The brands that won in marketing in 2024 were masters of showmanship.
Fashion’s love affair with sports has continued, as evidenced most obviously by the Olympic Games. Many brands benefited, including official sponsor LVMH, which was able to display its logos everywhere, from the medal trays to a dance sequence during the opening ceremony.
Beyond sports, pop culture has provided many resources for brands. Charli XCXThe ‘Brat’ album has sparked renewed interest, with retailers highlighting green items in their ranges, while brands like Acne Studios, Converse and H&M – which hosted a series of concerts led by Charli – have chosen the musician as ambassador. Brands from mall mainstay Gap to shoe brand Aldo have launched collections in honor of the “Wicked” film in November, while other films, such as “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, have seen brands from discount retailer Primark to beauty players Nyx and Lush also create themed collections.
Social media has also provided endless opportunities for brands to engage in more niche cultural moments, leveraging humor to offer a bit of escapist fun. Old Navy, for example, partnered with comedy designer Delaney Rowe, who wore the brand’s clothing in one of his TikTok videos, while Coach dressed comedians Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone for their podcast tour “Ride.”
In a world with short attention spans, where shoppers are likely to turn away or skip past traditional ads, 2024 has proven that entertainment – whether it’s hanging on for a moment more important or create your own – can be the best choice for brands to connect with consumers.
“If you want to break through…you have to think about entertainment,” said Kenny Mitchell, chief marketing officer of Levi’s, which recently launched a capsule collection in honor of the Timothée Chalamet-directed Bob Dylan biopic. “A complete stranger.” “You have to think about where you could show up, but it still helps tell your brand story.” »
But measuring the results of these marketing efforts remains a challenge for brands as they expand beyond the realm of trackable social media posts due to the longer-term ROI of certain types of activations. Looking ahead to 2025, brands will continue to iterate to find the best way to measure their culture-centric brand building efforts.
“People want to be entertained. It’s actually a way to maintain the relationship,” said Ana Andjelic, brand consultant. “If you keep people engaged with your content, even if they don’t buy your products for a minute, that’s your strategy.”
Cultural crossover
There was no shortage of cultural events this year, but brands still focused on the biggest moments, like the Olympics or “Wicked.”
But with so many brands jumping into these big-ticket events — likely in hopes of achieving the most impact — it was difficult to truly own a moment. LVMH was joined by a chorus of other high-profile brands, like Ralph Lauren and Nike, at the Olympics. And after the Games ended, more brands capitalized on the Olympic shine by selecting high-profile athletes: South Korean viral shooter Kim Ye-ji, for example, landed a Balenciaga campaign in December.
Brands have the opportunity to pivot to smaller events, like a cult TV show or an artist with a popular album, even if it doesn’t top the charts. Women’s clothing brand Free People has teamed up with the hit Hulu series “Tell me lies” on a capsule collection. Brands should also look at what’s growing in popularity: Glossier, for example, has taken advantage of growing interest in the WNBA, expanding its sponsorship of the league.
And of course, social media stars also provide an easy way to embed viral content. Marc Jacobs teamed up with designer Nara Smith, known for her elaborate recipe videos, on a video in which she “made” one of the brand’s iconic tote bags “from scratch.”
“In previous years, designers were used as product models or spokespersons for the brand message. But increasingly, people are gravitating towards the specific style of a specific creator,” said Louise Yems, director of strategy at creative agency The Digital Fairy. “That juxtaposition and novelty is what gets people’s attention in the first place.”
A sure way to stand out is to create your own moments. While this involves some risk (you’re not getting attached to a pre-tested asset), it can offer big gains.
Elf Cosmetics, for example, hasn’t been afraid to experiment with its marketing, sharing unexpected and humorous content that spans a multitude of cultural spheres, from a Super Bowl commercial featuring Judge Judy and the cast of everyone’s favorite movie. Netflix, “Suits”, up to a true short film. -a police parody shown in AMC theaters, to a partnership with water label Liquid Death for a heavy metal-inspired campaign. This strategy has allowed it to become the number one mass beauty brand in the United States in terms of units, with 23 consecutive quarters of net sales growth and market share gains.
Staying agile is key. “Our strategy is never set in stone,” said Elf brand director Laurie Lam. “We just allow ourselves to stay in this constant state of daring, of challenging each other, of pushing the idea further to the point where we become a little uncomfortable, and that’s when- there that, for us, it becomes something that we need to put out there.
That doesn’t necessarily mean jumping on every trend that pops up, which Chemmie Squier, creative director of The Digital Fairy, says can be a “race to the bottom,” cluttering shoppers’ inboxes or feeds with similar messages .
Instead, brands should use microtrends as a “litmus test for culture” and think about what they “really tell me about culture right now,” Yems said.
Monetizing cultural engagement
While entertaining consumers has been a key form of branding and community building this year, the ability to monetize and track the impact of that content is critical, Andjelic said.
This can be achieved by assigning “hard KPIs,” like in-store and website traffic and conversion, to cultural products to better understand which parts of a brand’s creative universe are doing the hard work . That said, some activations take longer to be profitable, which makes them more difficult to track but remain essential to strengthening the cultural weight of a brand.
Ideally, the two efforts work in tandem. Affordable cashmere brand Quince, which relies heavily on paid social media advertising, is seeking more opportunities to grow its brand. It integrated user-generated content from the creators it offered in its ads to the performance, and also hosted more events. For a recent holiday dinner in New York, the company partnered with influencer Chrissy Rutherford.
“We’re starting to realize that if we only do performance marketing, we’ll almost become an AI brand that doesn’t have a real heart and soul,” said Quince brand manager Antonieta Moreland.
There are, however, results to be sought. For activations like Christmas dinner, looking at the performance of the content shared by participants is an indicator, but “in the sense of a real ROI, an immediate ROI, we know that it will need more of these things in combination with your daily life. , an evergreen performance marketing engine to slowly build the brand,” Moreland said.
Figuring out how to create larger-scale activations that can be shared and have a broader impact is critical, but the brand is taking “baby steps” to be able to do this effectively.
For Andjelic, “tightly connecting marketing and merchandising, product design and branding” can enable brands to create a comprehensive suite of interconnected activities that play together to drive immediate and long-term results.