Leverage Other Brands Like Hilfiger Did

Image courtesy of Kunstakademiets Designskole via Flickr

A few days before my first day of grade 9, I bought (ok, my mom did!) my first pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans. This Hilfiger guy was getting huge. Everyone was wearing his clothing on TV.

But how did he get so big?

Back then I could care less.

Now, I care. And how he got so big is one of the most genius and fastest ways to become a big brand.

The Campaign Creator

A man by the name of Gorge Lois had just come off creating the brilliant I Want My MTV spots.

The goal we all know. Get people to take action and call their cable companies and tell them you want MTV! Getting famous musicians to deliver the message was brilliant. Of course the musicians would benefit from MTV being picked up. Everyone was a winner.

That campaign was a mirror image of “I want my Maypo”. Maypo was a cereal and George created that as well. He had famous athletes like Mickey Mantle, who kids looked up to bawling like babies saying “I want my Maypo”. What do you think kids did? Went to their parents and asked for Maypo!

One thing I want to point out and I’ve mentioned it before on another marketing site, you can recycle creative ideas again and again. That’s what George did with “I want my MTV”.

Leverage Other Brands Like Hilfiger

“I can make Tommy Hifliger a famous and important brand in a couple of hours”. Now watch the genuis of how Hilfiger was thrust into the limelight and his clothes found the way onto people like me.

I’ve tried to fast forward the video to start at 32:22 but it’s not working. You’re going to start at 31:47.

https://youtu.be/DJwahIx7-to?t=32m22s

George is so right. It could have taken Tommy millions of dollars and a few years to become well known.

Now a days you can achieve the same without having to spend millions. You can do this online and reach millions of people through different avenues. Some paid like Google or Facebook ads. And some free trendjacking relevant trending topics on Twitter or Newsjacking.

You’d have to think how you can create these opportunities. And how you create a similar idea to what George did for Tommy. But the time spent could be well worth it because going the long route could take you years of hard slugging and deep pockets.

The bottom line is since the start of Social Media and blogs, there are no gatekeepers to getting your brand known. You can do what Tommy Hifliger did in the same amount of time and for much, much cheaper.