The Tanning of America (34 page)

Dapper Dan played an extremely important role in introducing the founding hip-hop generation to couture brands. What's more, he translated those elements of haute couture into applications that were understandable to young, hip aspirational taste-makers. At the time, Gucci would never have made, as Dapper Dan did, sweat suits. They would never have upholstered a car interior. They wouldn't have understood. But Dapper Dan understood the aspiration, and he put it into silhouettes that were cool and street and influenced a generation's idea of what was high style. Because of Dan, I believe, an appreciation of specific couture brands became inbred in hip-hop culture. For consumers growing up in the culture, whenever we looked at our heroes and their album covers—at the ones who were having an impact on style and fashion—they were all wearing Dapper Dan's clothing. Later, designers like Marc Jacobs would specialize in making couture hip-hop accessible. But back in Dan's time, there was nowhere else to get oversized Louis Vuitton anything. He did it by customizing it, probably with fabric he secretly knew how to get on Canal Street, enabling his clientele to walk around adorned in scarce, aspirational looks, brands, and materials that no one else had. Catering to everyone from high-rolling street patrons to athletes like Mike Tyson to the some of the earliest rap artists like Big Daddy Kane and Salt-n-Pepa, Dapper Dan's was mythical—earning as many name-checks in rap lyrics as Barneys and Saks put together.

And then there was Jacob the Jeweler. Today Jacob & Co. is headquartered at the most prestigious of addresses, at East Fifty-seventh Street and Park Avenue, across the street from the Four Seasons. It's a far cry from the tiny shop in the Diamond District that was first opened by then twenty-one-year-old Jacob Arabo, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, so he could put food on the table for his family. As time went on, he became known as the diamond jeweler of choice for pop culture figures throughout the big bang of bling.

Besides his ability to unapologetically customize any piece of jewelry with the most bedazzling encrustation of the finest of diamonds, Jacob was an infectiously likeable character. With his Eastern European accent and slicked-back black hair, he brought flair to the game—he'd come to your office with his jewelry or meet you at a hot spot for drinks and let you see his latest. Customer service, baby! People would take him their already expensive watches, and he'd remove the bezel and bling them out. He treated his clientele like family. Oh, yeah, there were the street guys who paid in cash, no questions asked. But the mainstay of his business was pop culture celebrities either already famous or on their way—and Jacob cornered the record industry. He understood the value of bling. He understood the culture, the reason why pushing the limits of ostentation was a form of expression that was important at the time. And he also knew that a lot of his musician clients had business managers and record companies cutting their checks and that they were busy too. So instead of making highly valued customers wait for their jewelry, he would let them have the goods and then pay when they got paid. Basically, he gave credit. Not only that, but Jacob would freely loan pieces for award shows, as well as for media and video shoots.

In the beginning Jacob the Jeweler was such a well-kept secret that it took a lot of legwork to find out that he had a private space on Forty-seventh Street. He used to put up headshots of celebrities you could see through the window to let customers looking for him know they were in the right place. Getting on that wall was a rite of passage. Those photos ran from Biggie to Bono. Puffy may have gotten up there early, and so did Mary J. Blige. Soon it was everyone—Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, David Beckham. Before long, because of his customized offerings of huge “iced”out crosses, Stars of David, chains, and his gift for adding aftermarket designs to Rolexes and Cartiers and Audemarses, you had to make appointments. Jacob became so big that he had to start quarantining different customers in two private offices—in case there were rival rappers or warring record labels or executives who didn't like each other but happened to be there at the same time. With his larger-than-life personality, Jacob the Jeweler managed it quite well—inspiring his own legend that grew and grew, earning shout-outs in more than seventy-five major hip-hop releases over the years since 1999.

