Marketing Communications

Marketing Communications



Marketing Communications

Discuss your understanding on Advertising? Developments in telecommunications, electronics and computing are combining to form a new era of marketing communications opportunities.

This report will evaluate the advertising communication strategynand campaigns of two arch rivals Levis Straus and Wrangler.

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Levi's and Wrangler are two major American brands that are well known for their quality of denim and cotton jeans globally. Wrangler's main competitors in the jeans market were Levi Strauss and Lee. In 1988, when Wrangler hired the Martin Agency, its share of the jeans market was 7 percent, compared to Levi Strauss's 24 percent and Lee's 12 percent.

Since the 1980s Levi Strauss worked hard to claim the young urban market with its 501 jeans. Levi's 501 television commercials, created by the San Francisco agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, traded on the mystique of hipness with its use of blues music and young actors portraying city youth. Levi followed this with a series of ads for its 505 jeans (stressing comfort, not hipness) that sought to hold on to its share of the so-called lost jeaneration of baby boomers.

Lee developed ads that concentrated on a primarily female target group. According to Steven Rosengren, an account executive at Lee, "Lee is more contemporary, with a younger wearer [than Wrangler]. The primary target is 18-24. Confident achiever is the image we're trying to establish." To target it's core group, Lee relied on a series of commercials and print ads that employed the theme "Lee. The Brand That Fits." Like Levi Strauss, Lee's ads emphasized moodiness and sex appeal. Lee was not pitching itself as the maker of working jeans.

2. Critically discuss the current trends within advertising and promotion with appropriate reference to practical examples and sources?

The Levi's brand has been incoherent in the last few years, having lost the powerful place it hit in the 80s and 90s. Much of its latest advocating - particularly BBH's Dangerous Liason ad administered by Ringan Ledwidge - has endeavoured to inject some of the sexiness previously associated with the emblem by referencing its annals, and Go forward, the first crusade from W+K Portland for Levi's, is ploughing a alike furrow.

The campaign ran across TV, print, and digital (with the website launching tomorrow) and, according to executive creative director Susan Hoffman, wants to pay homage to Levi's history, "but also to refresh and reinvent the idea of a pioneering spirit for the times in which we live". These times are of course that of a recession and the locations feature a manifesto proposing that one of the responses is to abandon suits and make a come back to good ol' fashioned hard graft (presumably finished while wearing Levi's casual trousers) - "I am the new American pioneer, looking forward, not ever back," it states. "No longer content to delay for better times... Iwill work for better times. Cause no one built this homeland in suits." The two TV spots extend in a alike vein, featuring works by US ...