Is Culture-Shift Marketing The Only "Hack" You Need?

Levi’s was fighting an uphill battle in the 80s.

In an era where Thanksgiving dinners were to be attended in a suit and anything less formal would be frowned upon, Levi’s was selling jeans!

If your suit had a Patch pocket instead of a Flap, you’d get a remark from the security, asking if you’re on leave today - and Levi’s was selling jeans.

Windsor instead of a Seven-fold? Man, someone’s trying to skip work early? Mistress-much?

And Levi…. was selling…. f*king JEANS!!!

Levi’s made $1.6 Billion USD in Q1, 2024 - and they would’ve made much less money if not for their genius “Casual Friday“ campaign.

Let’s talk about that

Something Levi’s did really well in the 80s was hire an amazing set of marketers. Their Jeans was selling well with the working class - Construction workers, plumbers, the blue-collar wage earner - but when has any company worth its salt ever had enough.

How do you capture the much more sophisticated market? More importantly, how do you get these men in suits interested in a product that they never wear?

The answer became simple: Change their habits.

Create a culture shift so significant that your customers have no other choice but to adopt your product (make a good product first, though)

Levi’s made the Dockers during this time - revolutionary, but still, not selling as much.

This was the same time that a hotel in Hawaii announced something called “Aloha Fridays“ - an unheard-of tradition where employees got to wear a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, just to loosen up for the weekend.

Levi’s took this idea and went bonkers with it.

The company created an infographic pamphlet - Guide To Casual Business Wear - the equivalent of a simple eBook back in the day. They took nearly 25,000 copies of this trusty little guide, and sent it to all the HR Managers in the country.

This little stunt worked as follows:

• Company X is a large-scale enterprise (Hence the HR team - again, this was 1992), where everyone from the mailroom boy to the CEO wore a suit to work everyday

• The HR Manager at X receives a mailer from Levi’s that talks about how every organization in the country is dressing up for work - the Smart Casual way.

• It highlights the importance of professional attire in the workplace, and how a “Casual Friday” helps boost employee morale

• The mailer also sneaks in a few examples of how to dress for Casual Fridays - models posing in Dockers by Levi’s of course.

The campaign takes off like wildfire. Of course, when you give the impression that their competitors at Xerox are changing with the times and they’re here at HP staring at their Notch Lapel on a Friday afternoon, they’d of course want to change.

Casual Fridays becomes a thing, Levi’s rewrites the course of fashion in the workplace, and the rest is history. By 1995, 42% of the workforce in the US adopted Casual Fridays as a regular thing.

Culture Shift marketing or “Tradition Hacking“ as Sam Parr calls it is not new, but it is the most powerful form of marketing to date.

Titan’s “If you’re celebrating a milestone, it needs to be a Titan“ campaign, Cadbury’s “Shubh Aarambh, Kuch Meetha ho jaye“, even De Beer’s Diamond campaign - These are all examples of playing with the existing cultural beliefs in a society and puppeteering it in such a way that it drives a generational shift in consumer behaviour.

TL;DR Takeaway:

• To create a culture shift, identify a sector

• Tap into the existing behaviours of the decision-makers of that sector

• What is something you can do to modify that behaviour at scale?

• How do you give it away for free?

• Market the heck out of the results

P.S: I know I haven’t been writing in a while. Will be getting back to this newsletter consistently. I owe you guys that much :) Thanks for waiting