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With 'Made By You,' Converse Lets Wearers' Portraits Sell Chucks

This article is more than 9 years old.

Converse today continues its rich tradition of involving its consumers and brand fans in its marketing, unveiling its “Made By You” campaign. From around the globe, the company curated a collection of Chuck Taylor All Star portraits from a diverse collection of wearers—celebrities and regular folks.

The company, which for years has acknowledged the very powerful asset it had in its wearers—think Jackson Pollock, Joey Ramone and Mick Jagger—knows that while other brands work to amass devoted followers, its challenge is to hold onto, indeed, celebrate, those consumers who are its loyal core. Way back in 2004, Converse made headlines for its crowdsourced, product-inspired ad campaign featuring homemade videos, developed by agency Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners.

Then in July 2011 the first Rubber Tracks recording studio opened in Brooklyn under the marketing leadership of CMO Geoff Cottrill, a digitally savvy veteran of Starbucks and Coca-Cola who identified the deep connection between Converse wearers and music. Creating a free studio where unsigned musicians could lay down tracks was an opportunity to inspire brand engagement via a relevant give-back to individuals and to the community.

Today’s “Made By You,” created with current agency Anomaly, is the North Andover, Mass.-based Nike subsidiary’s biggest, most expensive brand initiative to date, said Cottrill, who a year ago assumed additional responsibilities as VP and general manager of Converse Brand & Segments.

“It’s a celebration of the people who have worn Chuck Taylors over the years and have made them their own,” Cottrill said. “Our modern-day image has been powered by the people who have worn them.”

So what’s the consumer insight that guided this effort? “We all want to be our true, authentic self in the world. The research we’ve done around the world [tells us that] the number-one reason why people buy our product is because it allows them to be them.

“The success of our brand has been on amazingly creative people doing amazingly creative things.”

The campaign acknowledges the reality that consumers are already taking loads of pictures of themselves in their Chucks daily and sharing them via social media.

“We see 13,000 to 15,000 [Converse] tags a day,” Cottrill said. “It’s an idea that this is already sort of happening. People are taking pics of their Chucks on the weekend, vacation, whatever it may be,” he said.

But Cottrill’s goal is not to harness Converse’s social-media prowess. “We love the fact that it doesn’t have a harness. It’s been driven by our consumers expressing themselves. We’ve let social media teach us about the brand and the way people think and feel about the brand and then focus our efforts accordingly. We don’t try to dictate or manage the message,” Cottrill said.

In the new campaign, portraits collected from celebrity artists and musicians such as Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, Futura, Jefferson Hack, Sayo Yoshida, Kate Lanphear and Glenn O’Brien will be featured alongside portraits from everyday Chuck Taylor All Star wearers, and used in global exhibitions in streets of New York, Shanghai, Rio and other locations.

The multi-channel campaign, which is global but also “hyper-local,” Cottrill said, will also stretch across online and social media and include launch exhibitions in New York, London, Beijing and Mexico City. Consumers will also have the ability to participate at pop-up portrait studios at Converse retail locations and events around the world.

“Made by You” will run for “an indefinite period of time,” Cottrill added. “We actually haven’t made a big splash in quite a long time. We’re trying to be a contributor to the culture in some ways by putting a spotlight on these things that are happening in the culture. That’s exciting for us.”

Cottrill’s advice for other marketers, based on his experience with this and other Converse efforts? “One of our values is, the consumer decides. It’s an important thing to think about here. We’re seeing our customer take the brand to interesting and new areas we wouldn’t have thought of. Other marketers may resist the places consumers may be pushing their brands into,” he said.

“Because we’re about self expression, we’re always going to be moving. We’re required to always move. Rubber Tracks, our sample album—we never would have gotten there had we not dug in and understood [our consumers’] needs and created something new for them. The consumer decides, at the end of the day. That’s easy to say, hard to do.”