Plus, a heavy bet on 1990s nostalgia is paying off for Levi's. Brands are competing for consumer and creator attention with rave-like dance parties, Megan Graham reports for the WSJ Leadership Institute. Between gigs at Ultra Music Festival and Coachella, DJ John Summit played a set this spring at an office-themed party in downtown Manhattan hosted by LinkedIn and Spotify. When HBO promoted its drama "Industry" with its own version of a rave at a Brooklyn warehouse, some of the show's stars turned up on the dance floor. Dance-punk artist The Dare went on around midnight. "We always think about it as sort of two audiences—as folks in the room, but it's also the internet writ large," said Mark Doumet, vice president of originals marketing for HBO and HBO Max. "We really create what I lovingly call content generation factories with these events."
Brand events in New York City are a dime a dozen these days. During Fashion Week or the U.S. Open, creators have more invites than they know what to do with. So your typical cocktail party or brunch has to do a lot more work to cut through. This is why we're seeing increasingly over-the-top brand trips to far-flung locales: Brands want the creators attending to be genuinely awestruck by the excess, and posting to show it all off. Levi's is seizing the rise of 1990s nostalgia to renew its own previous hold on American culture. The denim maker is releasing updated designs that channel vintage favorites, like the 517 jeans featured in the hit show "Love Story." It's also branching beyond jeans into 1990s throwbacks like slip dresses, baby tees and leather jackets. "We're already synonymous with the 90s style," said Anne Cambria, vice president of global marketing. "We really want to amplify the moment."
The retro push is working: The company forecasts sales growth as high as 7.5% during the year ending in November, which would be its best gain since going public again in 2019, not counting a post-pandemic rebound. The strategy also stands to benefit from Levi's plan to open more branded stores, where it can tightly control its visual merchandising and cross-sell full outfits. Analysts call the retail expansion risky, requiring new real-estate and merchandising expertise as well as traffic from consumers being squeezed by higher gas and other prices."If you build them and the consumer doesn't come, you're kind of screwed," said BNP Paribas analyst Laurent Vasilescu. The box-office failure of "Digger" over the weekend shows how hard it remains for movie studios to pack theaters with original films in genres other than horror, Ben Fritz notes for the Journal.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing