Gapキャンペーンの成功
This is Reina Moro's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone. Welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reina Moro, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York, Tokyo, and Singapore.
Today's guest is Ollie Walsh, the founder and CEO of Invisible Dynamics,
a brand transformation agency based in LA. I met Ollie about a year ago through a mutual client
that we were just starting to work with back in 2024. And that client is a luxury fashion brand,
Theory. And his company and my company were brought in by the CEO of Theory to help them
transform and elevate their brand to the next level. And even though we have similar capabilities
and certain things that we do and certain things that all this company does overlaps,
but we have different domains of expertise and we work as partners for this shared client.
So this was a great opportunity for me to, even though I have been seeing him for the past year
quite frequently, I didn't get to know him on a personal level. So this was a great chance for me
to get to know him. But also it turns out that one of the campaigns that he's led,
Gap's Bedding Denim. And many of you who may be in or close to the marketing industry
have undoubtedly heard about this campaign this summer or this fall. And it's a campaign from Gap
that starred Cat's Eye and it's been going crazy and extremely viral around the world. And
it's rare that a campaign from a brand goes this viral. So I took this opportunity to
have a conversation with Ollie about the behind the scenes of this campaign. So part one of my
conversation with Ollie is about one of the recent campaigns that he led for Gap, Bedding
Denim. It's behind the scenes story. So let's get started. Ollie, good to see you. So nice to see
you. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So where are you joining this recording from? So I am sitting
in Invisible Dynamics' Los Angeles headquarters at the moment on this lovely, sunny, perpetually
sunny day in the fall. Yeah. Just for the sake of the audience, you and I have known each other not
that long, maybe for the past year or so. We met through a shared client, which is, by the way,
public knowledge. So it's a theory. And it's a luxury fashion brand based in New York. And we've
been close collaborators for the past year or so. And I started to get to know you
on a professional level and on a personal level, and just wanted to use this opportunity to both
understand what you do professionally, but also some more recent work that's taken the
internet by storm. So I'll get into the nitty-gritty of that later in the conversation. But some
people may have heard of you and or your agency, Invisible Dynamics. But just by way of introduction,
if you can give a quick introduction about yourself and about your agency, that'd be great.
Absolutely. Well, no, it's been a great pleasure collaborating with you these past 12 months.
I feel like we've had a lot of fun, made a lot of impact, and just getting started.
But I think it's so nice when you meet somebody like yourself, where you have such a shared
language of brand building and understanding the elements that it takes in order to achieve that.
So Invisible Dynamics is my company. I'm the founder, CEO, and we call ourselves a brand
transformation group. From the top level, we really try to achieve this mission of being
one of the most important creative companies in the world. And we look to creative companies
like A24 and WME and the sort of elk of businesses which have a broad creative impact across culture
and say, okay, what is the way in which we can do the same? And so we craft programs and
we create products, which really help to elevate the world's retail landscape. And we do that
really in two ways. We help existing brands be more relevant in culture, improve the customer
experience across everything that they offer from fundamentally why they deserve to exist,
the products that they sell, the environments and digital and physical where they sell them,
and of course, the way in which they communicate and captivate culture in order for customers to
desire them more and feel more love from them and therefore be more commercially successful.
And then we internally develop products and technologies ourselves, which help that ecosystem
of consumer brand building in a myriad of different ways.
Yeah, let's start at a high level. And a couple of words that you mentioned that I
like to go deeper in. So it's two words, but I guess one phrase, which is cultural relevance.
And that's something that, you know, you and I, we've talked about with our shared client.
And I'm sure that's a topic of conversation that comes up quite a bit with the likes of GAP and
other clients that you work with. At the same time, I think culture, both the word culture and relevance
are somewhat broad and can be a little bit abstract in some ways. So how do you, in your
way of thinking about cultural relevance for brands, how do you think about
cultural relevance and how do you define it? Good question. Really, our goal is to help
our partners really participate in culture and not be spectators, but be contributors to
actually setting the cultural agenda. We're always really thinking around how can
their brand, with everything that makes it unique, really participate in three ways.
文化とブランドの参加
So how can they recognize the conversations that are happening in culture that are
important, that matter, and are the right ones for them to participate with? What are the moments
that are happening that really move people and connect to people which they have a license to
participate in? And then of course, what are the symbols that signal connection and how can they be
a part of that ecosystem as well? So we're really thinking around that connective tissue between
what a brand is, where in culture that they can play authentically, because as you say, culture is
everything. It's so broad, it's so overwhelming, so fast. What's the definition of culture to you?
