The Tanning of America (22 page)

Another instance that would come up down the road was the clear mismatch between Angelina Jolie and St. John's, the elegant, professional women's clothing line. What went wrong? Nothing and everything. It must have seemed smart in theory to have one of the most gorgeous women in the world—known in her film roles as bold, dramatic, sensual, and exotic—draped intimately on the page in the understated elegance of St. John's. But it wasn't believable for her or them. In my opinion, the campaign was a debacle, much like the tree that fell in the forest that no one was there to witness.

When there are shared values between companies and celebrities, as so many of the hip-hop artists who were name-checking brands in their lyrics were discovering, the exchange is almost always fruitful and robust. That's the Midas touch, when there is proximity to culture and it sets off a chain reaction of consumption. Sean “Puffy” Combs, as we'll see shortly, manages to do this almost in his sleep. An impresario who produces, directs, writes, MCs, acts, and builds cottage industries one after the other, he has cultural instincts that rival those of P. T. Barnum (the godfather of all show business). The prime example is when Puffy was featured with Busta Rhymes on the memorable “Pass the Courvoisier,” which name-checked almost every luxury libation on the market—Hennessy, Rémy, Cristal, Moët & Chandon, you name it—with the idea that they'd take any of those too but still preferred that you pass them the Courvoisier.

Within a year after the record and the video dominated the airwaves, Courvoisier sales increased 30 percent, the largest jump in the history of the three-hundred-year-old brand. Meanwhile, overall annual cognac sales in the U.S. had topped a billion dollars. Seventy-five percent of that had come from hip-hop-generation consumers (legal drinking age up to thirty-four). That is proximity to culture.

Not every brand wished to be included in the party. Later on, in 2006, the chief executive of Louis Roederer, the maker of Cristal champagne, told an interviewer, in effect, that he viewed hip-hop culture's embrace of the brand as unwelcomed attention. “But what can we do?” he asked the interviewer. “We can't forbid people from buying it. I'm sure Dom Perignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”

Jay-Z promptly released a statement with a response, saying, “I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands including the 40/40 club nor in my personal life.” In addition to boycotting Cristal in his clubs, replacing the bottles with Dom and Krug, Jay-Z then invested in his own line, Ace of Spades, made by Champagne Cattier, which three years later would be rated the best-tasting champagne in the world. The hand of the consumer that Cristal had bitten followed Jay-Z's lead and changed brands too. Not surprisingly, Cristal's market share plummeted and has not returned to its former glory since. Ace is now the champagne of choice in clubs and has replaced Cristal as the champagne of fine taste and status.

There were some brands that, though not averse to the business and the benefits, still never made the attempt to acknowledge and gain proximity to their customer. Timberland fell into that category. As part of the fashion and the culture, artists and consumers alike would wear Timberland boots like sneakers, driving sales around the world, making outdoor rugged footwear into a type of fashion, and yet the brand never showed their appreciation. Timberland didn't acknowledge that they had a loyal, activated consumer group that was supporting their brand. Executives just sat there and reaped the benefits of their spiking revenues and yet had no investment in managing or promoting the culture that made them rich. When the trend began to wane, at the last minute the brand tried to design into the community without any input from the consumers and the result was a goof, but still insulting. This was the same error committed by Adidas when they failed to give Run-DMC design input and blew the ongoing benefits of their endorsement deal.

Gaining proximity to culture, by the way, is not some one-shot deal that allows you to have insights and then conclude you've done all your homework in order to keep your relationship vibrant. Retailers, often the intermediary between brands and consumers, see this all the time. A very interesting account of how this urban/suburban like-minded consumer group evolved into the powerhouse it is today came to me from Mitch Modell, the CEO of Modell's Sporting Goods Inc.

