Facebook and Instagram. They experiment with the Coach Campaign and then transfer over and adapt the successful activations to the Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman Campaigns.
Influencer Marketing
In the past 2 years, Coach has heavily relied on influencer marketing. Coach has created the “Coach Fam”, a group of diverse celebrities and influencers to serve as ambassadors for their brand. These ambassadors include actors, actresses, models, musicians, and comedians.
Recent brand ambassadors include:
- Michael B. Jordan – actor
- Kiko Mizuhara – model
- Yara Shahidi -actress
- Jemima Kirke – actress
- Lolo Zouai – musician
- Miles Heizer – actor
- Liu Wen – model
- Camilla Morrone – model
- Spike and Tonya Lee – film directors and producers
- Ben Sinclair – actor
- Bob the Drag Queen – entertainer/comedian
- Fernanda Ly – model
- Kate Moss – model
- Megan thee Stallion – musician
Coach will use its influencer partners for a few cornerstone ‘feature’ ads and create many behind the scenes pieces of content like podcasts, outtakes, and bloopers to complement the feature. They’ll put paid media spend toward the cornerstone clips and let fans and customers engage with most of the extra content organically. Coach also uses another class of ads that only feature products.
What You Can Borrow From Tapestry’s Strategy
1 – Recruit influencers that overlap your brand’s niches
Your product most likely fits multiple niches. Sometimes you’ll find an unexpected segment over perform. One of Tapestry’s most successful youtube videos is Coach’s Michael B Jordan Capsule Collection featuring Naruto. The ad, which is just over 1 minute long, featurs Jordan walking through an urban Japanese alley where he interacts with two people that perform actions from the Naruto universe. He’s then transported to a bamboo forest.
The campaign targets the segment of people that are MBJ fans, Naruto fans, and luxury brand shoppers. This isn’t necessarily the first target audience you might think of when you think of Coach, but, this combination of creative, influencer, and nostalgia tie in appears to have resonated very well. It’s one of the brands most organically popular recent videos.
2 – Use questions to guide behind the scenes content
Questions are a great way to get people talking. They break the ice and the open ended nature of questions makes things feel less scripted. In the Wonder For All campaign, Coach asked its brand ambassadors holiday themed questions like:
- What’s your favorite holiday tradition?
- What’s your favorite holiday treat?
- What’s your favorite holiday movie?
3 – Have a post event strategy for seasonal campaigns
Coach promoted its Wonder For All campaign from early November until Christmas day. On the 26th of December, it launched a sale and sale ads to move unsold inventory. These ads focused heavily on building awareness of a year end sale where items were discounted up to 50-70%. The same post Christmas strategy was used by the other Tapestry brands, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman.
4 – Use a multi-tiered advertising approach
The key here is to not only rely on influencers. You can amplify influencer content with paid media. Retargeting, or showing product ads to people that have already seen your cornerstone (main feature) content, will help nudge sales after influencers build awareness for your campaign.
But I don’t have access to influencers …
You can try these techniques even if your brand isn’t ready to use influencers for marketing campaigns. As a business owner you can act as an influencer for your own brand. You can easily adapt these tips to feature yourself in media for your brand.
- Instead of recruiting a diverse set of influencers you can create a diverse set of messages and creative for your niches.
- You can draft topical questions, share your answer, and then poll your audience on those same questions on Facebook or Twitter.
Closing
Thanks for reading, I hope these 4 marketing strategies help you with your marketing campaigns. If you’d like help finding influencers or managing paid media and digital ads feel free to reach out on my services page. Best of luck out there.