Why Victoria's Secret got whomped by JD Williams

Failing to understand the new rules of “how to be a brand” comes with a heavy price. This week, Victoria’s Secret had to pay the bill in full.

When Victoria’s Secret launched its #PerfectBody bra campaign it probably wasn’t expecting a social media smackdown at the hands of a little-known plus sized retailer JD Williams and a petition from three women from Leeds. 

And the fantasy megabrand certainly didn't anticipate being forced to drop its campaign message in an embarrassing public turnaround, or to give way to voices that, until now, it has always been able to ignore.

Not everyone wants to be told that this is perfection.

Why would it? As the go-to lingerie brand for women dating sugar Daddies and hedge fund managers, Victoria’s Secret appears virtually unassailable. It has become a global lifestyle juggernaut with nearly five million followers on Twitter, six million on Instagram and 26 million on Facebook.

The brand has ploughed millions of marketing dollars into building a breathless sub-culture around “Secret Angel” ambassadors like supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio (1.1 million Twitter followers), to whom millions of women clearly aspire.

Only last week La Ambrosio was busy launching the VS Fantasy Bra (a compex bondage-to-beadcraft contraption that promises eye-watering discomfort to anyone trying to have fun). Along the way, she was credited with Angel-style insights into modern femininity, including “how to do a hair flip like a sexy, sexy boss.”

Victoria’s Secret is keen to democratize the notion of female achievement with posts like “Who needs a cap & gown when you can wear wings?” and runs hashtags like #WhatAngelsREALLYWant alongside pictures of underpants printed with the world “Boo-ty.”

In other words, launching a new bra line fronted by hair-tossing, size zero Amazonians in skimpy knickers is not merely standard fare for Victoria’s Secret, it is the template on which a gigantic brand has been built.

But a digital smackdown is exactly what the megabrand got when Frances Black, Gabriella Kountourides and Laura Ferris launched a petition on change.org https://www.change.org/p/victoriassecret-apologise-for-your-damaging-perfect-body-campaign-iamperfect  

Body-shaming the millions of women who are not size zero is not cool, the petition pointed out, calling on Victoria’s Secret to “apologise and amend your irresponsible marketing.” Thousands of supporters signed within hours. 

Then, in a smart piece of brand marketing, JD Williams - part of the Manchester-based N Brown group, picked up the baton. Headed by former Asda executive Angela Spindler, N Brown champions women from sizes 12 to 32 (http://www.nbrown.co.uk/brand_news). 

JD Williams ripped-off the Victoria’s Secret photo, posing the shot with its own fuller-sized models and launched it into the Twittersphere with the hashtag #PerfectlyImperfect.

Have you spotted the JD Williams difference yet?

Speaking on behalf of its own tribe, JD Williams was clear about its brief: body confidence is the right for women of all sizes and shapes, not just the super-thin. “We have a responsibility as a retailer to promote positive body image to our customers,” its spokesman said.

JD Williams is a minnow compared to Victoria’s Secret. It has fewer than a thousand Twitter followers while the uber-brand has a social media footprint the size of a developing nation. But JD Williams won this fight because it has a far better understanding of its cause. The pillar of its social media strategy is not a hard sell on its products. Rather, it has been to engage with bloggers and customers to champion how to make women feel fabulous, regardless of their size. When it came to taking on Victoria's Secret, JD Williams was speaking from the heart.

For its own part, Victoria’s Secret tried to ignore the mounting clamour. Its Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds kept their tin hats on throughout, pushing out useful tips like “#BeScandalous No.32: never underestimate the power of a black lace bustier,” while the controversy went on. 

Not exactly, but at least the sentiment is in the right direction

By the time almost 30,000 people had signed the petition, however, Victoria’s Secret knew it had to change. In the mother of all airbrushing stunts, the #PerfectBody campaign was mysteriously renamed “A Body for Every Body” with #LoveEveryBody” as its new tagline. 

While the message might fail even the most basic Advertising Standards Association test of accuracy, it at least indicates a degree of awareness that was long overdue. 

The Victoria’s secret climbdown is a Harvard Business School case study on how to go from #success to #fail in the world of social media. It’s a walk-of-shame that other brands will be forced to tread for as long as they refuse to recognize the new reality: power has moved from the brand to the community. Brands who insult the community do so at their peril.

Whether they recognise it or not, brands are now judged by how they treat the rest of the community, not just the customers who make up their sales. Arrogance and exclusivity can quickly become radioactive qualities. Efforts to make the world a kinder and more accepting place, on the other hand, can develop brand capital in a way that has never before been possible.

