Advertising: Lands’ End Ads Salute White-Collar Workers

Lands’ End Ads Salute White-Collar Workers

ADVERTISING for work clothes often features tradesmen, like recent marketing videos by Dickies showing workers outfitted in its clothing while forging knives and building hot rods, to highlight durability and fire-resistance. Now Lands’ End, a 50-year-old brand, is taking the unusual approach of promoting men’s dress shirts as work wear for jobs where the work is white-collar.

In television commercials and online videos, men describe their professions and laud the shirts.

In television commercials and online videos, men describe their professions and laud the shirts. Among the workers featured is Joe Branch, a sports marketer and executive director of Uwantgame, a nonprofit organization for mentoring student athletes.

Sitting in an office surrounded by sports memorabilia, Mr. Branch wears a white button-down collar shirt, navy blue necktie and gray dress slacks.

“If I’m at work, and I need to get it done that day, I’m really going to roll up my sleeves â€" like in every aspect of the word,” Mr. Branch says. “I really love the Lands’ End dress shirt because of the fit. They’re classic.”

At the end of the spot, Mr. Branch says, “My name is Joe Branch, and I was made to work.” It closes with the text, “Made to Work,” the slogan for the campaign, and the Lands’ End logo, a lighthouse.

Other commercials feature Reed Woodson, the founder of the interior design firm Beejar, and Justin Talt, a filmmaker and actor. Like Mr. Branch, the men are altruistic. Mr. Woodson designs eco-friendly spaces and Mr. Talt runs a company that helps independent filmmakers bring projects to life.

The commercials, which will be introduced Monday, are part of campaign that is the first for Lands’ End by AR New York, a unit of the Publicis Worldwide division of the Publicis Groupe.

The men in the commercials also are featured in print ads, which were shot by the fashion photographer Norman Jean Roy. Mr. Woodson wears chinos, and a blue dress shirt without a tie. Mr. Talt is more casual still, pairing an untucked blue striped shirt with jeans. The ads promote Lands’ End’s no-iron dress shirts, highlighting their starting retail price of $49, the implication being that they rival more expensive shirts.

“The quality and value of our dress shirts is one of the best-kept secrets,” said Edgar Huber, chief executive of Lands’ End, which is owned by Sears Holdings Corporation. “I don’t think many people recognize what great quality and what a great fit you can get at this price, and we wanted to shout it out and say, ‘This is what you can get for $50.’ ”

Lands’ End spent $12.9 million on advertising in 2011 and $5.1 million in 2012, according to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP.

About 39 percent of men describe what they most often wear to work as “business casual,” followed by 29 percent who describe it as casual (typified by jeans), according a survey by Mintel, a market research firm. Another 20 percent wear a uniform. Only 6 percent usually wear a suit. Men’s clothing is typically advertised in magazines with fashion coverage, like Esquire, GQ and Details. But for the Made to Work campaign, Lands’ End is placing ads primarily in The Wall Street Journal and the Business Day section of The New York Times.

David Israel, executive creative director at AR New York, said the campaign was meant to appeal primarily to men in their 30s and 40s who “wear a dress shirt to work and don’t get as celebrated as they should” for being successful and principled, like the men in the ads.

The ads are being placed beside business coverage rather than fashion because “we were really looking at how do we reach this guy in terms of media? What type of outlets does he go to, and what is he reading?” Mr. Israel said.

Unlike, say, the “It’s Miller Time” campaign introduced by Miller High Life in the 1970s, which celebrated men working at physically taxing jobs like repairing high-voltage lines, advertising has been less inclined to glorify work performed in swivel chairs. But the Lands’ End ads show dress shirts as akin to a uniform whose wearers perform admirable work, Mr. Israel said.

“For a certain guy, there is an idea that you wear a dress shirt when you’re going out into the day to accomplish something,” Mr. Israel said. “This is almost a uniform in a way for that guy, because serious work gets done in it, and there’s something really iconic about a dress shirt in that way.”

David Vinjamuri, the author of “Accidental Branding” and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, said that in advertising “the concept of honest labor has always been connected to blue-collar work, and Lands’ End is trying to translate it to white-collar work” in the new campaign.

As far back as the 1940s and 1950s, shirt makers like Van Heusen and Arrow depicted men in the professional class, but they tended to come off more as “company men,” Mr. Vinjamuri said. But the Lands’ End men in the new ads are more entrepreneurial, which will appeal to men in the work force today, especially younger ones, he continued.

“The thing that’s creative here is they’re showing the millennial or Gen X guy’s aspiration here, which is to be your own boss, and they’re romanticizing that,” Mr. Vinjamuri said of Lands’ End. “It’s emotional advertising, there’s no doubt about it, and it’s a very solid campaign for the brand.”