Code and Culture — Polo Ralph Lauren
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, brands face immense challenges creating meaningful connections and delivering value to…
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, brands face immense challenges creating meaningful connections and delivering value to their customers.
The convergence of sophisticated technology and time-honored cultural aspirations presents a unique opportunity for luxury apparel brands to differentiate themselves, drive innovation, and foster long-term relationships with high value customers.
In this article, we look at how one of the world’s leading luxury apparel brands, Polo Ralph Lauren, is combining the power of innovative digital technology with powerful cultural codes to win over a new generation of brand fans.
The Changing Dynamics of Brand Building
In an era of hyper-connectivity, traditional brand building strategies are no longer adequate to capture the attention and loyalty of customers who expect personalized experiences, seamless interactions, and a sense of purpose from the brands they engage with.
In the context of brand building, culture helps brands create aspirations, while code provides customers with new abilities. Bringing these two forces together is reshaping the way modern brands create value and build relationships.
The Power of Code: Unlocking New Possibilities & Abilities
Code enables modern brands to harness the vast potential of data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies to:
Personalize customer experiences: advanced algorithms and data-driven insights allow brands to deliver highly relevant and tailored experiences, meeting individual customer needs and preferences.
Optimize operational efficiency: automation and digitization streamline internal processes, reducing costs, improving speed, and enhancing overall efficiency.
Enable seamless customer journeys: user-friendly interfaces, mobile apps, and digital platforms provide customers with frictionless experiences, ensuring consistent engagement across touchpoints.
Access to information: code enables brands to offer transparent information, comprehensive product details, and valuable insights, enabling customers to make informed decisions.
The Power of Culture: Making Deeper Connections
Culture encompasses values, beliefs, and symbols, each playing a powerful role in building emotional connections and brand loyalty. By leveraging culture alongside code, modern brands can:
Align with customer values: By embracing cultural trends and understanding the values that resonate with their target audience, brands can establish a meaningful connection and create a sense of shared identity.
Tell compelling stories. Stories grounded in culture create a narrative that customers can relate to, evoking emotions and forging deeper connections.
Foster communities and belonging: Culturally-driven initiatives such as user-generated content, community platforms, and social responsibility programs create a sense of belonging and enable customers to be active participants in the brand’s journey.
Drive social impact: Brands that champion social causes and contribute to positive change can inspire customer loyalty and attract like-minded individuals.
Polo Ralph Lauren
The Power of Culture
According to Academia.edu, the power of the Polo Ralph Lauren brand is fueled by the enduringly aspirational cultural myth of old-money America.
His designers work within a culturally rich narrative framework centered on a variety of iconic American lifestyles, including WASP, Ivy League, country club, socialite, polo player, successful businessman, and cowboy.
According to cultural insights consultancy Canvas8, Google searches for the phrase ‘old-money style’ grew by 568% between 2022 and 2023, underscoring the enduring power of this cultural myth both in America and around the world.
The brand recreates these narratives through its apparel using icons and images from classic American culture that are rich in the tropes of establishment wealth and moneyed independence. Lauren avoids diluting this narrative by connecting the brand to popular culture, instead opting to fortify his brands with timeless symbols of privilege and frontier adventurers.
Lauren has created his own cultural universe, and his brands thrive on the strength of his reimagined mythology. According to PRL’s website, “Polo Ralph Lauren has always stood for providing quality products, creating worlds, and inviting people to share in our dream.” According to the website, the truth about what PRL stands for can be found in its advertising, and no other attempt is made to claim a deeper level of authenticity.
In a recent online article, Canvas8 highlighted the power of this approach noting that “The ‘old money’ look has long been popular on TikTok, grabbing the attention of nostalgia-obsessed Gen Zers, with TikTok posts tagged with #oldmoney generating over 5.9 billion views. There are photo compilations featuring old Ralph Lauren campaigns and young couples wearing white shirts, loafers, and chinos, drinking red wine in country settings, and even outfit videos titled ‘POV: you married a rich man’.
The Power of Code
But culture isn’t the only thing powering PRL’s growth. According to Yahoo Finance, PRL is making a big bet on the company’s efforts to expand its digital and omni-channel capabilities through investments in mobile, omni-channel, and fulfillment.
The company’s much touted “Next Great Chapter” plan includes three core value drivers, including a big strategic bet on the importance of “scaling our digitally-led, cohesive ecosystem strategy across our top 30 cities around the world”.
What does this look like in practice? Well, for starters, Polo Ralph Lauren has made social media and digital a key part of its retailing strategy for many years now, helping the brand connect with a generation that’s lived their entire lives online.
The brand has long been an omnichannel pioneer in the luxury apparel industry, with the company crediting its e-commerce business for its great success in Asia, particularly in China, where 90% of its stores were either repossessed, had to cut back on hours, or slashed employees. On a recent earnings call, Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet stated that Singles’ Day, China’s largest online shopping holiday, was extremely profitable for the company, bringing in “double digit new client acquisition and sales.”
Recently, Ralph Lauren has become more focused on younger, digital-first customers. In November 2022, it announced a partnership with the video game Fortnite, even redesigning its iconic Polo logo to include a llama instead of a horse. According to TechCrunch, Ralph Lauren hosted a Twitch livestream to commemorate the occasion, making it the first luxury brand to co-host a Fortnite player tournament. Furthermore, Ralph Lauren has created two shopping apps as well as some newfangled interactive POS screens to assist customers with finding the sizes and colors they’re looking for from the company’s DTC inventory.
The effects of this investment in digital innovation and technology to unlock growth can be seen in the company’s sales figures, which show growth of 2.5% from a year-ago. The consensus estimate among Wall Street analysts for the 2024 fiscal year is for sales of $6.72 billion, which implies a 5.5% year-over-year increase.
PRL’s stock price compares favorably against the Consumer Discretionary sector’s decline of 14.8% and the S&P 500’s fall of 7.1%. An impressive long-term projected EPS growth rate of 9.3% further highlights the strength of the company’s experience innovation strategy.
The Convergence of Code and Culture
Despite the contractionary storm clouds gathering in the economy, Polo Ralph Lauren’s success shows the power of synergistically integrating code and culture in your brand innovation efforts. When these forces are harnessed in unison, luxury apparel brands can unlock profitable growth by:
Delivering personalized experiences at scale: code enables brands to collect and analyze customer data, while culture guides the interpretation of this data, leading to personalized experiences that resonate with diverse customer segments.
Driving innovation and co-creation: combining code and culture empowers brands to co-create with their customers, leveraging technology to involve customers in product development, feedback loops, and customization.
Establishing brand authenticity and trust: the fusion of code and culture allows brands to demonstrate authenticity by aligning their technology-driven capabilities with cultural relevance, earning the trust and loyalty of customers.
Adapting and thriving in a changing landscape: code and culture provide brands with the agility to adapt to evolving customer expectations, technological advancements, and cultural shifts, enabling them to stay relevant and competitive.
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Catalyst Strategy is a Los Angeles-based independent brand innovation studio.
Our mission is to help clients grow their businesses by rethinking how their brands can add value to the lives of the people they serve. Our approach combines insight, foresight, and lateral thinking to help businesses create brands that their customers will find invaluable.
Whether you’re a B2C company or a B2B company, we believe you should be making a significant investment in brand innovation because of the importance of creating tangible value for your customers.
And, after two years of in-depth research on the most innovative brands, we’ve concluded that true brand innovation must occur at the intersection of code and culture.