Failing to understand the new rules of “how to be a brand” now comes with a heavy price. Victoria’s Secret won't be the last to pay the bill in full. 

BT and The Observer: a brand mash-up that actually works

By generating social and intellectual capital, The Observer/BT Ingenious brand collaboration was a tie-up that delivered for both

Kudos to BT Ingenious and The Observer, for The Observer Ideas Festival for the mind, a culturally activist brainfest held at the Barbican on Sunday (October 12th).

#Obsideas served up a programme of global perspectives on art, activism, politics, food, government, sustainability, music and justice. The speakers fetched up with passion and persuasion – and without a PowerPoint presentation in sight.

Highlights included The Wire-creator David Simon on story telling, Tiny Tempah on the pursuit of happiness and Guardian poster-boy Edward Snowden (via Skype) on life exile in Moscow.

Conchita Wurst was an unexpected entrant into the discourse on Scots and English devolution, Jewish Black American chef Michael Twitty explained the cultural memory of slave cooking and campaigner Jack Monroe put food at the centre of a growing class war.

An event like #Obsideas this is a treat, not only because it fires neurons, but also because it allows familiar brands to extend and reinvent themselves.

The Observer is a great read. But quality costs money, and like all newspapers - even those that have a strong digital strategy - it is experiencing precipitous sales declines. National newspaper sales are dropping by 8% year on year and the Observer has fallen faster, with sales down 10% and circulation hovering at just over 202,000 copies a week according to September's ABCs.

In that environment, extending its “reason to exist” is crucial to future of The Observer brand. At the Festival for the Mind, its ability to curate an edgy line-up of speakers and catalyse debate was on full display.

BT had a different objective. For the past two years its shareholder and customer focus has been on growing its broadband footprint. It has spent more than a billion pounds on football rights and the launch of BT Sport - so that it can bundle “free” Premier League and Champions League soccer with internet, telephony and digital TV.

If you aren't keen on the lure of football, the beginning and end of how you interact with BT's brand might be to wonder how much Jose Mourinho gets paid to loom so grumpily from billboards up and down the land.

#Obsideas was sponsored by BT’s innovation and creativity hub, though. And this gave the telecoms provider something different to say.

As sponsorships go the presence was low-key: the BT Ingenious logo was not splurged everywhere. But while it might be quietly spoken compared to its sporty sibling, BT Ingenious actually has plenty of cultural and political things to say.

It plays around with clever ideas, for a start. Current innovations include a project to hook up Coca Cola vending machines to Wifi routers in the developing world, which will create a network of free regional internet access hubs.

Hypercat - a multi-partner project - is working out new ways for your fridge to chat to your solar panels so that they can optimize your energy usage. Next-generation household appliances will soon generate enough data to talk sustainably to each other all day. But first they have to get around “the bottleneck” of human intervention. That is to say – me and you.

Little wonder that BT’s head of innovation Jean Marc Frangos muses on how the intervention of technology will shape our collective humanity.

Perhaps his questions are why the BT Ingenious brand mash-up with the Observer works so well. 

Technology of the kind of fibre and router plumbing that forms BT’s core business rarely fills stages or sets the soul on fire.

But, in its own way, telecoms companies have been at least as subversive as Tinie Tempah and Jack Monroe. The changing shape of society is a consequence of the tools and innovation we have to hand.

BT’s high-speed fibre backbone is one reason that more than four million people are able to work from home, a 30% leap in past decade, according to the Office of National Statistics.

Uncoupling humans from the traditional workplace has lead to a surge in women launching their own businesses, regional entrepreneurs and a lengthening of working life.

BT might not have the charisma to lead the social activism debate, and wisely outsourced that job to a creative specialist in the form of The Observer. 

But the technology company is an innovator and a disruptor all the same. It has a place at the table of social change - not least because it develops and delivers the technology that drives it.

FIVE REASONS WHY TESCO CEO DAVE LEWIS CAN WIN

By setting expectations to “doom” Dave Lewis has given himself a window to radically refocus Tesco’s model and business. 

 

By Mimi Turner

Dave Lewis is probably the least-envied boss in the FTSE 100. Since taking the reins the Tesco CEO he has suffered the kind of baptism of fire that comes along once in a business generation. 

Financial commentators remain transfixed by the slow motion car crash that is Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, while at Tesco’s tills, customers grumble openly about management disarray. Staff morale is in a bucket just at the time customers are moving away from the traditional shopping experience full stop. 

Tesco’s size, which was once its big advantage, has proved to be its Achilles heel. Rarely has an institution where most of the country has shopped lost its way so seriously. The biggest retailer in Britain has found itself out of touch.

