School of hard rocks

Breaking free from uniform campaigns

What?: Clothing retailers are having music for breakfast:

Lenny Kravitz, Avril Lavigne, Plain White T’s, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Vanessa Carlton, and Hayden Panettiere are all to promote Kohl’s back-to-school clothing campaign which kicked off on 20th July. A Facebook competition offering $10,000, concert tickets, $1,000 in Kohl’s gift cards, and artist-autographed merchandise will runalongside in-store promotions. Entrances toKohl’s stores will also be decorated to evokea rock concert experience and a back-to-school website will highlight a dedicated section for each artist involved. The campaign runs with the tag line “Inspired by the artists . . . worn by you.”

JC Penney (with help from Saatchi & Saatchi New York) is tapping landmark ‘80s brat-pack movie The Breakfast Club for its back-to-school campaign. A new website, and commercial directed by artist David LaChappelle, features various remixes of the Simple Minds’ track ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. The accompanying visuals highlight different JC Penney clothing collections via reworked versions of the original movies’ characters – each with their own distinctive style. An EP entitled ‘JCPenney Presents: Don’t You Forget About Me (The Covers),’ featuring the original Simple Minds version of the track and five other versions (by artists such as Hawk Nelson, Pacific!, Soul Mafia, and Son Lux) is now on sale.

J C Penny is also giving teens the chance to become a presenter at the 2008 Teen Choice Awards – hosted by teen queen Miley Cyrus – via an online karaoke video competition entitled Rock Your Look. Other prizes include $1000 for clothes, tickets to the show, and JCP gift certificates.

So what?: JC Penney sensibly distanced itself from a much publised unauthorised advert that depicted two teenagers ‘Speed Dressing’. JC Penney, however, has managed to pour some of that ad’s same teen empathy into their latest Breakfast Club campaign. It mirrors the cult film, right down to the ‘ham-throwing indie girl’ but steers clear of Judd Nelson’s volatile criminal character – giving it a High School Musical feel. Whether the film has the same resonance with today’s youth is questionable, but the site itself is engagingly constructed enough to make it stand up in its own right. Kohl’s campaign, on the other hand, opts for a traditional endorsement stance of leveraging its portfolio of brand-associated celebrities. It’s incredibly well executed, but there is still plenty of room to get more personal with
their teen audience.

“To quote that pioneer of teen angst, Morrissey, “the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life”. The same can be said of endorsements that see music in only one dimension. JC Penney and Kohl’s are taking a broader approach, capturing both ends of the buying spectrum with their campaigns: genre-conscious teens and those all important nostalgic adult pockets.”
Giles Fitzgerald, Editor, BBF

www.jcpbrands.com
www.kohls.com
www.rockyourlook.com