And how do you connect with it in a way which is additive versus performative?
Yeah, in terms of participation in culture, I think in the old days, like let's say
when we were teenagers, 20, 30 plus years ago, culture as it was defined and driven by, say,
mass media was a little bit more singular in that if there was one famous person for a brand, let's
say a classic example would be somebody like Michael Jordan for Nike. He was such an iconic,
visible character for the brand that gave license for Nike to be part of culture.
Now, 30 years fast forward, it's so much more, culture is so much more diverse and so much more
niche than it used to be. And before we get to, we're getting to say gap that I want to talk
about a little bit later. Give me some examples of brands that you think either you have helped
directly or some brands that you have observed that you think have successfully participated in
culture and then therefore became culturally relevant. I think it's a great time to be in
the business of brand building if you have a certain type of skill sets. And I think
that's having obviously a sort of creative mindset, which you know a lot about and talk about
is the multitude of culture now represents a ton of opportunities to play in lots of
different ways, which I don't think represented itself when culture was more singular. You talk
about Jordan and Nike, what that meant was it really precluded long tail of brands from playing
it because it was singular. You had to have the budget in order to work with the talent to cut
through on the media channels. Whereas now, there's so much more opportunity for individuals
who own brands or work with brands to be able to use the current platforms to get our attention
from the small devices in our pocket, which is where culture is set these days. So, culture used
to happen at these big moments, the Superbowl and the Wimbledon final or whatever events you want to
be sporting or otherwise. Whereas now, it still happens there but it's so much more fragmented,
really culture happens day to day, minute by minute, out on the myriad of social platforms
that matter. So, I think you see there's so many brands doing a great job of that and you see it
across the spectrum, across categories in lots of different ways because they're tapping into
different cultures of different kinds. I mean, if you look at the fashion ecosystem, which you and I
know very well, everyone can reference all day, every day at the moment, the Giacomo.
I think if you look at what they've tapped into, they've managed to harness,
you talk about sentiment and emotions and emotive connection, they've managed to
harness joy in a way which few brands do. Joy is obviously such a powerful emotion,
it's such an emotion and it's a really hard emotion to elicit because especially to do it
in a way which has taste and high cultural perspective. They've managed that
incredibly well and consistently do it and again, a lot of what's the success around sort of
cultural brands is, can you do it consistently? It's easy to come up with a great idea and do it
once. I wouldn't say it's easy, it's possible to come up with a consistent stream of great ideas
which reinforce who you are and where you play and connect with an audience in that way. I think
it's really impressive. So, they take a certain cultural aspect. I think if you look at somebody
like, my mind goes to, it's more of a person but Jonathan Anderson and how he
in a similar way at Loewe and now at Dior, he sort of understands symbolism,
he understands what conversations are happening, he understands how to tap into and subset new cultural
moments in order to spark dialogue and then I think if you, on another end of the spectrum,
you look at what Stone Island are doing, they are sort of playing more into
their codes and history and provenance and sort of innovative aspect of what they're doing
but doing it in a way which really intersects with different versions of design culture and music
culture and so on and so forth. So, those are some examples in the fashion world where at the
sort of top end, we're going to talk more in this conversation around Gap and more mass cultural
movement and the work that we've done with Gap and with Nike and Theory and
many others sort of taps into a broader consumer base. You sort of have to think
about culture in a slightly different way. So, I think those are some good examples and then
you sort of look at the edges, I think, look at say Palace and how Palace has managed to
take a skate culture which is a very particular niche demographic and then overlay that into
more of a street culture which is broader but then even to evolve it further as
Gapの文化的再生の旅
skate and street have somewhat of a fashion, they've managed to stay at the forefront and
you look at their collaboration with Nike right now as an example of the ability for them to
translate a sort of cultural opinion into a much more broader mass engagement.
Yeah. Any of these brands that you just mentioned, Jack Moo, Jennifer Anderson,
Stone Island, are you involved in any of these or did you just cite these as examples that you
noticed?
Was I?
Got it, got it.
To give credit to other...
Yeah. Why don't we get actually into Gap and before we talk specifically about
Berlin Denim because you've been working with Gap for multiple years now, for about three years,
I think, pretty deeply since the appointment of the new CEO who came from Mattel, right?
And yeah, so if you can give us a bit of a peek behind the scenes in terms of how you got involved
and what it is that you've done because, you know, Berlin Denim is the most recent and probably the
most visible campaign of the recent past that everybody has seen or has talked about but,
you know, you've done so many things over the past few years and, you know, I have the benefit of
being fairly, relatively close to you in terms of what you do and the shared client and all of that.