Founded in 1889 when the first store was opened in lower Manhattan by entrepreneur Morris Modell, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, Modell's is the oldest family-owned chain of its kind. Run by four generations over its history, Modell's boasts a massive online business and over 140 brick-and-mortar stores scattered across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, all stocking different inventories that reflect the neighborhoods where they're located, urban and suburban, ethnic, mixed, and not.

From the start, the company prided itself on providing excellence in terms of products and customer service, at a reasonable price. By selling a varying combination of outdoor and athletic gear, with army-navy supplies as well as casual apparel, the different stores over the decades had avoided becoming seen as an impersonal chain and were able to retain a connection to their distinct communities. But in the mid-1980s, with changing demographics due to reverse gentrification in their urban settings, in particular, Modell's suddenly found themselves without an active consumer base and with sinking sales figures.

Bewildered, the Modell family members and executives couldn't understand how a template that had worked for almost a century was now failing. Doing what most businesses did in the 1980s, they hired different consultants to give them answers, most of which indicated the need for an image overhaul but didn't explain how such changes would reflect the wants and needs of consumers. So it was at that point, Mitch reported, that they commissioned a huge $50,000 study to look at different locations, do customer surveys, and come up with a blueprint for whatever overhaul was needed.

Funny thing was, right when the study was commissioned, Mitch heard that one of their employees, a seventeen-year-old, African-American stock clerk by the name of James who worked at the Modell's on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, had volunteered helpful information to the store managers that would explain why their business was in serious trouble. Excited for answers, Mitch heard everything that James had to say and was stunned. But he heeded every word.

And the gist of it was: “Mr. Modell, I would never shop here.” Whenever he had purchased items in the store, James admitted, he was embarrassed. He said that he would use a bag from another, more cool store in order to walk home without being ridiculed. James explained why he would never shop there for anything other than a few sundry items, saying, “Look at the way you merchandise your product, you don't make it look fresh, you don't make it look right.” And then there was the issue that the brands being offered had no connection to cool.

Stunned though he was, Mitch Modell knew James was right and went to work, acting on the insights of a kid who knew more than all the experts—especially with regard to what brands they needed to start selling. While in the middle of doing that, the customer surveys that had been commissioned started coming back. Mitch recalled, “Everything that James told us, our customers told us. Either people had never shopped us and told us why they wouldn't go to us, or people who used to shop us told us why they wouldn't shop us anymore.” Mitch Modell knew they had to change within the year or they were sunk.

Among the brands that customers were going elsewhere to purchase were such names as Cotler, Starter, Bugle Boy, Champion, A.J.'s Jeanswear, Russell, New Balance, and Avia. These were the lines that early hip-hop culture had been adopting and giving the equivalent of the FDA inspection stamp of approval. Modell's needed to be authentic in the way that these brands were seen. And the most important brand of all that they hadn't been offering was Reebok—the early-eighties king of all cool footwear.

Ironically, the very brands that Modell's most needed to get into their stores would absolutely not sell to them. Why not? Their image. Reebok was the lynchpin. As long as Reebok wouldn't sell to them, none of the other brands would. The fact that some of Modell's stores sold army-navy supplies and others had discount inventories, the brand wholesalers believed, would disrupt the perception of their distribution powers. They were right.

Mitch said to them, “If we change our image, will you sell to us?” Everyone said back to him, “You'll never change.” Well, eventually that was disproved and the media covered it with headlines proclaiming how they managed to not only change their whole image but also create great excitement in the marketplace. And the rest, as they say, is history. But what never became history was the crazy, bold, and daring—as in gangsta—machinations that were required by Mitch Modell to get Reebok to sell to him.

This points out yet another cultural rule that commerce always has to manage, especially in a shifting economy—the fact that the flames of aspiration are fanned by scarcity. How does the brand control that? Very carefully!