My marketing revelation was in thinking about how someone who wasn't even a brand was getting so much word-of-mouth advertising that the world knew about him. That's when I realized that it wasn't about what you got, but where you got it. You got it from Jacob. He became that big. Then the question for me became,
How does Jacob the Jeweler become a brand?
Well, naturally he needed a product. In other marketing challenges, as we've discussed, marketing is sometimes done in product creation. This was the reverse—he had built-in marketing that was already spreading his name but neither a brand as a company nor a product line. Amazingly, however, Jacob already had the ability to sell a lifestyle mind-set, to speak to the values of aspiration like nobody else. He already represented the “top of the globe” for pop culture—the farthest destination you could ever imagine being able to go to. He had authenticity, credibility, and so much proximity to the top hip-hop artists that they were name-checking him in every other song.

When I set out to develop the foundation for a physical product that would define a brand right out of the gate—an ambitious undertaking—I knew one thing above all, that whatever it was had to have a name on it. Crosses and chains and earrings—the bulk of the products he sold—didn't work well because they didn't lend themselves to names. Watches were a different story. As a matter of fact, as I mulled it over, the realization hit me that a luxury-brand watch was all about the pull-up value. Wearing a Rolex had nothing to do with the fine inner workings of Swiss timepieces. It was about the equivalent of pulling up at the curb, pulling up your sleeve, and showing what's on your wrist. The pull-up begs the question,
How does this look as you notice it?
Since everyone was going to Jacob for aftermarket diamonds to add to their watches, I thought coming up with a Jacob-branded watch made the most marketing sense. Besides, watches were ideal for displaying brand names even with as many diamonds as possible. That seemed to be the way to go to place Jacob the Jeweler in the hierarchy to which he belonged, or so I felt, to make him the Harry Winston of the new generation. He even looked the part.

But talking to Jacob about the power of branding was way too abstract. Then we started talking about doing a watch and what ultimately gave us direction for the idea was his story as the international symbol of success—a rags-to-riches journey just like the one many of his famous clients had taken that embodied the American dream for an immigrant. It was in the tanning DNA. By 2003 his global reputation reached so far that his family of clients around the world was in five time zones. Why not design into that mind-set? Jacob knew that nobody needs to know what time it is in five time zones at a glance, but he also understood why that was the cultural story of the times. With that thinking, we competed with a watch from Audemars Piguet, this one-of-a-kind urban myth that retails for a million dollars and is so blindingly diamonded out, you can't even believe what you've beheld with your own eyes. The sickest watch in the world.

Jacob the Jeweler took that watch face idea, staying with over-the-top bling but adding a leather strap, along with color and to-die-for touches that allowed you to customize the watch by taking off the bezel and showing the diamonds or screwing it back on and wearing it plain. It was fun, sophisticated, and diamonded out, all at the same time.

One of the highlights of the experience working with Jacob came when I made a trip to Paris to show the prototype to style arbiters whose opinions would be important for marketing to a very exclusive consumer. On that trip, I was able to arrange for a meeting with Karl Lagerfeld. When the appointed time came, I was practically pinching myself as I walked into the House of Chanel—where I met Lagerfeld and placed the watch on his wrist. And he loved it. Lagerfeld loved the size of it; he loved the audacity of it. He wasn't concerned at all with a brand name he didn't know; it didn't matter. He didn't care about that. All that mattered was that it was a big-ass, blinged-out watch, and the pull-up value was the same. Besides loving it and letting me put it on his wrist, he allowed me to take a photograph of it on him. This, yet again, was a moment like others that let me know this was all tanning. He liked bling as much as the hip-hop industry did.

It was that moment when I gave it to him and Lagerfeld's eyes got big as he looked at it—as if to say, “
Damn!
”—that I realized those six degrees of separation are really more like two. What is the separation? The difference is between those who aspire and those who don't.

Needless to say, I returned to New York ready to take the world by storm. We seeded the watch in music videos and not only did it go absolutely crazy after that, but a brand was born. And for the next several years, the line went insane—everything built on superb design, the highest quality, and the fact that where you got it was from Jacob & Co.

