When is Good Taste Not in Style?

If you are American Apparel(AA) the answer is NOW!

AA, the latest apparel company to hit the fashion scene, is capitalizing on it vertically integrated, “sweat-shop free” operations and its sexually charged advertising to sell T-shirts and other basic, no frills type clothing.

Being one of the only remaining textile manufacturers in the US has enabled AA apparel to shorten its supply chain and respond quicker to changing trends, a strategy that its competition with top heavy management and factories half a world away isn’t able to duplicate. The inspiration for the designs, the design themselves and the production all occurs in house.

However, its founder, Dov Charney, doesn’t believe this operationally efficient strategy is enough. As Charney explains, “the whole sweatshop-free, made in American thing is no longer a selling point – “It’s like a sexy girl who keeps telling you she’s sexy; it’s nauseating” – but will always form the core of American Apparel’s success.

So, Charney has adopted a different strategy, a strategy that has been around forever, use sex to sell products. He has taken his in-house approach to design and production and applied it to their advertising, which is where the controversy begins.

Charney takes many of the ad photos himself, often using female employees as models. What started a couple of years ago as mildly boundary pushing crotch shots of models has now escalated to gritty amateur porn. “Meet Lauren,” exclaims one print ad, in which a young comely blond is photographed only wearing socks while performing a self-satisfying act. The ad reads “Safe to say she really loves her socks.”

Ann Simonton, the founder of Media Watch, says “this is beyond ‘sex sells.’ It goes to a level of humiliation.” There is something about the low resolution snap shots of these young barely legal girls that makes you feel like you are watching the founder play out his nymphomaniac fantasies on a powerless audience.

When did showcasing young, barely legal girls in sexually racy positions become an acceptable from of advertisement?

I guess when young women began buying the product. Jane Buckingham, president of the Intelligence Group, whose Cassandra Report is the arbiter of what’s cool with American’s youth, says that American Apparel is one of the most influential brands going. Today, the brand is prominent among both trendsetters and followers. It appears high in every category of cool- sitting alongside brands such as Marc Jacobs and Diesel, both of which are far more expensive and spend exponentially more money on marketing.

Detlev Zwick, an assistant professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, believes “He [Charney] has a good sense of what he can adopt and where he has to push the envelope in order to grab attention of the youth market – which is completely overwhelmed by marketing messages.”

Americans boycotted Nike when they learned of the horrendous working conditions in some of its South Asian factories (ie. Laborers working for $0.2/hour, female employees sexual molested by supervisors, workers not allowed to use the bathroom facilities but once a day.)

How is making your female employees pose in semi-nude photoshots for company ads not exploiting the young female labor force at AA? If Nike decided to use the pictures of its Asian child labor factories in its advertising (because kids are cute), do you think it would sell more shoes. I seriously doubt it. As a matter of fact I would argue that the backlash would be so severe that the company might never recover.

If Nike, a company touted for its innovative marketing, would never resort to this type of promotion, why do other companies?

I think this is partly because these companies are desperate, cheap, and honestly, uncreative. They want instant publicity and notoriety, but they don’t have the money to hire savvy marketers or time to generate buzz from grassroots efforts, so they take a page from Hollywood that says any publicity is good publicity and they look to push the envelope on what society will accept. Today, that is kiddy porn.

“The best way to show T-shirts these days from an advertising perspective is to put them on good-looking people, and if everyone’s putting them on good-looking people, then you have to put them in strange situations. They‘re just following that formula to a certain extent, says Max Lenderman, a youth marketer.

If by strange you mean inappropriate, then I agree.

But to say that this advertising is formulaic is to imply that it is predictable and necessary for promotion, and that because other companies have succumbed to this form of shock-value advertising to schlep their products that it is acceptable. For every company that has used this form of advertising there are hundreds that haven’t. It would be interested to learn the survival rate of companies that adopt this form of advertising and if they can maintain it over time. Abercrombie & Fitch learned the hard way about the repercussions of using overtly sexual selling tactics, when it was forced to pull the racy holiday edition of its quarterly catalog, which featured naked models and tips for oral sex, when sales dipped 13% over the previous year’s comparable sales.

I believe there are numerous reasons to avoid shock-value advertising, but the main one is that it’s not sustainable. When you resort to human’s basis instincts, there is really no where else to go. It brings instant attention and recognition because of the controversy it generates, but is does little to create staying power and branding.

Like many young Hollywood starlets have come to find out, sex appeal is fleeting, and there is always going to be someone younger, prettier and more unique waiting in the wings ready to use the “sex card” to get noticed.

If American Apparel really wants to be known for its quality cotton clothing, then maybe it should focus on a form of advertising that mirrors that same quality.