Lands’ End Builds Its Brand Around College Football Game Days
Lands’ End is using clear tote bags, an in-person tour and local influencer partnerships during the college football season to reach more consumers.
What are the key facts?
- 1Lands’ End is marketing around college football in the fall
- 2Brand launched a clear tote bag
- 3Brand will hold the Tote Tailgate Tour in three college towns
- 4Brand partnered with Graduate by Hilton for in-person events
What happened?
Lands’ End is conducting a concentrated marketing campaign around college football game days this fall in an effort to introduce the brand to more consumers. The company launched a clear tote bag last month designed to comply with different stadium bag policies. The brand will also hold its “Tote Tailgate Tour” in the college towns of Bloomington, Indiana; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Oxford, Mississippi, and partner with Graduate Hotels by Hilton. Activities will include coffee shop takeovers, free coffee for visitors, customization stations and products featuring the representative colors of each school. Lands’ End Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Sylvester said college football games have an intergenerational appeal that can reach families and consumers of different ages. The marketing plan resulted from collaboration between the marketing and merchandising teams and centers on the clear tote bag and fall products such as classic rugby shirts in new colors. The brand also plans to work with local influencers in each city and emphasized finding authentic partners. The company is in a period of transformation, increasing investment in performance advertising and in-person events while continuing its catalog marketing. As its fourth-quarter marketing plan rolls out, Lands’ End will continue turning in-person experiences into content to support holiday-season marketing.
What does this mean for cross-border sellers?
Lands’ End is combining in-person events, local influencers and product sales, showing how sellers can build a “product + content + experience” marketing mix around specific consumer occasions. For cross-border sellers, sports, campus and holiday settings with emotional appeal can raise brand exposure and create content for the subsequent holiday season.
What should sellers do now?
- 1Choose one existing product suited to sports, campus or gathering occasions, and create a new set of occasion-based main images and short-video scripts.
- 2Identify local content creators in target markets whose audiences relate to the product's use case, compile at least 10 candidates and verify their audiences and content authenticity.
- 3Set up a separate advertising campaign for occasion-based marketing, tracking clicks, conversions and return on spend separately from regular campaigns.ACoS / ROAS calculator
- 4Organize highly engaged assets from in-person or influencer content into reusable social-media and product-page materials for the holiday season.