Intensive Marketing Case Study of Levi’s – Full Walk-Through with In-depth Research

Marketing Research on Levi’s

The student team has conducted in-depth marketing research on Levi’s to under their current standing amongst the market and its consumers. This research is a compilation of primary research (survey results) conducted by them and secondary research (publications, research papers and articles). Let us start with the perception study.

Perception Study of Consumers

The student took a short survey asking their audience about their knowledge of Levi’s current campaigns and brand associations with Deepika Padukone. The following were their details:

• Know about Levi X Deepika Padukone – 46%
• Follow Levi’s & its Trends – 78%
• Follow Deepika Padukone & her Trends – 86% Levi’s new line of jeans, launched in partnership with Deepika Padukone, is not performing well. Audiences are not aware of the collaboration, but otherwise well aware of the brand and the celebrities of their liking.

Buyer Persona of Levi’s

Levi’s target audience includes females between the age of 18-35. These are the people who closely follow Deepika Padukone and desire to dress like her. She is someone who uses apps like Zomato, Netflix, Myntra, Inshorts, Amazon regularly. She is passionate about what she does and loves socialising with her friends. We will call her Shanaya.

Consumer Insights

Denim has become synonymous with all-weather and useful pieces of clothing – good for an outing and work. By researching the related keywords for jeans, the student team was able to determine the public trend towards more comfortable jeans. The search volume for the keyword Comfortable trendy jeans is 2,14,920.

Industry Insights

The total industry size of the denim market in India is INR 30,000 CR as of 2020, out of INR 3000 CR is the women’s segment. In this segment, Levi’s is one of the largest shareholders, with INR 50 crore of the market cornered by them. The majority of the market is run by small clothing merchants and unbranded retailers.

Levi’s Marketing Campaign

After compiling and analyzing the various insights and research, the student team came up with a campaign strategy to increase the sales of Levi’s jeans. This campaign and strategy are made with the intent to target Indian audiences, yet the applicability of these strategies can be scaled to a worldwide level, with the use of more appropriate influencers and messaging.

Targeting the women’s section of the market, the team has come up with the campaign “Wear your Comfort” with Deepika Padukone as the face of the campaign.

Campaign Idea

This campaign targets all parts of the marketing funnel and uses multi-channel strategies at each stage to increase both awareness and sales for the company. Their campaign is based on the consumer insight of increasing influencer culture and following the fashion choices of celebrities.

To provide the perfect comfortable pair of jeans to the female audience, the student team recommends continuing the Levi X Deepika Padukone collaboration. The campaign would speak about how comfortable the collection is and how it can be worn anywhere and anytime.

Campaign Hashtags: #Levis #WearYourComfort #LiveInLevi

Media Planning & Projection

To achieve the results of all the activities mentioned above, the student team has created an end-to-end budget. According to their findings, they expect the marketing budget to be 10% of the total sales. Since this activity mentioned is only for one month, they recommend Levi’s to spend INR 50 lakhs. The budget is divided as follows:

Marketing Strategy of Levi’s

The student team has developed a multi-channel strategy to accomplish their aim of increasing awareness and sales of Levi’s. Let us learn about the individual strategies used in this campaign, starting with Google Display Ads.

Google Display Ads

Users who have visited Levi’s website or part of their social media sphere will be shown advertisements enticing them to make a sale and buy the latest collection. Audiences will be remarketed with display ads on the websites with the communication that “Levi’s has 20% off on the Deepika Padukone collection”.

Google display ads are a great tool to enhance brand recall using remarketing. They can be targeted based on interest as well. Display ads have one of the highest rates of conversions in the industry.

App Push Notification Marketing

According to the consumer insights collected, most of the audience is consisting of young women who use multiple apps such as Inshorts to stay updated with news. To increase awareness about Levi’s, the student team has recommended push notifications about Levi’s. With exciting news and initiatives about the brand, the team aims to envelop people into the brand’s sphere of influence.

They plan to release stories such as “Deepika latest collaboration with Levi’s” and “Levi’s enters the metaverse”.

Metaverse Marketing

The latest trend in the fashion industry has been of releasing NFTs and entering the metaverse. Many pioneering brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada have launched e-items and virtual items of fashion in metaverse games such as Fortnite, League of Legends and Roblox. Called the “Levi’sverse”, the student team wishes to woo the audience by riding atop the Metaverse trend.

Levi’s can capitalise on this trend and capture its millennial audiences with virtual wardrobes, in their favourite games.

Influencer Marketing

The audience of an influencer represents a very active user base of people who like to imitate their favourite people on the internet. Deepika Padukone has millions of followers on her Instagram and is famous as a model, actress and fitness icon. By launching the reel in collaboration with Deepika using the new collaboration feature, followers of Deepika Padukone can be brought closer to Levi’s organic social media sphere and made aware of her latest collection with the denim brand.

The student team has suggested the concept of the influencer reel should be Deepika dancing on a popular song – showcasing the comfort of the Levi’s Jeans.

Other influencers such as Radhika Bose, Sonal Devraj and Masoom Minawala can also do similar posts and invite audiences to take part in the dancing competition. This will further iterate the fact that Levi’s latest collection is all about comfort.

Social Media Marketing

On social media platforms, there can be two types of marketing conducted: Organic or Paid. While organic focuses on the current follower base of the page, paid ads can help in increasing the number of new viewers and followers of the page.

