The Tanning of America (33 page)

John Demsey had known Puffy since the nineties and described him then as “a pretty glamorous figure around New York City. He was dating everybody and was in his J. Lo phase.” Those were the breakout years of Sean's lavish affairs out in the Hamptons where everyone came dressed in all white and when he threw fantasy birthday parties for himself with guest lists ranging from rappers to Donald Trump and Oprah to foreign heads of state.

The reason Demsey approached Puffy to do a men's fragrance line for Estée Lauder was, as he later noted, “One thing about beauty, especially fragrance, is you're selling aspiration. You're selling a lifestyle. And that's one of the reasons that I think Sean has been more successful than a lot of people—because of the lifestyle and swagger he has.” John Demsey described Puffy as having an uncanny ability to make suburban kids want to be him and at the same time connect to kids in the urban neighborhoods where he grew up. In the '00s with the millennial consumers, a celebrity who came out of hip-hop music was all the more powerful. How so? According to John, “Everyone defines themselves by the music they grew up with. It doesn't matter who you are or what you are. If you grew up in 1995 and you looked at seven of the top ten singles, you were defined by hip-hop. And that's it, that's your reference point.”

Launching the Sean John fragrance on the heels of Puffy's Sean John clothing line, which was doing phenomenally well, was not a leap either. But in Demsey's assessment, the most compelling reason for working with Puffy was that he was at the leading edge of the paradigm shift—the Thinnest Slice—of moving niche to pop culture all the way. Sean Combs had the advantage of being perceived as an entertainer, though he is so much more, in Demsey's eyes, “a businessmen and impresario who had transcended brand, personality, and lifestyle.” When my Translation partners and I consulted with Demsey and his team at Estée Lauder, they made it clear that they were marketing a lifestyle mind-set that was Sean John Combs–esqe, and not a product.

What was the mind-set? It was cool that made you feel infinitely confident. Puffy, as Demsey put it, being the archetypal “guy who knows how to work a room,” exuded that drawing power, that ability to know what is press-worthy, how to harness the uses of media—to gain optimal exposure, creating controversy, and still maintain some scarcity. Moreover, Puff knows how to recover from missteps. John Demsey's overview was this: “Just when you think you can count Combs out he reinvents himself. He went from Biggie Smalls and the whole West Coast/East Coast stuff, and completely transcended himself into the king of the Rat Pack. He rebooted himself. And successfully. The brand is him. It is completely driven by personality muscle.” Just when you thought he was not going to change his name again, he was back to Sean “Diddy” Combs and everyone had to write about that.

All of that thinking and decoding went into the understanding of why a stand-alone brand—Sean John—would work well for a holding company that offers distribution and marketing like Estée Lauder. It was the thinking that went into the naming of the two fragrances, Unforgivable by Sean John, and later, I Am King by Sean John. On the whole, men's products were a small part of Lauder's business. They had previously had great success with Tommy as a designer fragrance (with Tommy Hilfiger) but until the Sean John brand, there had been no attempt to go after New Generation male consumers.

Where was the competition in terms of younger-mind-set marketing? On the super high end, there was Creed, an independent perfumer based in Paris, started in 1760, that prided itself on having been the private fragrance designers for ten royal families—and six generations later was experiencing a surge in demand thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood royalty. For young teens, there was Axe—which was in drugstore distribution that put it on the end of the spectrum that lacked aspiration. Then there was nothing else—other than “let me wear my dad's cologne,” i.e. fragrances from established brands and designers such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, and Giorgio Armani.

In 2005, the marketing challenge wasn't in proving how cool Unforgivable by Sean John really was. And it wasn't in getting Estée Lauder to understand the mind-set of their target consumer. Clearly, they were paying attention. The obstacle they faced was setting up communication channels and creating a community that didn't exist for their new offering, and that's why the brand valued our input. Because the community wasn't primed to be excited about a designer men's fragrance that could be meaningful to their lives, there was going to be a learning curve for the consumer target. Therefore, some “edutainment” was in order. Without having to do full-on radical disruption, where you reinvent the wheel, we treated it like a movie launch—with the tag line “Life without passion is unforgivable.” Nor was it a shotgun approach, where you go as broad and big as you can and hope to hit as many consumers as you can. We were strategic and targeted in the building of community that was made up of different demographics but had a like-mindedness that came from being raised on the music that would have Puffy on its radar.

John Demsey gave us the power to really think differently about the intersection of consumers and their product, and really trusted my instincts—much as Paul Fireman had with sneakers—to do things that weren't in their regular distribution channels. On radio, we marketed the fragrance as if it was a new record getting ready to drop and had DJs doing shout-outs and running contests with hot giveaways. Our media plan was to buy airtime not just when we knew our audience would be watching but, rather, when they would be
intently focused,
the watchwords for our campaign. Most advertisers usually just buy big media—playoff sporting events like the Super Bowl or the NBA championship. Those are usually great times to be noticed but I wanted to go a step farther. Instead of just buying a sporting event with X amount of millions watching, I wanted to go where the consumer target would be tuning in with excitement to watch their heroes—LeBron James going up against Dwight Howard or Kobe Bryant dueling Dwayne Wade. I wanted to buy those particular events that I knew the core consumer would be intently watching; I was confident that this way we couldn't miss. And that's how we ran the media. By targeting the media in a manner that specific, we hit multiple home runs with media buys.

