Going to dinner after a day at the office? A focus on what clothes to wear and what dishes to eat are addressed in the joint promotion.
The magazine is Bon Appétit, part of the Condé Nast Publications division of Advance Publications, and the retailer is Banana Republic, part of Gap Inc. It is, apparently, a coincidence that the retailer involved features a food in its name.
Those two brands are working together, along with OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, to promote a new apparel collection coming from Banana Republic called Desk to Dinner. The clothes, as the name suggests, are intended to be versatile enough to be worn from a day at the office to a night out to eat.
(The alliterative name may sound silly, but it is certainly more cheerful than Cubicle to Sofa in Front of the TV Set Wolfing Down Takeout Chinese.)
A campaign, scheduled to begin next week, will seek to drum up interest in Desk to Dinner through print ads, direct mail, e-mail, digital content and social media like Facebook, Twitter and an Open Table blog, Dining Check. There will also be a presence in the windows of all 450 Banana Republic stores in North America as well as events in stores in major markets like Chicago, Houston and Miami, featuring chefs from local restaurants.
Banana Republic is known for collaborating with partners for clothing collections as it did in its successful lines of apparel inspired by the AMC television series “Mad Men.” And the retailer has previously joined with fashion magazines for promotions.
This is, however, the first time Banana Republic has worked with a food publication, said Chris Nicklo, vice president for marketing at Banana Republic in San Francisco.
Food is “definitely one of the passions” of the brand’s customers, he said, and the campaign also enables Banana Republic to expand its clientele because “Bon Appétit and OpenTable have audiences that are outside my own.”
“Collaboration, in my mind, is the wave of the future” for marketers, Mr. Nicklo said. “By partnering, we could bring more to bear than any of us could alone.”
Mr. Nicklo traced the genesis of the campaign to a meeting last year in San Francisco with Pamela Drucker Mann, vice president and publisher at Bon Appétit.
“We had a relationship with Bon Appétit in the past but were not planning to be in the magazine in 2012,” he said. That changed after Ms. Drucker Mann suggested the promotion.
“Based on the strength of this idea, we committed to running in the magazine in 2012,” Mr. Nicklo said. “She wasn’t just looking for more ad pages; she was looking for something that would work for her brand and our brand.”
Ms. Drucker Mann, who is based in New York, said in a separate interview that the collaboration “is as symbiotic as it gets.”
When you dine out, “what you’re wearing is part of the experience, and what you’re eating is part of the experience,” she added. “The culture of food, of going out, is a huge part of the work experience.”
Bon Appétit has already “dabbled in the world of food and fashion,” Ms. Drucker Mann said, citing a promotion in September during New York Fashion Week, called Feast or Fashion, that included events at restaurants attended by designers. There will be a version for Fashion Week 2012, she added, in partnership with the publication Daily Front Row.
Helping Banana Republic promote Desk to Dinner is intended to deepen the magazine’s involvement with fashion, Ms. Drucker Mann said, as well as bring to life a theme, “Where food and culture meet,” that Bon Appétit uses in its own trade advertising campaign.
As part of the collaboration, editors of the magazine will create content like restaurant reviews for a Desk to Dinner section of the Banana Republic Web site that is to go live next Monday. There will be links in the reviews to the OpenTable Web site, so readers of the reviews can, if so inclined, book reservations.
“This is new for us, working with retailers,” said Scott Jampol, vice president for consumer marketing at OpenTable in San Francisco. “If it’s successful, we’d like to do more.”
In this instance it makes sense, he added, because “when you’re buying a new outfit, it’s logical to think about where you will be seen in that outfit” — like, say, a restaurant.
The campaign is another example of how “the foodie lifestyle,” as Mr. Jampol put it, is becoming “an emerging trend” as marketers increasingly seek to “find where they are and what they admire.”
Mr. Nicklo agreed, describing chefs as “personalities, a new form of celebrities.”
Hmmm. Perhaps the next clothing collection from Banana Republic will be inspired not by “Mad Men” characters like Don Draper, Joan Holloway and Roger Sterling but by celebrity chefs like Mario Batali, Bobby Flay and Sandra Lee.
via New York Times
