Crocs appeal

By Becky Johns, Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 11:02 am

Crocs appeal

The iconic boat sandal Crocs had become both mocked and imitated, but the brand’s fortunes have been rejuvenated through a character-led story based on its Croslite technology

AdMap – June 2011 by Marshall Ross, Cramer-Krasselt

It’s a CEO’s dream: a product catches fire almost by accident and then takes off like a rocket, seemingly able to soar without the cost of marketing. But then you wake up and realize that the growth would have limits and the product’s story was being written by others – others who don’t like you.

This is the dream-to-nightmare scenario that global footwear maker Crocs recently experienced. A euphoric high, and then a slam back to Earth. But it’s also an example of how fast-acting the power of story can be. Just months after experiencing near-death lows in late 2009, Crocs has control over its narrative, is on its way to broader and healthier growth and is making new friends all over the world.

MARKET CONTEXT

Crocs began life in 2002 as a boat shoe. That explains a lot about why the Crocs iconic sandal looks the way it does. It’s designed to work well in water. Its rubber-like material, actually not rubber at all but a proprietary closed-cell resin called Croslite, helps you keep your grip on wet and slippery surfaces, won’t absorb water and then weigh you down, dries quickly, and is mold and mildew resistant. Just what boaters need.

It’s also incredibly comfortable. Croslite, precisely because it isn’t rubber, forms to your foot. After just a few hours, your pair gives a custom fit. They’re so comfortable that boaters didn’t confine their Croc-wearing to their boats. They wore them everywhere. Which is how the rocket was lit. Crocs don’t exactly blend in.

It wasn’t long before the sandal’s unusual looks became a kind of magnet. Suddenly, everyone wanted a pair. The company sold more than 100 million pairs and could only just keep up with demand. But the winds of fashion are nothing if not fickle – even for shoes some would call anti-fashion. The look of Crocs and their sudden ubiquity drew haters. Backlash set in.

While the sandals continued to sell, growth stalled dramatically. And new styles, designed to draft off the sandal’s success while widening the brand’s appeal, faltered. Crocs was left with excess inventory, which it began to sell at heavily discounted levels. The stock nosedived from a high of $68.98 in October 2007 to a low of $1.04 in November 2008. Wall Street was not happy. People were beginning to write the brand’s epitaph.

OBJECTIVES

We had two simply stated tasks: First, create distribution and sales success for new styles, while promoting the original sandal, which still represented the bulk of the company’s sales. Second, create a brand out of a product. Crocs was a one-shoe wonder. That wouldn’t work for long. Crocs needed to be something bigger in sales and message.

THE BIG IDEA

Crocs was being framed by rejecters as a homely shoe for people without taste. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, they were the sweat pants of shoes. In that kind of light, the new styles – 250 of them and counting – simply could not be seen.

We reckoned the fastest way to the future was to go backward, and explain the shoe for the first time. Remember Croslite? This feather-light, odour-resistant, form-to-fit material is what makes a pair of shoes a pair of Crocs. That story needed telling to combat against cheap imitators selling rubber look-alikes at a fraction of the price and drive home the comfort and ergonomic properties of all Crocs shoes – including the surprisingly diverse and fashion-forward new styles.

Crocs needed a new face. For a large group of people, it had the opportunity to be recast from a quirky look to a sensory brand, a distinctive champion for your feet’s well-being.

STRATEGY

One of the most important things many marketers fail to recognize when they attempt a reboot is that no matter how hard you try, you can never get away from yourself. Crocs, even without a story, was not a blank slate. The personality we would give it and the people we would seek to share it with had to somehow ring true.

Ken Chaplin, Crocs’ new marketing chief, had a smartly intuitive sense of where the brand’s real heart and soul might be found. While we would ultimately compete against fashion brands for people’s footwear dollars, Ken believed Crocs should not attempt to mimic that model. Could we gain serious consideration, he challenged us, without taking ourselves too seriously?

Key to making that happen was a strategy that focused our work on a group of independently minded women we call the Moxies. What makes Moxies special is their willingness to look past labels and see a product independent of its brand. (Yes, millions of these women actually exist.) If they think they’ll like something, they’re far more willing to give it a whirl than their more label-conscious friends. They still want style. They still want compliments. They’re just more open-minded about how to get them.

Embracing this mindset liberated the work from those mysterious rules of fashion communications that celebrate pretension over purpose and doom a brand to nothing more than a logo-flavored stylebook. Besides, Crocs had tried to follow the ‘image-first-meaning- never’ approach when it first launched its new styles. It didn’t work. So the Moxie mindset, with its brave willingness to hear a story, was the right kind of mental match for a brand with a story to tell, helping to distinguish Crocs from cheap imitators and trend-chasing competitors, such as Skechers, Sperry TopSiders and Havaianas.

EXECUTION

The Crocs brand needed a second look. So we created something that’s hard to ignore. Meet Croslite.

Croslite is the miracle material that makes every pair of Crocs your foot’s best friend. And now it’s the icon that’s helping to transform Crocs from a strange looking clog to a brand that makes your feet feel really good. In any style.

The campaign launched in support of the brand’s 2010 spring/summer line, spanning TV, print, out-of-home, point-of-sale, social media, digital and public relations, all carrying the ‘Feel the Love’ message, touting Crocs as the shoe that loves you back.

Moxies have their own media habits and we made sure Crocs shared them. Advertising appeared on programming and in publications that appealed to our adventurous and confident target, such as Lifetime, Bravo, E!, the Real Simple website, US Weekly and In-Style. We blanketed several key markets with prominent and unexpected out-of-home ads – a first for the brand. We also considered the retail experience, bringing the campaign both in-store and online.

We also enlisted influencers such as celebrity life-stylist Allison Deyette for events and press outreach to encourage people to take a fresh look at the brand and learn more about how Crocs shoes fit within their life and wardrobe all year round.

Finally, we leveraged the large numbers of devoted and passionate fans Crocs already had online to launch a new Crocs community called Vitamin C. We named five fans to serve as official ‘Crocs ambassadors’ as part of the roll-out. These correspondents for the brand attend events, blog about their lives and connect with other fans.

RESULTS

Less than a year since the launch of the campaign, the turnaround is dramatic:

• Sales are up 31% on the previous year and the average selling price has increased by over 12% since the beginning of the campaign.
• Knowledge of Crocs’ diverse range of designs is up by 57%.
• Consideration of the Crocs brand among purchasers and non-purchasers has increased by 8% and 22% respectively.
• Crocs was ranked tenth in a YouGov 2010 Most Improved Brand Buzz Ranking.
• Wall Street has responded, with the stock price doubling since the campaign began.

The effort has so resonated that Crocs distributors in Europe are supporting the brand with their own budgets, extending the campaign to the uK, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and, most recently, Brazil.

And while the goal was never to convert those who would probably never be converted, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that even some former haters have seen the light.

The real win, though, is that the brand now knows unequivocally what it stands for and what its role is in the world.

And thanks to the Croslite character, Crocs designers can continue to reshape the look of the brand, tweaking its style, knowing its unique comfort story will always be there.