But yeah, if you can just paint us a picture of what your involvement, what your ask was and,
you know, before the current CEO came, Gap has been one of those brands that
tried to make a comeback for multiple times under a few different types of leadership.
And for the past, say like 10 years or so before the CEO and before you guys got involved,
wasn't necessarily, you know, culturally relevant, right? And there were multiple times that they
tried but walk us through maybe the first CEO to before getting to the Denim campaign that
you think was the foundation for cultural relevance.
Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey with Gap as a partner and it continues and I think there's so
much more ahead. I think we're just getting started but the impact has been quite remarkable.
The journey really started, I think, you know, rewind probably two and a half years before
myself and Invisible Dynamics got involved. The new CEO of Gap, Mark Breitbart,
people confuse Gap and Gap Inc. Dixon is the CEO of Gap Inc. and they own Gap.
Oh, I see, I see. Got it, got it. Yeah.
And that letter. So Mark was appointed as CEO of Gap and really for about two and a half years or
so before I met, he was upgrading the infrastructure for the back of the business. So really thinking
of the important components around the product experience because when you think about and when
we talk about brand transformation, ultimately what we're all working towards is the type of
commercial success that we've seen from Gap in the last few years. You've seen for the first
time in I think 15-20 years, you've seen seven quarters of comp growth and that's accelerating.
You see a huge spike in shareholder value. So in order to drive those results,
cultural relevance and consumer awareness and desire is the largest driver of that.
That doesn't just come from a marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns are obviously important and
some are more successful than others. But really it's about thinking of every single element of
brand and what role does it play and how can it offer a consumer the best possible experience
so that they want to repeat that experience time and again and lead to the commercial outcome.
So the heavy lifting is needed when it comes to brand transformation to ensure
that the products and the experiences fundamentally are giving the consumer what
she or he wants. So Mark had very much started that journey of addressing some of the
behind-the-scenes aspects. Him and I met in sort of early spring 23 and we started a front-end.
We'd been connected by a mutual friend and who had seen the impact that I'd had at Aritzia.
I was chief marketing officer of Aritzia and was on the board of directors and for
your listeners who don't know about Aritzia, it's a women's fashion retailer.
It's probably one of the most, if not the most successful contemporary women's accessible luxury
fashion in North America in the last decade or so. It does I think in excess of three
billion revenue and has really been growing very quickly over the last decade.
So I was a part of that journey and that was really the chapter for Invisible Dynamics.
A lot of people were looking at Aritzia and seeing success and thinking about how they could
have their own success story. So hence, I was connected with Mark and at Invisible Dynamics,
as I said, we have a range of programs and platforms and technology tools that we utilize
in order to think about 360 brand health and stand the state of a brand as it exists at the
moment. We have a piece of proprietary technology called the Invisible Index, which as you're
familiar with has over 200 points and uses both call and quant in order to give a brand health
score across a range of brand pillars and the ability to evaluate a brand, the line upon where
a brand is, do that objectively, do it in alignment with key stakeholders in order to then be able to
identify how you improve those scores in order to improve the outcomes is a very powerful approach,
which we have applied many times across many brands of all sizes to huge success. So that
Gapのブランド変革の旅
was really the logic of the conversation that we had with Mark. And so the first phase of our
relationship was doing something that we do at Invisible Dynamics that I feel is quite unique,
which is the definition and visualization of a brand North Star. Essentially with you, the CEO
or CMO or chair or whoever it may be. And we say, we're going to show you what your brand
looks like in three years time. Yeah. Yeah. Really touch point. And we're not only going
to show you, we're going to articulate then what you need to do in order to get there
and articulate the commercial impact that that's going to have on your business and how it's going
to accelerate disproportionately your commercial success. So we did that with Mark and his team.
