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Background:

When Calvin Klein dropped its new spring 2024 campaign with a shirtless Jeremy Allen White wearing the brand’s signature underwear on Jan. 4, it set the internet ablaze. Social media feeds flooded with reaction videos and media outlets covered the campaign widely. The following week, Calvin Klein saw a 30 percent year-over-year increase in underwear sales.

While the brand could never have predicted the gigantic response the campaign would generate, Calvin Klein’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Bottomley says the brand did everything it could to put the strategy in place for it to do so.

“In a culture that’s very flat, how do you create those spikes … we adopt what we call an entertainment mentality,” said Bottomley on stage at the BoF Professional Summit in New York.

This week on The BoF Podcast, BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed sits down with Bottomley to unpack Calvin Klein’s marketing strategy and how they cut through the noise to create cultural moments.

Key Insights

• Calvin Klein’s entertainment mentality can be broken down into three main parts. “Firstly, we put a lot of focus on creating stories and creating content that people are going to want to spend time with. The second thing is we think really hard about the talent, not just in terms of reach of engagement, but the opportunity to create a cultural character, show them in a way that maybe you haven’t seen before,” Bottomley explains. “And then the third thing is media. We work with real intention to blend the media mix, to try and game the algorithm and and really to cut through.”
• Bottomley stresses that the brand does not aim to court controversy. “There’s an authenticity to what we do, which is partly the DNA as a brand. This idea of sensuality and empowerment, they go together,” he says. “It’s much more to do with partnership, creative expression, and this idea of a character that we feel is going to work, but that our partner really believes in.”
• On balancing brand marketing and performance marketing, Bottomley believes the two are intertwined. “The way we think about it is that everything is brand and everything is performance. The imperative of a brand is to lead and to say from within the confines of where culture is going, ‘how can we step outside that and excite people with something?’”

Additional Resources:

• Calvin Klein, Levi’s and the Real Value of Marketing. Both brands are leaning on high-profile advertising campaigns to refresh their image. We find out this week whether that’s translating into increased sales.
• Why Calvin Klein Ads Still Get People Talking. Steamy images of Jeremy Allen White and FKA Twigs pushed the brand — which has a well-documented history of courting controversy — to the centre of conversation once again, proving casting and timing plus a little bit of provocation can fuel relevance.
• Calvin Klein’s New Strategy: Don’t Market the Dream, Market What Sells. As seen in its latest collaboration with skate brand Palace, Calvin Klein is focused on highlighting its most successful categories like denim and underwear.