• by Karl Greenberg , October 15, 2015

Nothing comes between controversy and Calvin Klein. The nitroglycerin of social currency, controversy is a key tenet of CK's marketing culture. Melisa Goldie, CMO of the global apparel company, shook that volatile mix at Association of National Advertisers' Master of Marketing Conference on Thursday, closing the first day with a mix of sex, truths and videotape. 

She kicked things off with clips of CK's work over the years, at least one of which, perhaps the most famous, was before the start of Goldie's 15-years-and-counting tenure at the company — yes, the famous campaign starring Brooke Shields, who was at the end of her first 15-year tenure on Earth. Those pieces of creative demonstrated the four truths — controversy, tension, simplicity and embracing culture — that Goldie said defines CK's brand strategy. 

Those truths aren't new. As she pointed out, they derive from a marketing model, consumer adoption of technology, that has been around since the 1950s. For review purposes, the adoption-over-time bell curve comprises innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. 

“We have to build brand evangelism,” she said. “And that is the same challenge faced by creators of new technology. You have to start by making the concept relevant to innovators. To convince a lot of people, you need the help of early adopters.” She added that their advocacy helps the brand bridge a perilous chasm between those on leading edge and the great mass of early and late majority consumers under the statistical dome. “And they are key ROI,” she says. “Business success requires convincing a small group to reach the large group. And to do that you have to have something provocative and disruptive to say. If you want to get attention you have to be disruptive.” 

While innovators embrace controversy, early adopters, she said, respond to cultural tension, such as that evinced by brands like Nike, whose inherent tension Goldie argued, is between the active life and the couch; or Dove, plying the waters between self doubt and the truer definition of beauty; and Apple’s leveraging the “us versus them” tension between individual and the organization. 

Goldie offered CK's examples: the Kate Moss/Marky Mark 90’s era ads that played with tension between innocence and ‘bad boy’ imagery. Arguing that the next truth, simplicity, hooks the early majority, and the late majority and the long tail after that responds to a brand embracing their culture, a la the #mycalvins campaign.

Which leads to the campaign that everyone probably wanted to know about: Justin Bieber as the Marky Mark of the 2000s. She said the decision to use him wasn't easy. “It was the hardest thing I did in my 15 years on the brand.” But she said the decision was easy because it hit all of the buttons. “Is it controversial? Did it leverage tension? Is it simple -- very. And will culture embrace it?” She said the company passed its own test on ROI, but also on the extent to which it was flattered through imitation, most notably by SNL. “At launched we shipped two million units of product, and are reaching for seven times that this year. We cannot keep it on shelves. So our relationship with retailers has grown.”

And, echoing a theme throughout the day: the danger of getting caught up in numbers, she said if they had relied on data they might not have had the chuzpah to do it. “Calvin isn't timid and doesn't get caught up in analytics. If we were we wouldn’t have used [Justin Bieber] in a campaign.” Too controversial.