And Richard was on the board of directors. And during that process, we met and he obviously is
an incredible brand builder. And Mattel in revitalizing the Barbie brand was exactly the
kind of leadership that Gap Inc as a folio needed. And when we found out that he'd been appointed
as CEO of Gap Inc, that was an incredibly exciting moment because at a point collectively,
us in partnership with Gap, where we had clarity of the brand North Star,
and plotting the journey of implementation to be able to transform the elements across identity,
across product branding, across retail, across e-commerce, across app, across
marketing, communications, collaboration, social, that we wanted to do. And that journey
began. And part of the foundational vision, we defined the strategic foundations and some of the
tools that we use. I obviously won't talk about the specifics of the details that pertain to
that brand or any brand. We have something which we call a brand formula, which is a very
powerful filter, which allows an organization and all of its leaders to be able to apply a
consistent filter across their area of business in a way which allows everyone to move towards
a shared goal whilst doing what they do day in day out. And if you look at the
evolution of the Gap brand in the past two and a half years, since we had set that foundation,
we executed against that plan. And the sort of similarities that you can see probably most
consistently across the campaign work that Invisible Dynamics has done, where Tyler and
Jungle, whether it be with Troye Sivan, whether it be Parker Posey, whether it be Cat's Eye,
whether it be Sienna Spiro and the holiday campaign that launched yesterday, you see
a consistency of components, which might be visible in a certain degree to the external world.
But then being a brand expert that you are, when you start to break it down in a much more critically
analytical way, you can start to see the realities of that structure playing out
in a way which allows for consistency, but also originality and evolution of message,
depending upon the brand and the product message necessary.
Yeah. To the extent that you can talk about and you can share publicly,
if you, I mean, you know, it's difficult to pinpoint like one single thing. Hey,
this is the thing that helped Gap turn a corner or, you know, one activity or one
operational thing. But say like if you had to pick three things that were quite key in Gap's
transformation over the past couple of years, what would you say they were?
I think first and foremost, it is the ability to have clarity of brand or style.
And that is the foundational work that I.D. did in partnership with Gap to start.
Is we collectively helped look at the brand three years in the future.
What does that mean? What are the words? What are the images? What is that brand world in a
cross-channel capacity? So first, the definition of the brand style for sure. The second is the
alignment of key stakeholders. None of the realization of any North Star, any vision happens
without key leadership by it. It's a team to achieve towards that. And it can't be done
by external partners. It has to be done by internal teams. Yeah. Play a critical role in
the implementation and execution of it like we have done. But it needs to be owned and led by
internal teams. And so, you know, the buy-in and consistency and consistent commitment of
leadership is the second thing. And then connected to that is the investment in it.
And it's all investment. And Mark and Richard, to their credit, have understood the vision,
have believed in the vision. And then the teams have then invested in the implementation of that
vision and the belief that it's going to translate into the commercial outcomes that we all wanted.
And I think that's exactly what's happened. Yeah. How would you say products played a role
in the transformation of Gap? And, you know, in around the same time timeline,
Zac Posen, I think, was hired also as the chief designer maybe two or three, two and a half years
ago, I think. Yeah. A year and a half ago. A little bit more recent. Yeah. And how would you say that,
what kind of impact has it had? Product is,
you know, if not the then joint top of the most important aspects of what any consumer
business is doing, is the product is key. Of course, brand is king and brand is everything,
but product is king. And so, product and everything associated with it and how you
break it down in terms of the qualitative aspects of it, in terms of the stylistic aspect of it,
Gapの変革とコラボレーション
in terms of the stylistic aspect of it, in terms of the assortment, and is it meeting what the
market needs are in terms of value proposition? And, you know, of course, then how it's being
presented and merchandised is absolutely key and critical and crucial. As I mentioned,
Mark has been working on a lot of the fundamentals behind the scenes for a number of years in order
to really improve and elevate the quality of the product that Gap had been creating.
One of the things that has, I think, accelerated the awareness of Gap's product to the world has
been a collaboration strategy, which we've been a part of. And, you know, collaborations with
Doan and Colt Geyer and Palace and Baze and so many others in between have really
allowed the whole new audiences to discover Gap today. And in discovering the excitement around
those collaborations also discover improved quality of the Core Collection. So, that's been
a really powerful role, whilst the consistent improvements across the Core Collection have
happened. And I think the same has happened with Zach. Zach's obviously an incredible designer.
He's very product-minded. His role as, you know, Executive Creative Director across the portfolio
of Gap in France has let the portfolio benefit from his creative vision in a whole myriad of
different ways. So, he's had impact across the portfolio. As it pertains to Gap itself, he's
really had an outsized impact on Gap Studio, which is a collection which is a more elevated capsule
collection that launches on numerous occasions a year. And through that has really, you know,
in the connections with talent and celebrity and red carpet, has really put Gap into a whole other
part of the cultural conversation in a really qualitative and design-forward way too, which has a
halo impact across the Core Business as well. Yeah. On that note, how does marketing work with
Zach and or the product team and the marketing team? You know, is it Zach and his team dreaming
up, hey, you know, here's a collection for the next, you know, for winter season and then presenting
to the marketing team or how does that work? Yeah, I don't want to overshare. So, you know,
especially of areas that are not my particular purview, but it's obviously a very close
collaborative effort between product and marketing and all aspects of the business really.
