Takeaways:
Billboards force brands to focus on a simple message that reinforces their essential values.
This Ralph Lauren ad is an effective use of the medium. The company seems aware that its ‘preppy traditionalism’ is increasingly at odds with the way most young people (even wealthy ones) want to signal status. So it is trying to evolve the way it is perceived by its existing customers to be more casual and progressive.
Strategically, Ralph Lauren has a decision to make, either 1) begin a multi-year process of change in its values and core products, or 2) double down on its historic elitism and settle for a smaller, more moneyed customer base. Unfortunately it seems to be trying to fudge a middle path.
An effective Billboard deserves respect - you have to keep your message very simple, but do a lot of things for your brand all at once. You need to communicate the quality of your brand (high or low), who your product is for, why it’s worth someone’s time and money, and why they should care now, all in a way that can be understood by a broad audience of people.
I passed this Ralph Lauren billboard on the way from the airport the other day, and was so fascinated by it that I schlepped back out to Chelsea the next day to snap a photo. It does a pretty good job against the above billboard checklist, but at the same time reveals a brand at a point of cultural turmoil - Ralph Lauren's ‘preppy traditionalism’ has long since passed being cool; in fact the status it signals is now a touchstone for socioeconomic resentment.
In this billboard Ralph Lauren seems deeply aware of a need for reinvention, but at the same time is shackled by brand baggage and yesterday’s customers.
The edge of acceptable wokeness
The ad contains no words, other than the name of the brand. In itself this communicates quite a lot:
We are an established brand - you’ve heard of Ralph Lauren, and our credibility is such that we don’t need to convince you of our quality.
We are a premium brand - the creative is uncluttered and has very few elements in order to reflect this.
In addition, this billboard is in the middle of Chelsea in London - a posh borough a bit like the Marina in San Francisco or Manhattan’s upper East side. Ralph Lauren know their existing audience (westernised, wealthy, style-conservative…living in Chelsea), and are not trying to convert a new demographic with this campaign.
Wealthy, privileged young people in urban environments are highly sensitive to how they are perceived by their peers while out and about (especially in the UK). With this ad and the broader campaign Ralph Lauren is trying to communicate that they can help their wealthier-than-average customers look more woke and less stuffy, and ultimately minimize judgment by young people around them.
Let’s take a look at the ad:
On the surface it is quite uncontroversial. A happy young caucasian male(?) with long hair is wearing bright, preppy and slightly ruffled clothes. He looks like he probably goes to a private school, but maybe sneaks out to party at the weekend.
However, the look is quite a departure from the three-piece suits and cocktail dresses; the Polo Club set from which Ralph Lauren the brand was born. It’s even quite a digression from today's ubiquitous, clean-cut Ralph Lauren polo shirt look; for decades a beloved staple of what you might call ‘management-consultant-casual’.
The primary colour messiness of the style in the ad indicates something more playful and less serious. Secondly, the ruffled cuffs, long hair and baseball cap are there to indicate a loosening of Ralph Lauren formality.
There’s a more subtle subtext at work, though, one that I think has been quite cynically employed by the team who put together this creative.
The model is in some ways gender-ambiguous and in some ways not - long hair and a fairly androgynous face are offset with traditionally male clothing and quite masculine hands. Likewise, the primary colour dress and rainbow-detailed baseball skirt the edge of an LBTQ-friendliness without explicitly acknowledging it.
Ralph Lauren appears to be hedging; it wants to be perceived to be woke and progressive, without having to explicitly say so or commit itself culturally. And this is exactly the message it wants to carry through to its customers, who are historically quite small ‘c’ conservative when it comes to wading into the controversial topics of the day.
Ralph Lauren is saying, “You can be perceived to be a bit more liberal, without having to actually get into the political messiness of the whole thing.”
There are a couple of things I don’t understand about the ad. For one thing the model is just wearing a lot of clothes…like way too many. A tie, a shirt, a blazer, a baseball cap and a sweater wrapped around the waist. But most of it is minor and I’m willing to chalk it up to a maximalist fashion shoot credo that I am too uninitiated to ‘get’. In general I think the creative team did a good job showing, rather than telling, the message they intended.
