Branding Nightmares

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So I work for a t-shirt company, and several of our shirts, originally designed as kind of "bad ass" biker gear, have been showing up in hip hop videos. So the company president* has the brilliant idea of re-branding this part of our line as "streetwear" and creating a new website for it, getting a new booth at the semi-annual trade show, etc.

Fair enough, except that he has no exposure to hip-hop at all, yet insists on directing the new brand. So the new logo is in bright candly colors with cheesy graffiti script superimposed on a brick wall background -- obviously, in his mind, because that's "urban." It looks like it could be used to sell kids clothes, except most of the shirts in this new line have huge screaming skulls all over them. (It's biker gear, right?)

So now I have to go to the tradeshow with this, looking like the ultimate poseur, and I'm going crazy. It's not just bad -- it's AWFUL. How do I stop this marketing trainwreck, or failing that, stop caring?

* Also my dad. You'd think he'd be open to my ideas moreso than other co-workers, (and I have offered specific ideas on numerous occassions), but apparently it doesn't work that way. Grr.

― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Friday, 17 February 2006 17:54 (nineteen years ago)

Make him sit down and re-watch the videos that the shirts appeared in. Buy a bunch of copies of hip-hop magazines and flip through them with him. Remind him that this is pretty much the least he can do, in terms of market research.

If he still doesn't catch on, go on youtube or something and make him compare against some old-school hip-hop videos. Draw attention to the ages-ago quality of "bright candy colors" and "cheesy graffiti script."

If you want to be really professional about it, you can put together.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:12 (nineteen years ago)

You can't stop this trainwreck by yourself, since you don't have sufficient authority to stop it. You're not the engineer or the brakeman, just the porter. All you can do is yell "Stop the train!" while the others look at you quizzically and carry on. Do what you can to convince them. Then, if they stay unconvinced, let it go.

Looking like the ultimate poseur at a trade show is not a fate worse than death. It's a story you can tell your friends. Just don't let anyone from your company catch you undermining their misguided stupidity by badmouthing it to customers. Then they can blame you for its dismal failure.

Just go into it thinking, "wouldn't it be hilarious if this stuff actually sold?"

― Aimless (Aimless), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:14 (nineteen years ago)

That should have read "put together a PowerPoint presentation comparing and contrasting imagery from 1985 with images from the modern-day market."

But mostly hammer on the point that it's really, really bad business to sink money into a product without doing any assessment of the market at all. And how it wouldn't be that huge of an investment to spend $6 and 20 minutes flipping through a hip-hop mag and going "oh, wait, our product's image doesn't fit this market at all."

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:15 (nineteen years ago)

Oh, another technique would be to ask questions. Like "what sort of person do you think will respond positively to this image?" And "can you provide evidence that this sort of person actually exists in 2006?" And so on.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:17 (nineteen years ago)

I would like some biker t-shirts.

Just thought I'd mention it.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller 68), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:22 (nineteen years ago)

holy shit you know dj paul????

― ,,, Friday, 17 February 2006 18:24 (nineteen years ago)

for reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoKiy4bCS-Y&search=stay%20fly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ4kwmlfEBc&search=poppin%20my%20collar

― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Friday, 17 February 2006 18:42 (nineteen years ago)

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