So, and then, of course, depending upon the initiative and depending upon the impetus,
it sort of depends upon where the lead might come from. But, you know, everything that we think of
is rooted in product. Yeah. When you look at the campaigns that we've done, you look at,
you know, really the sort of first big piece of fashion entertainment that we reintroduced being
linen moves, you know, that was a story about linen and movement told through
Tyler and just before she won her Grammy and the Jungle dance crew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And
but it was a linen story. If you look at Troye Sivan and Get Loose, that was a story about loose
denim, baggy denim. Yeah. If you look at the cat's eye better in denim, again, that's a story
about denim. So yeah, individuality that denim represents, but also the unity that it brings
as a product category. Yeah. In terms of the connection between the product lineup or the
key product and the marketing story. And when I started to notice and not just me, but the
industry started to notice what Gap was doing, you know, perhaps two years ago when you were starting
to the work that you were doing started to be seen out in the market. And I mean this with
compliment. It reminded me of old Gap in a good way, like he felt like Gap again. And, you know,
I'm old enough to have seen, I think it was like around 2000, like the khaki pants campaign that
was so iconic of that time. And obviously, you know, it's a completely different generation
and different era. But in a good way, the good old feel of the Gap is back. It seems like it's back.
Was that an intentional thing or did it just happen sort of naturally?
No, that was highly intentional. I mean, I think we take an incredibly thoughtful
approach to every aspect of brand transformation. And so everything that you're seeing and feeling
is as a result of that intentionality. And we really believe that the details matter greatly.
And when you're working with any brand, it's really important to
pay respect to the origin of that brand and the origin of what makes that brand successful and
resonate. And of course, that starting point is then different depending upon the heritage of
the brand and what they've been doing and how well it's resonated. Gap was the pioneer of fashion
entertainment. So much of what that they did was a real celebration of humanity, was a real
pioneer of culture, trade series that they used to do to the cinematography of their dance ads,
mashup of musicality and styles, and really the incorporation of it all. And, you know,
through this sort of platform of most loved essentials. So they had this incredible connection.
Obviously, America is still the pioneer of culture for the world. American culture has a disproportionate
impact on global culture. You can argue that it had a greater impact, as you were saying years ago,
when things were more singular. Coming up, I think now what's really exciting is that you see
other cultural forces from other geographies really having disproportionate impact, which I
Gapの文化的役割の再定義
think is super exciting. But American culture is always going to have a very powerful role to play
in the world. And there are very few brands who have the authority to take an opinion around that.
I mean, you can really count them on one hand. It's Gap, it's Nike, it's Apple, it's,
I mean, you could argue it's Ford, it's, you know, you start to sort of run out a little bit, Coca-Cola.
In terms of the sort of great American brands who then really start to set culture,
there's not that many of them. For us, it was about making sure that the role that Gap
played was very true to where its history and heritage was, but it had to be modernized. You
can't just look backwards. You can't play from the archives, you can't repeat. And I think a lot of
people, when they're thinking around what was successful in the past, they're too literal
in terms of the replication of that. And you're too literal, and you don't apply enough creativity
you don't have enough of a focus on where culture is right now and how it's going. And
then if you don't have the conviction to be able to make bets on where culture is going,
and to be able to show up in culture as it moves there, then you're not going to have the
success that you want. And I think that we've anticipated an idea, we do this not just for Gap,
we talk about collaboration with theory, and you look at the theories level of
aspirational, luxury, contemporary fashion, it speaks to a different audience, it's centric
from New York, and they are the essence of New York. But they are more of a high cultural
perspective in terms of their associations, with design and with craft and with architecture,
and more design centric aspects of culture. So when we cast Britt Lauer as the face of
the Fall campaign, which launched two weeks ahead of her winning an Emmy for Severance,
that was an example of us thinking around where culture is moving, understanding that she's played
a disproportionate role in culture, thanks to Severance, which has been one of the most
successful TV franchises of recent, and the creativity and the design of that visual that
they've built, really having nice alignment, and then seeing her as a rising star, associating
us with them, because it's authentic, because she's from New York, because everything feels right.
