Case Closed: Our Winning Cannes Young Lions India Submission
While all roads lead to Rome, only one would get me and Praptee Sharma to Cannes this year. And that was winning the Cannes Young Lions India (Marketers) competition.
For those not in the know, Cannes Lions (the Oscars of advertising) hosts a global case competition for young professionals (under 30). If you win your country-wide round, you and your teammate get to fly down to France during the festival and spend an intense 5 days battling it out with your global counterparts. The winners claim the Young Lions title for their category (PR, Print, Media, Marketers, or Film).
While Praptee Sharma and I did manage to win India’s first Young Lions Gold at Cannes (a story for another day), the first step was winning at an India level.
In a tough primer round organised by The Times Group, our India case solution tackled a challenge for a fictitious fast fashion brand under fire. We’ve had requests to share our submission, but I think ‘Case Closed’, our series under ‘Bread, Butter, Brand’, where we break down marketing cases with creative solutions — is the best place for an in-depth look at our submission. So stick with us, as this is gonna be a long one!
The (Suit) Case
Sharing the case we had to unpack below.
The fashion industry is a major contributor to environmental degradation, with fast fashion trends leading to massive waste and pollution. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the fashion industry produces about 92 million tons of textile waste annually. There’s a pressing need to promote sustainable practices in the fashion sector to mitigate its environmental impact.
Source: Link Here
Objective
The primary objective of this campaign by an established fast fashion brand facing backlash for its wasteful practices is to catalyze a Sustainable Fashion Revolution by raising awareness about the environmental consequences of fast fashion and encouraging consumers to adopt more sustainable fashion choices. The campaign should aim to inspire a shift towards eco-friendly practices, promoting conscious consumerism and responsible production within the fashion industry.
Desired Response
Create a campaign to raise awareness about the environmental impact of fast fashion, emphasizing the need for sustainable alternatives and to create behavioural change to encourage consumers to make conscious fashion choices by opting for sustainable and ethically produced clothing items.
TG
24–45 years old
Budget
Create a marketing campaign with a budget of 30 crores to create awareness about consumer-conscious fashion.
Unravelling the Knots
Step 1: Understanding the Market and Trends
Step 2: Our Brand
Deciding not to spend too much time ideating a brand name, and focusing on brand identity instead, we arrived at “Tara” (sound familiar?)
Step 3: Who is our Target Audience
While the mentioned target audience was 24–45-year-olds, we decided to get more specific.
Meet Ashna, a fashion girlie who never compromises on her style.
The Tailored Solution
Praptee and I immediately jumped into the ideas- there were so many different things a fast fashion brand could do here. Brand films, loyalty programmes, social media- ideas on what we could do were endless.
What we learnt was to take a step back and think 1) What is the actual problem? Get very specific here and 2) What is our consumer insight?
What are we solving for?
The three core problems we identified were:
- Low consumer awareness about the environmental impact of fast fashion
- Negative brand perception
- Unconscious consumerism
Jury Feedback: Go back and read the case problem again- what is missing? While we covered the objectives and inferred problems from those, we missed articulating that the campaign was in response to public backlash- an important element to consider! Always reframe the problem you are presented with as- the problem, and your understanding of the problem. A note which proved invaluable for us during the Cannes competition.
The Core Idea
We rested our solution on the core idea that — “While purchasing clothes, people only consider the price and are unaware of the ecological impact- we want to expose the true cost of fashion”.
The Insight
First of all, what is an insight? Well, an insight is a consumer or category truth which feels obvious in hindsight. It’s a light bulb moment. It’s an idea that gets you to re-organise your life. You hear an insight, and think “Oh haaaaan”.
Our Insight:
Fashion has two purposes — internal and external validation. How it makes you feel internally (confident, comfortable, ready to take on the world!) and the external validation is the perception it creates in someone else’s mind (people give you compliments, do a double take when they see you etc.)
Our solution rests on creating touchpoints for both the external and internal validation sought by our customers while helping them build more sustainable fashion habits.
Jury Feedback: While we had a clear insight in mind (and this saved our butts in the Q&A), what we missed was highlighting this insight instead of a “core idea”, and using it as the north star for our solutions. Always think hard to arrive at your insight, and always always lead with it!
What will we do?
Since fast fashion as a category centers on customers buying more, our campaign focused on not deviating from the category core to promote pseudo-sustainability, but:
- Being more authentic and transparent about our practices
- Making sustainability more sustainable, we don’t want customers to go from 0–100
- Creating touchpoints for customers to engage with the brand between purchases, consequently improving brand perception and customer LTV
All good things come in threes (read: Bread, Butter, Brand), and so does our solution framework.
