Young Successful Entrepreneur

I am a huge proponent of building your brand and staying true to it.  If you’re brand is “solid and professional,” then everyone on your team must wear a suit and tie at all times and be a pillar of professionalism.  If your brand is “productive and fun,” then your culture must be upbeat and all of your client interactions must end with a bright smile :).

Now lets say your brand has worked for you but now you are growing rapidly.  You started with a niche group of people and are now gaining momentum.  Do you change your brand to accommodate to your new (and much bigger) market?  That’s what American Apparel has done.  Jeff writes a great blog about how sex sells and influences companies to “take the money.”

I want to take a step back and talk about American Apparel’s brand based on these ads:

I believe that AA actually has a pretty great strategy tied to its marketing efforts.

AA started as “green” and ethics minded.  Lets say they branded themselves very well with the sustainable minded people.  However, Jeff points out that only 10%-12% of sustainable minded people actually go out of their way to buy “green safe” products.  So what are the other characteristics of the sustainable minded?  They are raw, free, rebellious, against “the man”, amateur, and young.  I believe that AA’s ads are meant to further target the “sustainable minded” population.

Take a look at the ad above.  It represents raw, sex, youth, and freedom.  There are a lot of other ones that you can check out be just googling AA ads.  The girls in the ads are looking at you, exposing themselves freely, confident with themselves, and don’t care what you think about them.  They are strong minded and independent.  These are the exact characteristics of the people that AA is targeting.

You see, AA is still a “green” and ethics based company.  The new ads penetrate their target market further and I believe they have done a great job with it.

You can say that they “sold out” because now they’re using sex.  I believe that they haven’t sold out at all.  The ads are not trashy, but a strong statement about confident sexuality and doing what you believe in.