And of course, she happens to look incredible in Theory's clothing. And just before the wider
world recognizes her talents is a good example of, at i-D, what we try to think about. We're trying
to think about where the ball is going to land, and then making sure that our partners are positioned
in exactly the right place to take advantage of that. Yeah. To get a bit more specific into the
キャンペーンの反響
Denim, the Bettering Denim campaign, and we can talk about, you know, how we started all of that,
and I'm sure there are a lot of things that you can't quite talk about. But what I'd love to know
is, you know, it's gotten really, really incredible reactions from so many different corners of the
industry and in culture. And it's not often today that we see an activity or campaign from a consumer
brand that has that kind of visibility, because of the fragmentation that you talked about.
The good news with fragmentation is that there are so many more opportunities for big and small
brands to take a part in culture. But at the same time, it's become difficult to break out of that
noise just because there's so much noise. So the question that came to my mind was, of course,
you want your work, you want your campaign to be successful and to be seen by as many
people as possible. But were there any surprising reactions or surprising
outcome of that campaign activity?
Absolutely. I think you do the best work that you can do, and you are very thoughtful about
every element of the work, and you partner to put it out into the world with the most impact,
and then you see what the reaction is. And worst case, you know, you've done a really good job,
the creative is excellent, the narrative is what the world needs, the cultural associations and
finesse are spot on. And it resonates and has a nice reaction. The best case is what happened
with Cat's Eye, which is that you ride a cultural wave of art, which was multidimensional, which
takes the world by storm. And it's, I suppose, like any virality is you can
ask things for virality, but you can't predict it. And I think that's what happened
with Cat's Eye. I also think it's much easier to be contentious and to spark
awareness and discussion around topics that people talk about, but don't necessarily
drive affinity than it is to think about a positive message and putting a positive
message out into the world, which not only sparked dialogue, but also drives affinity.
Yeah, I think that we benefited from the Sidney Sweeney dialogue. Yeah, ahead of time. So that
was a moment where it was an example where the world had picked up on the message of Sidney
Sweeney and the American Eagle campaign in a way which was driving awareness, but it wasn't
universally positive sentiment. It was contentious. And then our timing
was fortuitous, and it came after that. And of course, it wasn't a reaction ad.
I mean, just based on the timing, you couldn't have planned it that way.
No, exactly. Yeah, you're right. But what it did is it put out a positive message into the world
Gapのメッセージと成功
with an incredible point of view. And it put out a message of global confidence, of unity,
of individualism, but also collectivism. It was this sort of idea of the power that Denim
can bring and the duality of it representing you as an individual, but also being a collective,
told both incredibly beautiful, incredibly talented global K-pop girl group who are just
breaking onto the global scale. And the result of that message, the quality of the storytelling,
the craft from the director, Bethany Vargas, and the choreographer, Robbie Blue, and just the sort
of quality of all of the creative components of it came to strike a chord. And the results
blew everyone out of the water. I mean, over 400 million views in the first year.
It's insane. It's insane. It's insane. It was incredible. It's had over 8 billion total
impressions. And that keeps climbing. It was the number one trending search on TikTok
the week before. It was absolutely incredible. And I think there's now over 250,000
community-generated replicas of the content. And you saw everyone,
maybe Kimmel and his crew doing it, all the sororities doing it, to ceviche shops in Mexico
City, literally baristas in the Philippines. It was like global take of context.
Was there a worry about, just like in the past year or two, there's a bit of a backlash against
DEI, diversity, that sort of thing. And Cat's Eye being, A, a K-pop group, and B, the cast is
more diverse than other groups, perhaps. And I guess less, perhaps slightly less American than
American Eagle casting of Sigourney Weavy and Sigourney and being cheeky about that aspect of it.
But was it a risk that you and Gap were willing to take or you weren't too concerned about?
I wouldn't say it was a risk. No, I would say it was a confident decision.
But I don't think it was a risk. I think you risk things when you're being contentious,
when you're being against something. We weren't being against anything.
We were just being for unity, we were being for confidence, we were being for individualism,
we were being for collective strength. And all of those traits are inherently American,
but they're also global traits. And so the message wasn't, you shouldn't be this,
or you shouldn't be that, or it was just about celebration of things in a way which
was told in a very confident manner.
So, yeah, it's interesting because at the same time, when you are for something,
there may be, even if you are for something, there may be and there will be people and or
groups that will be against what you are for. But in this case, because it is in general,
in general, the points of view that you were and Gap was trying to convey
were positive in nature. There was nothing negative about it.