Pillar 1- Educate
The first step is to create awareness about the environmental impact of fast fashion choices
A Brand Film- “Costly Trends”
We started with a series of brand films to educate the customer about the “true cost of fashion”.
Film concept:
Influencer-style films with a twist. By leveraging algorithm-friendly influencer formats like ‘#GRWM’ and ‘#FashionHaul’ videos to shed light on the ecological impact of each of our fashion choices.
Instead of talking about the cost of the products, the ‘Influencer’ describes them in terms of carbon footprint, water usage, and waste generated during production. This shifts the conversation from monetary cost to ecological cost and makes a hard-hitting statement on how everyday actions impact the environment.
#CostlyTrends #TrueCostOfFashion
Planet Points
“Planet Points”, our hero idea, is our rewards program to help and excite our customers to make better fashion choices. We’ve created a pervasive green rewards programme, that educates and provides opportunities for customers to be more sustainable in every single brand interaction.
Pillar 2- Empower
Well after education, it’s only fair that we create opportunities for our customers to make more sustainable choices in fun, bite-sized ways!
Metamorphosis Collection
Introducing a sustainable multi-wear line- complete with seed paper tags and a 5/5 planet score. Metamorphosis has pieces that can take you from day to night so that you can transform your look with every wear!
Mend, Don’t Discard
One of the biggest reasons for discarding clothes is easily fixable tears and the unavailability of good tailors to fix them. But now, you can get easy access to a directory of verified tailors right within the Tara app, and improve your planet score with each repair or alteration.
Seed to Stitch
With our Seed to Stitch initiative, we’re getting real about fashion by showing you the journey of your clothes from “Seed to Stitch”. Starting with the Metamorphosis line, customers can scan the QR on the tag to unlock the garment’s story — where the material came from, the amazing people in the manufacturing process and the part you play in every purchase made.
Pillar 3- Enrich
And finally, our plans to enrich our customer’s lives.
Sounds of your Shirt
Immerse yourself deeper into the seed-to-stitch journey with our “Green Noise” playlist which is a sensory experience to help you unwind through the lens of your favourite Tara garment. After all, we do say retail is therapy, don’t we?
Why this? While we acknowledge that this may not be the most obvious space for a fast fashion brand, this was our one off-beat attempt to explore new formats of content. We wanted to create touch points for the brand outside of the consumer purchase journey to stay top-of-mind without being too salesy and potentially map synergies with Tara’s forays into the wellness space ;)
The Upcycled Edit
Upcycle your cherished clothes into Instagram-worthy pet clothing or home decor that is uniquely yours! What’s more? You can also improve your planet score with each upcycled item.
Weaving the Social Fabric
We would also create multiple social conversations to consistently reinforce Tara’s sustainable messaging with our audiences.
But if that doesn’t float your boat, you can always be a Bhidu and save the earth one gamla at a time! From Polio drops to the hottest new fashion drops #iykyk.
Offline Community Building
Taking the party offline, we would also be curating exclusive events like clothing swap parties with onsite stylists, early access to new collections and more for our top-tier planet point holders.
That culminates the ideas part of our submission. We also included the metrics and impact we expected to drive, along with a split of the 30 Cr budget across the three pillars in our final presentation.
Jury Feedback
We had the opportunity to present our solution to a jury of esteemed marketers-
- Jaswinder Sodhi, Head of customer propositions, digital and market, wealth and personal banking, HSBC India
- Naarayan TV, CMO, IDFC First Bank; and
- Sunil Gadgil, Marketing Director, Nivea India
They gave us some amazing feedback and food for thought during our post-presentation Q&A
What worked?
- A clear insight that tied into every idea presented. Internal validation is taken care of by dopamine hits while getting points and feeling good by doing your bit in making the world a better place. Customers then receive external validation from gamification, social validation and shareable content and unique clothing, creating delight in the process
- A business-first approach- by doing a “green push” in a way that created touchpoints with customers in-between purchases, and focused on bringing them back to the platform and building loyalty
What could have been better?
- Reframing the problem, before jumping to what we were trying to solve for
- Leading with the insight, and not assuming that what was obvious to us was obvious to everyone else. Always think insight first, not idea first!
- Too many ideas — learn to not be driven by FOMO and leave out some ideas. Pick your top ideas and be confident that this is the best way forward!
This feedback was game-changing and has become the bedrock for how we approach marketing problems. And guess what, it helped us bring home the Gold from Cannes!
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