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Friday, September 26, 2003
Levi's closes last US plants. What do you expect from a firm that has lost any semblance of strategy, and just as important, lost it's grip on innovation?
I love jeans. Levi's started putting out an innovative new line a few years back called Levi's Vintage Clothing. LVC was not just another marketing gimmick - it was a real brand-builder. They focused on reproductions of vintage clothes as close to authentic as possible - using top quality materials and hand-done finishes.
LVC's jeans were absolutely phenomenal, and caused quite a stir in the world of cool. Why? They represented Levi's leveraging their most critical strategic resource: 100+ years of jeans-making history, and all the skill, knowledge, and love that went into those jeans. Most importantly, people were actually willing to pay a premium for wearing levi's - for buying into the authentic history of the Levi's brand.
What happened? First, the line was incredible hard to get in the US, because of the standard marketeer's totall wrong assumption that American men all want to look like Jerry Seinfeld. Note to marketers: we don't want to look like dorks with bad jeans. Then, for some reason (my guess is corporate inertia), the creativity got sucked out of LVC, and worse still, the innovation which was supposed to trickle down into their cheaper mass-market lines stopped doing so.
This was sad to watch. LVC represented one of the few really good integrated brand and innovation strategies I have seen in a *long* time. Unfortunately, corporate strategy was out of alignment with it, and so the axe is dropping on Levi's.
The point is that innovation, even when brilliantly strategized and excuted, must be supported across the firm by a coherent corporate strategy. Otherwise, it will most likely flounder and fail - like the sad case of LVC: a brilliant product line, but ultimately an underutilized strategic resource.
Lesson: Dockers is the anti-future. Don't Dockers your strategy.
The irony is that Dockers is a classic business school case about marketing and innovation. Yes, b-school is almost totally detached from the real world. Cases like this are a big part of why most MBAs get the creativity and coolness sucked out of them. When we covered the case in b-school, Dockers was presented as one of the greatest fashion innovations in recent years. I spat my coffee into my lap.
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