The Shoppe - Victoria Secret’s Rebrand, Crumbl Cookie Hype, Facebook in VR, & More!
Welcome back to The Shoppe! This week we’re talking about Victoria’s Secret ditching the Angels image, Crumbl Cookies franchise boom, Facebook experimenting with VR advertising, and Nielsen measuring streaming usage. Don’t forget to subscribe so you can be notified every time we post!
Victoria’s Secret is undergoing a major rebrand this year. The brand has finally come to the conclusion that their current image is no longer culturally relevant and the new focus will shift to what women want, and not what men want. After months of scrutiny involving the former owner, the brand was found to have been enforcing a misogynistic work environment that promotes racism, sexism, and sizeism. The rebrand will include two new branches: The VS Collective and The Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancers. This inauguration will include influential individuals such as Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Megan Rapinoe, Valentina Sampaio and more, to be the fresh new faces. These influential women will make up the board that will advise the brand, appear in the refreshed advertising, and promote the brand on their social media profiles as well. Victoria’s Secret will no longer exist on the single functionality of what is ‘sexy’ through the male gaze, but will be expanding its reach to women of all walks of life and reimagining the definition of sexy.
A single store in Logan, Utah opened its doors with just chocolate chip cookies in 2017. Crumbl Cookies had a humble beginning, but has begun to dominate TikTok and the App store in just four years. The retailer has now been able to transition into a franchise and has expanded to 220 locations in 30 states. The franchise has offered over 140 flavors of cookies so far, and has an interesting marketing model which includes a weekly rotation of their cookie menu. Every Sunday, four new flavors are announced, and the following Sunday, no matter how popular the previous week's cookies were, they are replaced with a new set of flavors. Instead of following the dated model for marketing a franchise, the company decided to adopt the ‘hype-based’ marketing that revolves around sneakers. While only offering a selection of four cookies each week, besides their two staple cookies, customers feel the need to buy into the exclusivity which in turn drives Crumbl’s sales up and contributes to their popularity across social platforms.
Facebook is now trying their hand in advertising with virtual reality. This move comes after Facebook decided to find new ways for revenue to be generated by developers. The ads are still in the trial stages and not ready to test yet, and alternative VR formats are also being explored. The company has stated that they will collect information on if the ad was interacted with or not, but will not collect personal information stored on the personal headset. This information includes gender data, height, weight, and will also not alter how your personal data is stored. By including another platform in their advertising deck, Facebook will now be able to target more relevant audiences by analyzing app use and then providing more useful ads which is particularly relevant in the wake of the iOS 14.5 data tracking discussion.
Nielsen, the company known for decades as being a top research firm, is now using their monopoly to measure how prominent streaming services really are. According to recent data, Nielsen was able to discover that cable and live TV still take precedence over streaming platforms. In May of 2021, 64% of the time American viewers watched network and cable TV, 26% of that was spent on streaming services, and the other 9% accounted for video games or DVR. As of right now, the streaming leaders that are way ahead of their competitors are Netflix and YouTube. Nielsen will be using a new metric named ‘The Gauge’ which will allow for more accurate records, in addition to its original audio-recognition method. However, the metrics are only able to measure screen time on TV, not phones or laptops.
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