They Get It: Coach Poppy Project
In an earlier post, I talked about all the fun I had watching Livestream’s coverage of Social Media Week. While I learned a lot in all the sessions I “attended”, I must admit my favorites were from Lucky magazine’s first-ever Fashion & Beauty Blogger (FABB) Conference. Speakers included fashion and entertainment royalty (Jenna Lyons AND Joan Rivers? Seriously, best conference lineup EVER.), as well as reps from a number of top fashion and beauty brands.
During a session on how fashion and beauty bloggers can access and develop relationships with larger brands, David Duplantis, SVP for Global Web and Digital Media at Coach, talked about a very innovative campaign his company launched last year.
The Poppy Project was developed to spread the word about Coach’s Poppy line of affordable luxury items. Here’s how the project worked, according to Creativity Online:
To participate, online fashion bloggers register their sites to the Poppy Project to receive a customized code that will place a colorful Poppy vine on their site. Participants grow their vine by getting others to tweet a chosen personal hashtag. The blogger with the greenest thumb, or, the biggest vine, will then win [a] $2500 Coach shopping spree. Also, hidden in the growing vines will be bags that users can click on for special gifts.
Coach Poppy Project (via Creativity-Online.com)
Coach’s decision to reach out to bloggers and their followers is brilliant. Many luxury brands, regardless of industry, take a less-interactive approach to marketing, fearing that if any external voices join in the conversation, it will tarnish the brand. Even the simplest move, such as adding a “Like” button for Facebook, can be too much.
But by engaging fashion bloggers (who have the potential to generate lots of word-of-mouth referrals), Coach was able to spread the word about Poppy to a plugged-in, younger audience–which was their target with this fresh, colorful line. Coach gets it because the entire Poppy Project, from the contest concept to the graphics used, reflected the line’s image–an important lesson for any brand that chooses to use new media to build its following.
Media Merge 