Look the part, be the part

How can a brand with no budget and no awareness create buzz?  A little behavioral science can help.

This comes from the newsletter of Jen Clinehens, a behavioral science specialist.  The brand is Jo Malone, which today is part of the Estée Lauder family.  But at one time, they were a very small, boutique brand based in England and struggling to break into the US market. 

Jo Malone’s eponymous founder managed to wrangle a concession space inside New York City’s glitzy Bergdorf Goodman store, but she had no way of attracting attention from shoppers who had never heard of the brand.

What she did have were 1,000 empty shopping bags with the Jo Malone name on the side.  And they were cool-looking bags. So, she asked 50 friends to walk around the swankiest parts of the city with these distinctive bags.

Nothing was in the bags.  No purchases had been made.  But that wasn’t the point. The point was to expose people to the brand, make it seem familiar and not new (the Familiarity Bias), and imbue the brand with some credibility in the minds of its target consumers.

The ploy worked. The launch was successful and it was only a few years later that Malone sold her brand to Estée Lauder.

(As Proposition Joe said to Avon Barksdale in The Wire, "Look the part, be the part, m*****f*****")