As we saw with this campaign, the savings for spending advertising dollars this way is monumental. Instead of buying inventory that's useless—when you're just buying empty eyeballs (as most companies do)—you're buying focus and passion from the audience. When I argued this point against the traditional approach, I started calling it a departure from “empty eyeballs.” When advertising companies recommend media buys all too often they are drawing from data that tells how many viewers their commercial is going to reach—when, in fact, those are empty eyeballs. None of those statistics provide a measure of how many people are actually paying attention. Digital campaigns are mounted on claims that a site gets millions/billions of hits. But how many coming to that site are paying attention and how often does that translate into sales? As I would later tell clients, by buying focus, we can avoid being in the empty-eyeball business.

During the discovery of this phenomenon with the Unforgivable launch, all I knew was that buying NBA alone wasn't meaningful; I wanted to pay for what mattered. Because we knew what mattered, we could save a lot of money—buying local games and then using the rest of the money to buy more media that mattered. Avoiding empty eyeballs let us save money we could then spend on more targeted media
and
it got us a much better ROI than if we had tried to be in all places.

With that thinking for our TV commercial buys, we went directly to where our consumers were going to be watching intently with marketing worthy of their focus that aligned the Sean John aspiration with that of the athletes. How? With fun, risqué story lines in nonconventional formatting. One tactic came from Puffy's idea to shoot behind-the-scenes footage of the different romantic settings used for the commercial and making that into a short film—showing him and two women in a ménage à trois and a flash of nipple, making it much too controversial for television. Next thing we knew the film had gone viral online and had become our ready-made digital campaign!

As obvious as this might sound, believe it or not, a lot of brand executives and advertisers don't see the value in targeting a core community. The attitude is,
Why would we speak to an audience that's already made up their minds about what's cool and what isn't?
As a case in point, I can recall a conversation with a very upset marketing executive for a major beauty line who wasn't seeing traction after going through most of a multimillion-dollar budget on a fragrance being endorsed by none other than Beyoncé Knowles. After my advice was solicited about how to best use what was left of the budget, I had to ask what they had spent most of the money on so far. That's when it became clear they had put everything into high-end beauty and glamour placement, but that wasn't focused on her core audience.

In addition to producing a stunningly beautiful commercial, they had bought lavish spreads in
Vogue
and glamorous movie starts—ads shown on massive screens in movie theaters right before the beginning of the movie. But why hadn't they targeted media where Beyoncé's fans would be engaged?

Upon hearing the question, the brand executive shrugged and then said, “Give me an example.”

“I just listened to everything that you did,” I replied, and went for the example of low-hanging fruit by asking, “Why didn't you run the commercial, let's say, on BET?”

And the brand executive asked, “What's a BET?” After I explained, the executive's follow-up was, “She's big on BET?” Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot to do at that stage of the game. It was a situation in which not understanding her core audience held back a terrific product from reaching its potential.

Working with John Demsey in a hands-on capacity with Unforgivable, we knew that mistake wouldn't be made. But you know what? John would be the first to say that many of the executives at his own company were skeptical about investment in a consumer group that had no track record at driving purchase consideration of a men's fragrance—let alone a new fragrance associated with a hip-hop luminary.

Then again, true to Puffy's personality muscle, we made sure that the community we were building would fan out in all directions. There was the Brinks truck delivery of an exclusive, limited edition of the fragrance to Saks—with heavy security and tons of press. There was a New York Stock Exchange bell-ringing and samples delivered to downtown offices in the thousands, and P. Diddy antics on all the talk shows, including a Sean John and David Letterman battle with the two spraying Unforgivable in each other's mouths.

Imagine the skeptics and their flabbergasted reactions when tanning forces ricocheted from a core to a global mainstream embrace, making it the number-one-selling men's fragrance in no time, with an estimated $35 million in sales the first year. The campaign was named the best-executed launch strategy of the year by a leading beauty marketing association, among numerous other awards. Sean John's follow-up fragrance, I Am King, was released within the year and topped that act. By 2009, even with a troubled economy and consumer spending down, both fragrances were in the top ten. I Am King was at number two, doing more business than Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

How was that possible? Again, because the messages of life without passion being unforgivable and having the audacity to say you are king—of whatever it is that is your arena—are so much more cool and valuable than just smelling good.

And herein lies the ongoing challenge to marketers who know, on the one hand, that it is not advisable to dictate to consumers how they should define cool, and who, on the other hand, want their brand to be considered any time a consumer is asked to complete this phrase: “Cool is . . .”

There is a strategy that helps balance those two concerns. But for it to work, first brands have to believe in their own intrinsic coolness, no matter what their bottom line or the desirability of their products at the time.

Whenever I ponder why “Change Clothes” caused social habits to change en masse or why the launch of Sean John fragrances for men struck the chord that it did (or why for a few years throwbacks were the coolest consumption items on the market), I think back to a time when being in the know about what was cool and where to go get it was all that mattered.

Don't get me wrong. Of course it was exciting to witness the success of people who came from the same place as you and who were showing up in the latest fashions, driving expensive cars, wearing flashy jewelry—or, even cooler, when they had those items customized! To have something that was one of a kind or that only an exclusive few could ever attain, well, that meant you had more than money—you had access. And there was a mystique and intrigue attached to wherever it was that gave you access. With real success you had a pass anywhere. You could go to places with exotic, foreign-sounding names that you had no idea where they even were.

Throughout the eighties and nineties, there were a couple of illustrious destinations right in New York City that were the equivalent of traveling to those distant ports of call—the Shangri-las of style and luxury. They were attached to so much status that the only advertising ever required was word of mouth. You had to know someone who could even tell you where such destinations were. One of these was the boutique design shop known as Dapper Dan's on Harlem's historic 125th Street—where Dan Jenkins, couturier extraordinaire, kept an endless and secret supply of logo-emblazoned fabrics like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, MCM, and Chanel, which he magically transformed into sundry custom designs, from clothes to hats to auto upholstery.