I’m more interested, though, in why a large amount of thought and design resulted in an extremely cautious step into repositioning the brand, rather than something more explicit or bold.
It helps to look at a recent history of the brand.
Ralph Lauren’s baggage
Unfortunately, Ralph Lauren hasn’t been cool for a while. One of my favourite references to the decline of the brand is from William Gibson’s sci-fi novel Pattern Recognition, wherein the protagonist Cayce Pollard has a kind of preternatural sensitivity to style, that means she feels physically ill when exposed to bad fashion:
“My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tinture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”
And this was written twenty years ago!
Despite its enduring uncoolness, Ralph Lauren has been able to stake out profitable territory by marketing primarily to the booming finance-and-consulting class (as well as their kids). Along with puffy Patagonia vests and chinos, their never-ending range of inoffensive and clean-looking shirts has provided a reliable fallback for a kind of fashion agnostic upper-middle-class militia.
You can only milk a dead horse for so long though. As the polo shirts have become more and more ubiquitous, they’ve become cheaper, and lower quality, and show up more and more on sale shelves and in Nordstrom outlets, all of which hurts the Ralph Lauren brand overall.
Secondly - and more urgently for Ralph Lauren - the values their brand represents have become a source of social resentment.
Rising costs and a decreasing standard of living are finally starting to be felt by those in the socioeconomic groups adjacent to Ralph Lauren’s customers in Europe and America. Coupled with a perception of widening wealth inequality between the ultra-rich and everyone else, things that symbolize establishment, conservative wealth are becoming incredibly unpopular, especially amongst young people.
And in terms of branding, it’s harder to think of a logo more associated with the conservative ultra-rich than Ralph Lauren - a crest of an ivy-league billionaire's son on horseback, playing a game so exclusive and requiring so much wealth that you will literally never play it.
Compounding this resentment is a growing mainstream belief that wealth inequality is also inextricably tied with issues of race inequality, LGBTQ discrimination, and other forms of cultural oppression. In America, for example, mainstream media has had wall-to-wall coverage for years on how old, selfish, rich Republicans are trying to legislate away gay people’s right to marry, women’s right to abortions and contraceptives, and how the Republican party continually tries to disenfranchise non-white voters with predatory and unnecessary voting regulation.
In short, looking traditionally wealthy and conservative is increasingly uncool, and if you take a browse around Ralph Lauren’s online catalogues, you'll see that their models look just like the kind of elitist douchebags who are currently showing up as Hollywood supervillain elitist douchebags on the big screen.
Woke or broke?
If you’re Ralph Lauren and want to avoid the TJ Maxx bargain bucket, I think you can do one of two very different things:
Actually change - ditch the polo playing jock and find a less conservative smart-casual style, like Scotch & Soda or Sørensen.
Double-down on elitism - target a smaller market of far wealthier customers with high-end, highly conservative fashion.
Moving your brand back up-market is very difficult, but not impossible - in the early 2000s Burberry brilliantly escaped its association with ‘chavs and football hooligans’ to be the kind of brand now preferred by the young and ultra-wealthy, especially in China.
It’s unlikely, though, that Ralph Lauren would choose this path. The accounting department probably couldn’t stomach the loss of revenue from taking all those polo shirts out of circulation, and the supply chain and marketing costs of producing and promoting only ultra-high quality clothes would be existentially risky.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Ralph Lauren is willing to take the first option either.
The billboard I snapped is part of a Spring 2023 collection named ‘California Dreaming’, with the stated goal being to ‘reimagine coastal elegance’.
Rather than moving away from wealthy, preppy traditionalism, though, its trappings are on full display:
The middle path always feels safe, and at a big company is doubtless easier to sell internally. I can imagine a powerpoint presentation to executives, explaining how Ralph Lauren can ‘appeal to a new generation of more progressive Ralph Lauren customers, while retaining the style and tradition for which we have become beloved’.
And it may in fact be safe for middle-management and the board, who can move companies or retire if things go south. But it isn’t safe for the long-term survival of the company and brand. It is in fact the slow train to irrelevance that Ralph Lauren has been riding for more than twenty years, and which William Gibson alluded to in Pattern Recognition - a dilution of quality and uniqueness until there is nothing left.
Nice billboard though!