Correct. I mean, you will always get people who are looking for a fight. That's not a reason to
not do something. That's part of the world. People will always want to fight. And you shouldn't be
looking for a fight, I don't think, as a brand. I don't think that's the right way. It might get
people talking about you, but I don't think that's the right way to approach it. I don't think most
brands want that. I think most brands want to speak to as large an audience as they possibly
can. I think you have to have an opinion. If you're trying to satisfy everyone with all things
all the time, you're going to achieve nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So on that note, though,
I don't want to push this. I want to double click a little bit into this topic because I think
for a brand to be strong, right? I think a lot of the brands and the brands that you mentioned
earlier, the Apples, the Nikes of the world, those strong brands, they have a very clear
and strong point of view, right? And when you have a strong point of view, you're also
against something. So let's say I'll just take Apple as an example. From the get-go,
the positioning that I think at least I as a brand expert or somebody who works in branding,
I see Apple as a company that is for creativity and that creates tools to enable creativity of
anybody and everybody that touches Apple. The flip side of it is, and then like in the past,
Apple has been pretty explicit in expressing their contentious stance against say like either
Microsoft or PCs or the lack of creativity or more formal and business aspect of the business
side of the world. So I do also think that having a point of view that's a very strong point of
view for say creativity or for freedom or for victory in the case of Nike, right? Which also
creates either a literal enemy or a philosophical enemy. And I mean, having worked with you,
I think you think about this and you talk about this, but so how do you balance between
the positive aspect of a brand like Gap, who is for the most part appears to be positive,
but at the same time, there's always an enemy, so to speak. And doesn't have to be like a brand
that's against you or somebody. You have to consider it in a few different categories. And I
think that there's a humanistic element to what you're fighting for and what you're fighting
against. And then there's a competitive element in terms of who your competition is. Of course,
the commercial success often comes at the expense of someone else. Not always if there's a marketplace,
but often there's competition who are trying to outperform you. I wouldn't advise that
ブランドビルディングの重要性
the right way to succeed is to specifically
make a public enemy of yourself. The Apple, Microsoft ads that you're thinking of and
were they funny? Yes. And do they get people talking? Yes. It was a long time ago. I don't
think you've seen them do that for a while. I don't think really that that is the best form
of communications or brand building in my perspective. And I wouldn't put it up there
amongst the great pieces of communication that Apple has put out there in the world.
Because I think it comes from the wrong place. But I do think that if you identify a humanistic
enemy, then I think that can be a very powerful rallying thing in order to get people
talking. I was talking a bit about, I was at this event, this conference a few
weeks ago, and Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google and Alphabet was speaking. He's
one of the most intelligent people on the planet. And he's very involved right now in the
Ukraine war, personally, and helping to fund certain units and in the support of Ukraine,
in the support of sort of democracy and across the world. And he said something along the lines of
companies mission statements and the analogies with war. And he said, there's nothing as
unifying as a mission statement, which is we're going to win this war. When things are existential,
it really is a unifying force for your team in order to get behind and get in line and work
towards a shared mission. And you talk a lot about brand strategic foundations, and you use words
such as mission and vision and so on and so forth. And often they get a little bit confusing.
If you think about the mission of the war is to win the war against YZ, it's very sort of
crystallizing. And so I do think, though, that having a mission or an enemy, which is clear,
is a powerful rallying organizational element. If your mission is to fight against
a lack of creativity, OK, great. Let's fight against that. That's a humanistic component.
And so I think that those can be very helpful to say, OK, we are fighting against this negative
humanistic element. We are fighting for freedom of expression. We're fighting for whatever it
may be. It can be a very powerful element in brand building. Yeah. So just to summarize that
point, because I think it's a subtle and nuanced point, but I think it's important for the audience
to understand having a point of view. And there's a difference between having a humanistic enemy,
as you put it, versus, say, competitive enemy. Because when you think about a competitive enemy,
it could be an organization, it could be a person, it could be a country, it could be
a group of people. And then naturally, the intention becomes, or the nature of that
competitiveness becomes contentious between the two parties. And one wins, and then the other loses.
Whereas if you have a humanistic enemy that you are either fighting for, or sometimes you might
be fighting against, say, the lack of creativity. But let's say the humanistic cause is
creativity. You're fighting for that cause. And the more people can be part of it, the more people
win. And it's not that the people who aren't part of it are losing, per se. Yeah, I think, yeah.
Whereas the competition will come and go. Once you've won one battle, you'll have another one
competitively. So there'll always be a battle. It may not be the same competition.
But you'll always be competing. But like you say, the cause gives you something to
focus on in the long term. Yeah. No, this framing humanistic
enemy versus competitive enemy, I think is a useful one. And I think, like I said, it's a fine,
sometimes nuanced line. But if you're not clear, it can go wrong very quickly.
