Marketing in the News - Week 2 Topic

Changing the way we look at women has been a pretty popular topic for many years. In the past we have held women to look a certain way, have a certain physique, or have a certain skin tone to be considered beautiful. When I heard that Victoria’s Secret was launching a new campaign that was more inclusive for all body types and shades, I was thrilled! I instantly wanted to read more about this topic as soon as I saw it.  

Victoria's Secret has a long history of having a huge influence in many women's everyday lives. It makes many women unhappy with the way they look. Victoria’s Secret has had models undergo super strict diets and extensive exercises for many years to make them fit a specific body type. This article covers the new campaign launch to be more inclusive of all body types. Victoria’s Secret’s attempt to make themselves more inclusive has appeared to have backfired on them as people are feeling as though they are just going through the motions. Victoria’s Secret has been saying all the right things but it has somehow still turned into a flop. The reason for that is because people believe that it is all a performance. The people don’t feel as though this move is based on sincere interest of the people as they have been asking for years for this move to happen. Instead, this is taking place years after their competition has made the change and coincidentally coincides with current media attention on women’s topics. Ironically the value proposition of Victoria’s Secret is “More than stores, more than products ... Victoria’s Secret & Co. works to empower our associates, give back to our communities and put our customers first.” Customers, however, believed that they were not being taken into consideration unless they fit into that stereotyped mold. 

The three main points of this article are the timing of when they announced their new campaign, how people have seen this move before, and how it takes more than a band-aid to clean up the mess. The timing of the campaign was executed at the worst timing possible. Victoria’s Secret had been pushing off the idea of doing an inclusive campaign even after many of their competitors began taking on this challenge. When Victoria's Secret finally launched their campaign, they got a lot of backlash for doing it all these years later after people continued to ask them to change. 

This campaign idea was something that people had seen before, so they were not surprised by this move. Several companies such as Dove and Aerie had used similar campaign strategies attempting to include models with similar body types as their customers. This method gained a lot of popularity and has been very successful, but it was put into motion several years ago. 

Before Victoria’s Secret had released the campaign, they didn’t go out to the public and apologize for excluding so many women from their target audience, but instead decided to move on and act like they never excluded anyone. As a result, they may never recover some of their lost potential customers.

                

Victoria’s Secret is marketing through t.v. ads and commercials as well as social media. The main challenge that Victoria’s Secret is facing is that it is getting backlash for just now introducing this new inclusive idea. What makes Victoria’s Secret’s job harder is the fact that people have lost their trust in Victoria’s Secret. A lot of people turned away from them and as a result, it will be hard to get them back again. Just like that, they have lost their credibility. Victoria’s Secret doesn’t appear to try to do anything about this situation and it seems like maybe they are just hoping it will all work out since it doesn’t specifically say how they will be approaching this challenge. Their competition that had made these changes years ago are now beginning to benefit from the lost customers of Victoria’s Secret.

The marketing approach that Victoria’s Secret used is new to them but it is not a new concept. In fact, Dove had done a similar campaign launch which had the same idea of having body positivity be one of the main focuses. It had seemed like Victoria’s Secret was attempting to recreate that same idea after seeing how well they did after making that move. Originally, the buyer persona for Victoria’s Secret was young females who love fashion and have a lot of money and want to have a high-end life-style. With the new campaign, Victoria’s Secret has expanded their target persona to be more inclusive of all body types.

              

        The marketing approach was a good idea but it was definitely put into effect at the wrong time. They should have done it at the same time as the other brands so they would all be at the same level. I also believe that Victoria’s Secret should have apologized to the masses for being so toxic in how they have behaved with their “perfect models” and not just move on and act like it didn’t happen. If I was the product manager, I would have listened to the people and what they wanted years ago and tried being more inclusive instead of waiting after everyone else has done the idea and randomly bringing it up to gain some popularity on the news/media.

A few important lessons that I learned from this article are that timing is a crucial point in marketing. Paying attention to what the people want is key to selling your brand/product. If a company misses their mark and doesn't listen, they could potentially lose customers for good.

ARTICLE LINK: adweek.com-victoria's-secret-misses-the-mark

RELEVANT LINK: victoriassecretandco.com