Calvin Klein’s CMO on taking a different path from rival luxury brands
At The Drum Live in London, the marketing chief explains why investing in big tech platforms yields monotonous results, the importance of tailoring customer experiences, and what the fashion brand gains from partnerships with influencers like Kendall Jenner.
Calvin Klein / CK
Just over a year ago, Jonathan Bottomley joined Calvin Klein with big dreams of making it the most desirable lifestyle brand in the world. Today, he tells The Drum that the mission is going to plan.
“What I’ve tried to do is bring one of my core beliefs, which is that I truly believe in the transformative power of brands,” Bottomley explains. “And that isn’t just big picture and old school advertising. It’s in everything that you do.” That means everything from how the clothes feel to how boxes arrive at customers’ doors to the e-commerce experience.
“A lot of [the technologies available to us] have been to do with the ability to be more precise about who you’re talking to, to manage your journey,” he adds. “Everyone is paying Google, Meta, Snap, Tiktok and WeChat. They’re paying the big platforms to show up, and there’s not a great deal of differentiation that you can now create through that investment. Everyone’s doing the same thing, everyone’s got the same tools by and large.”
The downside is that brands are broadly showing up in front of the same customers. What Bottomley stands by is that it isn’t just about the content or communication; it’s about the many other things organizations do, be that a value proposition or promise.
His next point is about serving the business. “Brands need to be extremely focused on the mid to bottom-funnel activities, tuning everything that you’re doing to be as precise as possible,” he adds. “Fantastic and precise audience segmentation, making sure that not just the communication is tuned to travel and tuned to engage, but elevate the platforms that you own.”
That might be social media, a store, a website, or a call center. Elevate the experiences that those channels offer consumers.
Over the past 10 to 15 years, Bottomley says he’s had the opportunity to prove the power of what marketing campaigns and activities are truly delivering for businesses. This means marketers should be involved in strategic conversation around growing brands, which feeds into Bottomley’s ambitions for Calvin Klein.
He adds: “It sounds lofty and ambitious, but there’s purpose behind the words. Desire is the lever to create value for a business like ours."
The storytelling aspect is what sets brands apart and creates demand. Bottomley says that when you walk into a Calvin Klein store or visit the website, that’s what customers should feel. “Marketing is one aspect of creating desire, but product is the primary vehicle for that,” he continues. “We’re a design-led business, we’re a product-led business.
Creating desire within the fashion world is an ever-evolving task. Brands need to be thoughtful about every single execution. “So that they cut through culture, evolve, update and refresh the brand DNA for today,” says Bottomley. “And bring this idea of the dream and desire to life for the consumers we’re focused on.”
One way the brand does that is by working with ambassadors like Kendall Jenner. “When we did our collab with her, the post got millions of likes. A lot of this is meant to be embedded in culture,” he continues. “20 years ago, we would have said, ‘Right, what’s our media buy-in?’ And how are we going to get this content out?’ Now, you’re investing a little bit more in the content of the partnerships themselves.”
He cites one example of this being the partnership with Michael B Jordan. The actor was on billboards for Calvin Klein and scheduled to be on talk show Jimmy Kimmell. While on the late-night program, they did a skit about the billboard, which landed the brand over one billion of impressions.
“We think hard about tuning the content, the partnerships that we create and the story that we tell so it travels in culture,” says Bottomley. “Our media investment is not the key to the reach that we get, but you tune in very specifically up front to launch.”
The marketer says that the second area of investment is with the digital media owners, taking specific looks and talents to Calvin Klein’s audience and consumers and driving that all the way through to sale.
Looking to the future, Bottomley says that the role of the CMO will change with ever-evolving technology advances. “AI is going to play a big role in terms of the way that we execute certain things and I think that will be a benefit to us,” he concludes.
“The CMO of the future will start to play with and understand their expertise in those technical spaces as well. The core will remain the same, but I think the tools will evolve and you need to be the expert of those tools in your business so that you can remain the authority in that space.”