Before women could vote in national elections they got a shoe specifically designed for them: Keds. It’s a classic example of marketing: identify a market segment (middle class women) with a need (a more comfortable shoe), and create a product specifically to meet that need. Keds didn’t try to be everything to everyone, and that was central to its success.
Over the years women from Katherine Hepburn to Donna Karan wore them. When some pro women tennis players started to wear Keds on the court they created a Champions line. Jennifer Grey wore them in “Dirty Dancing”.
While a few years ago Taylor Swift did TV ads for Keds, today Keds CMO Emily Culp is using a mobile-first, omni-channel campaign to promote the brand. They call the campaign “Ladies First Since 1916”. She talks about “micro-content”, saying, “How we start building our content is we think about mobile first. Everything our consumer does is in mobile and it originates there; so we build content for mobile and then we fan out to the other channels from there.” Their 100th birthday campaign will include social media channels Facebook (over 3 million likes for their page), Twitter, and Instagram, and print ads, too.
Culp also knows the challenge of the post-modern identity of today’s consumer.
She may be going into work one day channeling an Audrey Hepburn style look or dress if you will. The next day, she may decide to channel more of a Yoko Ono person, or I should say style. Where that’s interesting is that it shows how our consumer has so many different sides to her and as a brand we need to honor that, and one of the ways we’re doing that is by building a diverse collective — we call it the Keds Collective — of women who really represent and embrace the multifaceted nature of our consumer.
This is a pretty fascinating marketing challenge, and calls into question how to create your customer profiles or personas.
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