When I first got to know the executives at GM in the early days of my marketing career, I was incredibly relieved. For one thing, my fear had been that with corporate America and Madison Avenue now discovering the hip-hop impact, they would want to go out and do things that had nothing to do with their brand—like sponsor rap battles. Thankfully, GM was too culturally sensitive to try to force proximity that way. The other source of my relief—and frankly excitement—was hearing how the GM team drew from mind-set marketing to rekindle the cool of a classic brand: Cadillac.

Kim Brink, a former GM exec, recalled where things stood in the late 1990s, when she came on board, moving over to Cadillac from Chevrolet—where she had gained a strong background in marketing trucks. The image of Cadillac in the luxury automobile universe at the time, Kim acknowledged, was weak. “It was known for white people from Florida,” she said, citing research, “snowbirds, traditional, country clubs, comfort, older generation.”

Like many established brands caught in the all-too-familiar trap of needing to innovate and connect with younger consumers without losing core customers, Cadillac had been going through an identity crisis for some time. Finally, enlightened GM executives came up with the inspiration for the Cadillac Escalade—a luxury utility vehicle that was going to be designed for the urban landscape.

My question to Kim was whether they were aware from the start that it would appeal to urban consumers of luxury cars—enough for it to receive its cool credentials, which would then influence a suburban mom in Bloomington, Indiana, to purchase the reinvented Cadillac.

Though she wished they could say that they knew a plan to target urban culture would lead to broader success, Kim didn't remember everyone having that kind of clear insight. From her perspective, coming from the truck side of the business, “You saw a kind of escapism, on the mountain, everything four-wheel drive.” Now they were mixing that powerful road-dominating message into the Cadillac code. She and the rest of the team asked themselves, “Okay, we're bringing a luxury utility to market, what can we do to completely differentiate it from the category—disrupt the norms, the conventions going on in the category?” That's when they started tracking other luxury brands and seeing how once the urban market adopted a brand, its popularity spread dramatically from there. And the idea that suburban moms would eventually be driving an Escalade to pick up their kids at prep school, of course, could then become a reality.

Mike Bentley, a GM marketing executive who worked with Kim when I got to know him, went so far as to describe the importance of the Escalade and the positioning of it within the urban market by saying that if it hadn't happened that way, “Cadillac might not be around with us now.”

Born and raised in England, but a passionate devotee of American cars, music, and culture, Mike told me, “Escalade fits the code of what Cadillac is. None of the other models did. I came to see that Escalade, and what it stood for, kept Cadillac alive. One of the reasons: It plugged into hip-hop culture.”

Mike drew parallels between the badges of success valued by the urban mind-set and the fact that the Cadillac has been a potent symbol of success from the moment of its creation over a century ago. Deep within the code, he explained, Cadillac represented “arrival.” When a focus group was conducted with people from a mix of backgrounds and cultures, they were asked to reveal their first emotional impression of a Cadillac. The group had first taken time to vent about negative experiences with car dealers or rising gas prices and then had done a relaxation exercise to connect to their true feelings. So when the question was asked of them, Mike recalled, “stories came pouring out. We analyzed those stories for plots and themes. One interesting thing about Cadillac—literally all the stories start with the Cadillac arriving and someone successful getting out of it. To us, those stories say, ‘I have arrived. I am here.' Nearly always it's a successful male—just the guy who lives on the block who is a little notch above the rest. White, black, Hispanic, and Asian people write that story.”

Interestingly enough, Mike Bentley said that similar questions asked about Ford as a brand and emotional impressions of it “started with a story of a group of people getting in the car and going off together on an adventure.”

Not all companies, large or small, are willing to delve into these deeper strands of meaning so important to marketing strategies—and so clearly revealed from conducting this kind of pop culture anthropological study. Ford, I should add, had clear insights over the years in recognizing that departures were key to their code. Think of the names of their SUV models—Ford Explorer and Ford Expedition. In the luxury utility category, the competitor to the Escalade is the Lincoln Navigator, also reflective of a departure into new or different terrain. Even the model Ford used to launch its entry into hybrid technology speaks to departures—the Escape.