TORONTO – As Abercrombie & Fitch’s U.S. sales dropped by 17 per cent Friday, one branding expert says CEO Mike Jeffries violated some unwritten rules of marketing in a past interview that recently resurfaced.
“If you have a cool brand, you don’t talk about being cool,” said University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management marketing professor Michael Mulvey. “If you’re cool, you know it, and your customers know it.”
Mulvey said customers don’t want to feel like you’ve made them cool with your brand, but there’s another problem: many customers don’t want to feel like they have to exclude others in a negative way to be cool.
“It’s one thing to be an elite brand that’s highly sought after…but it’s another to be an elitist brand, and they’ve crossed the line there,” said Mulvey.
He explains that in the social media era we live in, it’s customers who control the brand as well as the companies themselves.
“They come off a little bit more as an elitist, perhaps a little bit bullyish, and I just don’t think that the majority of Abercrombie customers necessarily want to have that association with them.”
The comments in question?
This quote has recently made the rounds in traditional and social media, and also prompted a Change.org petition that’s garnered more than 70,000 signatures in an effort to force the company to “make clothes for teens of all sizes.”
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“Anyone who’s been to Abercrombie & Fitch in the last few years has probably noticed that they don’t carry XL or XXL clothing for women and their waist sizes for men leave room to be desired,” stated the petition, posted by Benjamin O’Keefe. “Why? Because, they don’t want overweight young people wearing their brand!”
On the topic of why the first quarter was “more difficult than expected,” Jeffries said it was “due to more significant inventory shortage issues than anticipated, added to by external pressures,” in a statement to investors posted Friday.
York University’s Schulich School of Business marketing professor Alan Middleton said inventory issues are a possibility due to changes in currency.
“I assume they get a lot of the stuff out of India and China, in which case those prices have been going up,” he said. “So that’s possible.”
But do the “external pressures” include a public backlash to the brand?
While Middleton said there’s no doubt Jeffries’ comments are bad public relations for the organization, he thinks they’ve had a very minor impact—if any—on the first quarter results.
“How much it actually results in sales loss, as opposed to sales postponement or just not going there, is the tough issue,” he said.
Middleton said it’s not that any single comment will drive people running from Abercrombie, but that continued bad publicity or bad brand experiences will give people a reason not to look for the A&F product specially, relative to competitors. He believes what matters is what happens next.
“If I was a shareholder, I wouldn’t be looking at it so much as the impact on the first quarter results, as rather poor judgment in management,” added Middleton. “In which case, how good is the rest of the judgment in management about other things? That’s what would worry me.”
Do those external pressures include a public backlash to the brand?
Mulvey acknowledged that controversial ads have worked well in terms of building the Abercrombie brand in the past, citing the fact that adds were “sexier, or perhaps a bit sexist,” as well as the “almost homoerotic photography, with guys posing as if they were wrestlers, but anybody who’s truly a wrestler saying ‘that’s not a move in wrestling.’”
He said while those are good ways to build a brand in terms of “youthful, coming-of-age type of offering,” companies like Abercrombie can’t always control the sentiment of that publicity.
“So here they’re seeing the other edge of that sword could perhaps cause them some harm. And so people talking about the brand—in this case—it happens to be negative,” he said. “They need to pay the piper.”
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