Social Marketing Case Study: Levi’s Project 501

by Alex Nesbitt

Levi.com’s VP of Marketing, Patrice Varni, spoke at the Forrester

Marketing conference about Levi.com’s Project 501, Levi’s user submitted
design contest. The project was launched using a branded entertainment
segment on the television show Project Runway and an online campaign
targeted to women. Digital Podcast covered the launch of the program and
asked the question about whether this kind of campaign, done on Levi’s site, could drive a big
enough audience to make the investment worthwhile.

Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely
disconnected. Someone had arranged for the branded entertainment piece on the Project Runway
show and as a part of that got a large online buy on the Bravo site.

The project landed in Patrice’s lap and she went to Avenue A/Razorfish and had them develop an
online campaign oriented around a very detailed map of all the touch points. Once they had
completed the map, they went back through the map and made sure that they incorporated
selling pants into the program in a way that featured the right products.

They got 3,000 design submissions to the contest for designing a new Levi’s product. Over 2000
of the submissions complied with the rules. The campaign got 134,000 unique visitors and
almost 19,000 registered users. Two-thirds of those were women in target age group of 18 to
25 years old. They had 122,000 design ratings. They also got 924 social networking/blog
badges with over 30,000 views.

Interestingly word of mouth marketing on social media like blogs and social networks turned out
to be a major driver of awareness about the campaign. Social media drove 38% of the
awareness about the campaign as compared to 30% of awareness coming from TV and low
single digit for everything else.

During the five weeks that the program was running, the top 5 selling products changed from
traditional products to the featured products. The traditional core products had a price
point of about 44 dollars and sold to an older demographic. The products featured in the campaign
were Levi store exclusive, more fashion forward and had price range of 58 to 70 dollars. Literally
overnight they got a different demographic and a sales lift that made a measurable impact on
sales.

Once the campaign ended, the top 5 selling products switched back  to the traditional
top 5 selling products.
Patrice said that they had to steal themselves to the loss of control and reaction during the
program. Once they had chosen a winner, they had some very negative comments from people
who didn’t win. This caused some consternation about the comments and debate about what to
do about the comments. Levi decided to leave the comments up and it turned out well as the
community policed the problem well.

Perhaps the most important part of the program was the way the program changed the way the
company worked to get the digital team working with the marketing team. The online and
traditional agencies had to work together to make this work.

While the results may not seem tremendous, Patrice felt that the program was a tremendous
success, due to the organizational learning and the level of engagement.

It is very interesting to see Levi’s willingness to experiment and the results of this program.
Project 501 clearly provided some hands on learning and capability building for Levi. It is clear
that this kind of program can drive sales. The challenge now becomes how how to scale this type
of program into a more significant campaign and how to make it more than a five week program.