The student team has two strategies in mind. Firstly, they wish to conduct organic marketing efforts by creating posts with a human touch. These posts can include consumer stories, influencer posts on Levi’s page and more. The posts should have a healthy balance of photos and videos.

Secondly, best performing posts that directly talk about the product should be promoted to increase brand awareness. These promotional posts have more CTA driven captions and shopping tags.

SEO & Sponsored Articles

A lot of potential buyers use google search to find what theta re looking for on the internet. That’s why SEO becomes an important factor to influence their decisions in the marketing function. If you are interested in decoding this strategy, head over to IIDE’s Search Engine Optimization Course to learn more.

The student team has identified these top 4 keywords that should be the priority for Levi’s. Targeting these should improve their organic marketing conversions significantly.

Another way to implement SEO for your brand is to do sponsored articles from reputed sources. The benefit is twofold – it increases your reach and awareness levels tremendously, as well as many technical benefits that a website gets when it gets backlinks.

The student team has proposed a list of seven topics Levi’s should release promoted articles for. They are:

• India Today – Levi’s with Deepika Padukone has announced to launch a store in metaverse to let you buy clothes in a virtual world
• Vogue – Deepika’s collection of most comfortable jeans
• Cosmopolitan – Deepika’s everyday jeans collection
• Bazaar – Top 5 most comfortable jeans for women
• The cherry on the top blog – Best quality jeans for women
• Gia Says That – 5 tips to choose the right pair of jeans
• The Snob Journal – Comfortable & durable jeans for women

Quora and Reddit Marketing

Both of these social platforms are built for one thing only – driving public discussions. By targeting these platforms, the brand will be able to create a buzz around the collection, as well as target the millennial audience they are trying to appease and enfold.

Questions relating to the collection’s comfort, durability, looks and other aspects can be floated on these platforms. These posts will help engage the audience with the brand.

Google Search Ads

Conducting remarketing through google search ads is one of the most tried and tested strategies in digital marketing. If you are interested in learning one of the most in-demand skills of the industry, check out IIDE’s Google Ads Course.

The Search Ad strategy can be divided into two, as follows:

Google Shopping Ads:

While users see ads on their social media, the student team plans to focus on google shopping ads based on action-level keywords for which our ads will be displayed on the SERP. By using words such as “sale” and “hurry-up!” (action-based words) on the creative to create urgency.

Remarketing Ads

There can be 2 types of remarketing campaigns that are run through Search ads. First is the normal google search ads which are based on the keywords list.

The second is by using their email address or RLSA (Remarketing lists for search ads). This is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google and search partner sites.

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO is the latest field in digital marketing. As more and more companies start using digital marketing seriously, there is now a focus on improving the overall effect of the strategies in place. Conversion Rate Optimization focuses on synchronising all the strategies together and improving the sales of the company with timely communications and tech. If this interests you, check out IIDE’s Conversion Rate Optimization Course to learn more.

The student team has suggested the following improvements for Levi’s to increase their CRO:

New Pop up

Currently, the pop-up ad on Evi’s website is very text-heavy and not so persuasive. The student team has suggested a more graphic oriented pop-up that has a simple CTA for consumers to follow. Their new pop has a clear incentive on the top and contact details form that goes along with it, making it a perfect marketing tool for generating interested leads.

Chatbot

The latest craze in the marketing industry, chatbots are a great way for your users to communicate with the brand regarding their queries. A smartly created chatbot can make a great impact on how useful and user-friendly the consumer feels your website is.

The student team has suggested a unique chatbot that uses AI to give feedback and help the customer choose the right item for themselves. They have also decided to use Deepika Padukone herself as the face of the chatbot, making the conversation between it and the users more lively.

AR Shopping

The fashion and apparel industry is heavily reliant on the look and feel of their products and it’s a common trend that consumers tend to rely on the physical trial of the clothes to make buying decisions.

Our students have come up with the idea to generate an AR wardrobe that is called Deepika’s Lookbook, which audiences can emulate through the filters. Trying to bridge the gap between the die-hard fans of the actress, this filter can make users feel attached to clothes by leveraging their liking for their icon.

Email Automation

Post interaction communications, when timed correctly, can increase turnaround sales for the company. Email automation is a smart way to increase engagement with a customer who may have recently visited your website. If you wish to be an expert in the field, you can try out IIDE’s Email Marketing course.

The student team has designed multiple emails that can be triggered according to the actions of the audience. That is as follows:

• Welcome Email: Triggered right after a user signs up on Levi’s website. This email pushes an INR 500 discount on their first purchase a signing up bonus.

• Cart Abandonment Email: If a user leaves the website without finalising their purchase, they will get email reminders to finish their purchase. To incentivise that, they can be given 20% off for a limited time, to make sure they complete the purchase, driving up the sales of Levi’s.

Expected Results

If everything goes as per plan, the student team expects Levi’s to make sales worth 150CR in the female section. The overall impact of the campaign is to increase Levi’s share of the market and sales by 3X, further placing it as a market leader.

Conclusion

Levi’s is a very well known brand and a market leader in terms of sales and goodwill when it comes to the denim market. Known for its iconic marketing campaigns, the brand has established itself as young, free and suave. Yet, in India, its market share is less what someone will expect and the answer to the low numbers is digital marketing. If the brand uses the kind of strategies suggested by our student team, theta re surely to increase their sales.

With India digitizing as fast as any first-world nation, the need for digital marketers in the country has exploded. If you are interested to know more about this field and wish to upskill yourself, check out the 4 Months Advanced Digital Marketing course to know more.

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