How do you Differentiate a brand in a
category like denim
Background
-
A Japanese legacy denim brand of the 1940s that pioneered the denim subculture in Japan after WW II.
-
Having lost considerable market share to international and homegrown Japanese brands starting in the 2000s, the brand wanted to revive itself in the Japanese market, and enter India and the UAE.
-
Mandate was to develop the brand proposition. Our process involved a brand audit, primary market research in India and UAE, immersion in Japan, Dubai, Mumbai, secondary research for the denim category, and a semiotic understanding of the category and Japanese culture.
Challenge
-
Differentiate the brand in a category like Denims which had become a commodity with brands featuring at mass, premium, and super premium ranges.
Brand solution
-
For a potent category that had the potential to represent different ideologies ranging from rebellion, masculinity, sensuality, glamour, and more – the space had become too crowded with most brands representing one or more of these.
-
At the functional level, we leveraged the association that Japan has world over with high-end denim, and combined that with the high-end craftsmanship of Big John.
-
As a strong differentiator, we identified the cultural opportunity for the brand in the Japanese cultural construct of Shibusa (which has no parallel in any other culture) and layered it onto the brand.
-
Shibusa embodies Simplicity, Implicitness, Modesty, Silence, Everydayness, Naturalness, Imperfection – values that are timeless in any culture – and is a way of life / personality if chosen.
-
Shibusa has the advantage of being a cultural and an aesthetic construct, and therefore was taken as the basis for brand Big John. It's components when put together evoke feelings of ‘carefully constructed casual’ and ‘seemingly effortless, but with a lot of thought’.
-
This found expression in the product design, retail experience, as well as future communications.
How do you create content in line with societal realities of the day.
Despite a successful, strong new positioning that fed into new content, the channel was losing viewership. Social and cultural constructs like femininity, relationships, love, etc. in the current cultural context were to be defined in line with the new positioning to be taken as a common thread across different story constructs.
How do you dissipate the denim sub-culture beyond urban to semi-urban centres
An online brand, Korra Jeans’ product lines were made of raw selvedge denim making it niche in the category. With a focus on craftsmanship and sustainability, Korra products had great potential in the domestic and international markets, but awareness was low.