No matter how much leverage Mitch used with the sales rep, no matter how much begging he did for just a dozen pairs of Reeboks to put in one store, he was told, over and over, “No” and “Never.” At a trade show, he even went directly to the CEO of Reebok, Paul Fireman, the gregarious visionary who had taken the British shoe company to the pinnacle of the footwear world, and Modell pleaded with Fireman to grant them a personal favor and let them put Reebok in their stores. Unfortunately, word was out that some of the Modell's stores were still very much army-navy and selling batteries and had inventories with irregulars or discounted merchandise. Paul Fireman couldn't interfere with his rep's decision.

Mitch Modell then came up with a kamikaze strategy to scare the rep into changing his mind—which meant almost going broke to get sneakers shipped from Germany and making it look like Modell's was going to discount Reeboks and hurt the sales of the big-name department stores like Macy's and Bamberger's. In the end, after sitting there with a fortune in sneaker inventory, the bluff worked and he didn't have to do that. Between the sales rep and Paul Fireman, Modell's was okayed as an account and within seventy-two hours all the other brands opened up accounts for them. Mitch said, “If it wasn't for Paul, I wouldn't be in business today. I'll never forget it.”

Within six months the new and improved Modell's was booming like never before and growing like wildfire with stores opening up left and right. Reebok was that powerful, that magical, that cool. Not just in the urban locations where James had helped Modell's become responsive to their local consumers but, as time went on, in their other stores everywhere. After almost biting the dust, they became key movers of the athletic and other apparel that by the late eighties and early nineties was part of the hip-hop look.

I could well remember my teenage years when their store on Jamaica Avenue was suddenly the coolest place to shop. Run-DMC got their sneakers there! Forget about it. All the eighties rappers from the Bronx, old-school before there was such a term, shopped at Modell's. Jamaica Avenue back then was a destination of glamour and excitement—where you'd go to get gold teeth and big flashy jewelry and also pick up the coolest brands, like A.J.'s, Pony, and KangaROOS, at Modell's.

When I asked Mitch Modell what evidence he saw that the urban customer was driving mainstream consumption—at what point the kid in Greenwich, Connecticut, was buying the same shirt that the teenagers in the boroughs were wearing—he answered, “We were always an urban retailer that transitioned into suburban.” Initially, just as with the early days of only finding the music on certain ends of the dial, that meant some of the nonurban, nonethnic consumers who crossed from the mainstream before everyone else were actually making the trek to Jamaica Avenue and other urban Modell's.

At first, there had been Modell's Sporting Goods in the city and boroughs while the Modell's Shopping World stores, the discount operations, were out in New Jersey and Long Island. Then in the early nineties, with the rise of massive discount superstores, instead of battling for survival, they turned all their suburban stores into Modell's Sporting Goods at just the right moment. Mitch Modell described their unique, fortified place in the marketplace by saying, “And so we became an urban/ suburban brand.”

Because they had been authenticated by the cool of their urban influences, with urban culture driving sales in suburban doors, Modell's was at the perfect intersection to witness how trends moved. Starter was a brand that Mitch said began with athletes spotted by fans in the stands, followed by rappers anointing the look, and then it kept building like a wave in a stadium. As we saw with NWA's adoption of the Raiders' uniform and colors, the blurring of the lines between hip-hop and sports had been there from the start. As time went on, team affiliation was important, but as the trend widened, the mass appeal of sports-influenced fashion had much more to do with colors borrowed from teams. Color was king. Kids would sometimes buy as many as five of the same item in different colors. This was true whether it was Starter jackets or New Era hats or proleague licensed jerseys or Reebok sneakers.

Coincidentally, when I finally made the decision to begin to transition out of the music business and into advertising, one of my first major accounts that was facing a grave challenge and was in need of the Midas touch was Reebok. After a decade and a half, they had lost proximity to culture. It was to the everlasting credit of Paul Fireman that he was willing to give me a shot to try to pull off what needed to be a total disruption strategy. And then some. There was only one solution that I knew could work. Hip-hop culture was going to be the magic bullet I could use to help Reebok with the reinvention and activation required for relevancy.