Men With Pants: Listening to Khakis...again

October 25, 2010 | Comments (0) | Share

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" is one of my favorite quotes and it's as true in advertising as in any other human endeavor.  Case in point:

The Men Without Pants TV spot that Dockers ran in the 2010 Super Bowl generated quite a bit of attention.  It was the first time they'd run in the Super Bowl since 2002 and they made a big deal about the integrated campaign that included a mobile music discovery application provider and a branded content site to "engage the customer more deeply than a 30 second spot during the game could".  They announced that the campaign would run through 2010.

The spot was a disturbing vision of unattractive guys marching through a field in whitey (and other color)-tighties, singing “I wear no pants”.   They were interrupted with a notice to mankind: Calling all Men – it’s time to Wear the Pants.  According to their YouTube posting,  “The takeaway of the ad is that men might see a glimmer of themselves in the pant-less parade and make the decision to Wear the Pants, both literally and figuratively.”

The spot struck me because it was the antithesis of the initial Dockers campaign that ran in 1987 and was so vividly described by Malcolm Gladwell in his brilliant 1997 New Yorker article, Listening to Khakis:

In the fall of 1987, Levi Strauss & Co. began running a series of national television commercials to promote Dockers, its new brand of men's khakis. All the spots-and there were twenty-eight-had the same basic structure. A handheld camera would follow a group of men as they sat around a living room or office or bar. The men were in their late thirties, but it was hard to tell, because the camera caught faces only fleetingly. It was trained instead on the men from the waist down-on the seats of their pants, on the pleats of their khakis, on their hands going in and out of their pockets. As the camera jumped in quick cuts from Docker to Docker, the men chatted in loose, overlapping non sequiturs-guy-talk fragments that, when they are rendered on the page, achieve a certain Dadaist poetry.

Gladwell’s article was a breakthough for me because it gave incredible insight into a breakthrough ad campaign, and because it articulated how important real research is to successful marketing.  It describes in fascinating detail the academic research regarding the differences in the ways men and women process information and the way Dockers and their agency, FCB, used the research so effectively. It also illustrates beautifully how a successful campaign must evolve and may, in fact, have to be jettisoned due to its success: 

In the early nineties, Dockers began to falter. In 1992, the company sold sixty-six million pairs of khakis, but in 1993, as competition from Haggar and the Gap and other brands grew fiercer, that number slipped to fifty-nine million six hundred thousand, and by 1994 it had fallen to forty-seven million. In marketing-speak, user reality was encroaching on brand personality; that is, Dockers were being defined by the kind of middle-aged men who wore them, and not by the hipper, younger men in the original advertisements. The brand needed a fresh image, and the result was the "Nice Pants" campaign [then] being shown on national television-a campaign widely credited with the resurgence of Dockers' fortunes.

It may not seem like it, but "Nice Pants" is as radical a campaign as the original Dockers series. If you look back at the way that Sansabelt pants, say, were sold in the sixties, each ad was what advertisers would call a pure "head" message: the pants were comfortable, durable, good value. The genius of the first Dockers campaign was the way it combined head and heart: these were all- purpose, no-nonsense pants that connected to the emotional needs of baby boomers. What happened to Dockers in the nineties, though, was that everyone started to do head and heart for khakis. Haggar pants were wrinkle-free (head) and John Goodman-guy (heart). The Gap, with its brilliant billboard campaign of the early nineties-"James Dean wore khakis," "Frank Lloyd Wright wore khakis"-perfected the heart message by forging an emotional connection between khakis and a particular nostalgic, glamorous all-Americanness. To reassert itself, Dockers needed to go an extra step. Hence "Nice Pants," a campaign that for the first time in Dockers history raises the subject of sex.

Fast-forward to 2010.  Dockers spends a ton o’ dough to run a spot with unattractive men without pants in the Super Bowl.  Who would want to identify with them?

Evidently, not enough men. 

The new fall 2010 TV spots for Dockers at JCPenney that are running constantly in football games (which I sort-of watch with my husband) harkens back to 1987 – and 1997.  It’s straightforward, featuring nice-looking pants on nice-looking guys (nice-looking from the waist down, at least).  It doesn’t insult their intelligence (or mine). It’s consumer-centric, focusing on what the target audience actually wants.

It’s a good example of what we mean by

Never Stop [Research-Based Customer-Centric] Communicating.