So far, so catastrophic for Tesco’s new CEO.  But Dave Lewis can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Tesco’s implosion has handed him a mandate for transformational change. Tesco’s reason for existing, its ethos and its relationship with customers are all up for review. He can transform the business.

Here are my five reasons I think he can win:

Tesco is still the biggest

 

Lidl and Aldi may be snapping at Tesco’s heels, but like Yorkshire terriers yapping away at a Great Dane, they are tiny by comparison. Aldi has 4.8% of the grocery market and Lidl has 3.5%. Tesco’s numbers may be going in the wrong direction, but it still has 29% of the groceries market and buys more from suppliers than anyone else. 

The truth is that while Lidl and Aldi have nibbled away at Tesco’s certainties, Britain’s biggest supermarket has lost share to Sainbury’s, Morrisons, Asda and Waitrose as well. The latter have passed on lower prices to customers when Tesco has not. When Waitrose (5% share) and Sainsbury’s (16%) offer branded products at the same prices as Tesco, it is because they are taking less profit than the biggest supermarket in the country.

Tesco has yet to invent a model that competes with discounters who offer their narrow product range still packed in pallets to save on staff costs. But without a doubt Tesco has more power than anyone else to push its prices down. If it can’t match prices with its competitors, it is because it is taking too much profit.

Rock bottom is the right place to start

 

As every account of Tesco’s travails in the business pages points out, shares are trading at their lowest point in more than a decade - and are worth half of what they were a year ago. 

Investors have abandoned hope of a turnaround in the short or medium-term and some have dumped the stock. The likes of Blackrock and Warren Buffet have added to the entertainment by delivering a spanking on their way out. The Tesco investment was “a huge mistake” the Berkshire Hathaway founder helpfully told CNBC, shunting the share price still lower.

Disastrous though the recent share performance has been, it is an advantage for Lewis to start at rock bottom rather than for investors to lose faith six months into his stewardship. It’s better for him to shed the shareholders who are not in the game for the long term rather than to have them throw in the cards when his strategy is being built. 

For Dave Lewis, the lower the shares are in the short term, the better the future will look. 

He can bury the past

 

Whatever the outcome of the multiple inquiries into the murky practices of squeezing supplier “overrides” and promotional payments, this crisis will burn Philip Clarke’s legacy and underline the extent to which his strategy failed.

The catastrophic collapse in faith means that Lewis has one big advantage: he can trash his predecessors. His transformation plan will point to their toxic legacy as the reason Tesco has to change. 

Burying the past regime is a privilege that was never afforded to Phil Clarke, who inherited the mantle of Terry Leahy just as Tescopoly growth era overheated. Mike Coupe will struggle with the legacy of City sweetheart Justin King, even though his first step has been to launch a strategic review of Sainsbury’s business as its sales decline. 

Neither Dalton Phillips at Morrisons nor Marc Bolland at M&S had the chance to cast off the charismatic leaders of the past. That has hurt their ability to evolve. Dave Lewis has no such issues: he is free to bin recent history and pledge that the future will be different.

Tesco’s historic margin commitment is, well, history

 

Like Labour’s Clause Four, Tesco’s industry-leading margin has underpinned its identity. Like Clause Four, it will have to be dropped for Tesco to reinivent itself. Without unshackling itself from its margin commitment Tesco cannot take a price-war to Aldi and Lidl and manage its £574 million pension payments and sale and leaseback commitments at the same time. 

The good news is that the £250 million black hole in the stated half-year profits has buried the margin commitment anyway. Whatever the real margin is, it is certainly less than 5%. Going forward, the fundamentals behind the commitment are in serious doubt. No-one, not even Lewis or chairman Richard Broadbent, can say with certainty what full-year profits will be, so the margin is a very grey area indeed.

Tesco’s future has to be different from its past

 

Never again will Tesco recover the swagger and arrogance of its heyday. Its decades of unstoppable growth and regional sprawl are over. The Tesco Extra, Tesco Express and Tesco Metro formats have been eating one another’s customers for a while, and now the music has stopped. 

Tesco’s best hope for the future is to invent a new way of being relevant to customers. What that looks like will take time to decide. Fewer stores means massive closures, lower prices means lower margins, more quality means more investment, store transformation means a new vision, online growth means making the profitability work, social media means that pricing is transparent, whether Tesco likes it or not.

Dave Lewis’s only task is to reinvent the business so that it reflects a customer base with which it has lost touch. He doesn’t have to tinker with the old strategy hoping that some quick-fixes will work. His job is to rewrite the rationale for the business as a whole. 

And where Tesco goes, inevitably the market will follow.