High Altitude Marketeering

Patagonia is a brand that’s not afraid to stick with what’s working. Its very first product, the Stand Up Short is still in the line after 37 years of service. The brand’s marketing collateral too, uses elements that have been in the creative mix for 20-odd years. The consumer catalog is no exception.

In terms of product styling, page layout, and the way product and non-product content is woven together, the books employ many of the same tropes they used in the early 80s. (Some would say the design look and feel is stuck there too but that’s a topic for another post.)

What struck me about the Heart of Winter 2010 catalog that came in the mail today was the sheer length of the editorial content. In comparison to most consumer catalogs, that statement is a double whammy. Few apparel catalogs have any editorial content at all. Except for a paragraph or two of brand fluff to position the brand or romance a collection, few books offer anything but vaguely emotive lifestyle photography and product images with corresponding product descriptions.

The current winter book has four long pieces, each close to 1,000 words, describing a scene or two from various expeditions. Patagonia has always dedicated a fair amount of page real estate to editorial-style stories about its athletes and their expeditions.* But these days, 1,000 words is long by any standards. As marketing content, it’s astonishing. We’re told daily by media pundits that attention spans aren’t what they used to be and that Americans’ appetite for content, if we have any appetite at all, is limited to sound bites, 140-character updates and text messages consisting of a string of acronyms.

In the outdoor gear and apparel market, using expedition stories to lend credibility to the brand is as common as the zipper garage. But these stories are generally shared with consumers in 21st-century media style: lots of images, short video, and choppy blog posts heavy on the photos. Devoting full pages to close-set type all in the same typeface and point size is unheard of. It’s as if Patagonia actually expects someone to read it.

One of two things is going on. Either Patagonia is woefully out of date and employing elderly, climbing-obsessed marketers to focus messages solely at their peers, or there’s still a place for long-form marketing text in some dark corners of our economy.

With no data to make a call one way or the other, I’m going to opine that Patty is preaching to the choir. A segment of their community is still probably interested in this content in this format, but that group is shrinking every year. Time will tell if Patagonia’s marketers can poke far enough outside the bubble to get in the heads of the majority of their customers: outdoor consumers that love the brand, live the lifestyle, but are nonetheless evolving in how they acquire and interact with brand stories.

The only constant is change. And while long form editorial is refreshing, I think it’s ultimately going to go the way of the morning paper.

What’s with the Stand Up Shorts anyway. A five-inch inseam? Nobody’s worn shorts like that since Higgins kicked Thomas Magnum out of the Robin’s Nest.

*I wrote about the use of expeditions in marketing for a SNEWS issue to come out at the ORWM. There’s lots more to ponder about the efficacy of marketing apparel using images very similar to your competitors’ (despite its beauty, expedition photography all looks pretty similar) and text describing sports that only a small segment of your consumer base can understand, let alone identify with.