Gapの懐かしいキャンペーン
Correct. So that was part one of my conversation with Olly Walsh, the founder and CEO of Invisible
Dynamics, a brand transmission agency. These days, creating anything viral, of course,
with TikTok and Instagram and all those platforms that we have, things can go viral. But the fact
that a piece of content gets seen by so many people around the world, and it was something
crazy like 400 million views across different platforms. I mean, if you can get a medium view,
that's pretty good. If you can get 10 million views, that's great. If you can get 100 million
views, that's amazing. But to get 400 million views is just not something that a brand can
easily achieve. So the three key takeaways from this conversation with Olly was as follows.
Number one, when in doubt, return to your roots. Number two, have a humanistic enemy,
not a contentious enemy. And number three, lead with product story, not brand story.
Key takeaway number one, when in doubt, return to your roots. So anybody above the age of, say, 40,
particularly in the US, would remember the good old days of Gap around year 2000.
And if you remember, one of the most memorable campaigns and TV commercials of that era
came from Gap. And there was this khaki pants TV commercial that Gap did in which a group of
female and male dancers were dancing to this music, and just purely expressing joy wearing
these khaki pants. And with simple creative filming technique that became quite iconic
of that time. And I'm old enough to I think I was a college student around that time.
And it was a campaign that was so visible and so talked about, not just among young people,
Gapのブランド再生
but across different generations and in so many different markets. And since then,
for the past, say, 15 years or so, to be completely honest, and I think Gap would admit
this as well, they fell off of a lot of people's radar. And it was not part of the cultural
conversation for a long time. The leadership team of Gap has rotated a few times in the past decade,
trying to turn the brand around without that much success. But it's really within the past
three years or so, Gap's been intentionally and strategically returning to its roots,
and how the brand used to feel by featuring the products prominently, and really highlighting
what made Gap in the first place, and highlighting and elevating it. And that approach,
even though it is, to some extent, an obvious approach, and a lot of companies try to do,
but when things are not going well, one of the first things that you should think about
is how can you return to what made that company, that brand successful, and reinterpret it,
and then reintroduce it to the world in a relevant way for the current time that we live in.
So when in doubt, return to your roots. It's something that I think is easy to forget,
but when done right, when interpreted in a relevant way for the modern world,
it can be a really, really powerful approach. Key takeaway number two, have a humanistic enemy,
not a contentious enemy. This was one of the topics that came up in my conversation with Ollie,
and it's a common thing for us marketers and brand builders to talk about what the enemy is,
what does the brand stand for, and what is the enemy that the brand is fighting against.
But the thing that Ollie said that resonated with me, and I think it's something that doesn't
get talked about enough, is that yes, it is important to have an enemy or what you are
fighting against, but you do have to be mindful of making that enemy or the relationship with that
enemy a contentious one, and you don't want to necessarily make an enemy out of other people
or other brands or other organizations or other groups of people. But instead,
we should think about your enemy in a humanistic way, meaning that, hey, we are against, say,
the lack of creativity. We are against racism. Those are the things that could be your humanistic
enemy, as opposed to, hey, we are against this company or that brand or that person.
If you take that approach, you can make the situation quite contentious, and it can lead to
unproductive conversations. So have a humanistic enemy, not a contentious enemy. It's something
that doesn't get mentioned a lot, but I thought it was an important distinction that we need to make
when you are thinking about and talking about brand building.
Key takeaway number three, lead with product story and not brand story. And this point relates
back to the first point that I made, which is when in doubt, return to your roots.
And at the end of the day, of course, we as marketers are trying to create affinity,
relevance, emotional connection. So more so than ever in this transparent that we live in,
of course, brand storytelling is important. But if that's the main thing, and if that's the only
thing that you do without having quality products that you can rely on, then it will backfire.
So lead with product story and not with brand story. So the three key takeaways from my
conversation with Ollie were key takeaway number one, when in doubt, return to your roots. Number
two, have a humanistic enemy, not a contentious enemy. And number three, lead with product story
and not brand story. So that was part one of my conversation with Ollie Walsh, the founder and
人間的な敵
CEO of Invisible Dynamics, a brand transmission agency. In part two of this conversation,
we discussed the power of compound interest in life and work. If you're listening to this
on Spotify, there's a Q&A field. So please do send us your questions and comments.
And if you like our podcast, please leave us a five-star rating. We'd be so grateful.
I'm Reina Moto, and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
