 What's up everybody, once again it's Brand Man Sean and we got to talk about Gucci's racist turtleneck. And when I say racist, obviously a lot of people are basically, you know, alluding to blackface when we look at this turtleneck. Why is this so important and what's the marketing and branding scenario related to it? Well, we'll get right into that. So first, to look at this story entirely, you really have to consider the fact that, you know, Gucci is a fashion brand. So now we have to look at the fashion industry as a whole to put things into context because Vogue has done this, right? Prada has done this. Prada did it with their product. Vogue did it where they had the slave earrings in their magazine. So it's not necessarily just a Gucci thing, it's a fashion industry thing. Now, this video isn't to determine whether somebody is right or wrong, whether somebody did it on purpose or not, but it is the things that should be considered and could be useful to anybody in terms of what's actually happening when these things do happen from a marketing and branding standpoint. When it comes to the high fashion portion of things, it's not just this commercial thing. We're just trying to sell a lot of products. It's more of an artistic thing, right? We have something we're trying to express. In a lot of cases, you have this on by guard way of thinking, right? You're trying to push the envelope, you're trying to do something thought-provoking that's always existed in the fashion industry. As a matter of fact, that's a lot of times where people look at stuff and say, why would somebody ever wear that or that's ugly? Who would do that? It comes from similar ways of thinking that lead to some of these racist creations that happen as well. The difference is, back in the day, there was no social media, so people who probably would be offended by some of these things or just aren't even interested in fashion from an artistic standpoint probably wouldn't be aware of a lot of that stuff happening. But now, we changed the landscape. Social media happens, bow. And because of that, there's a lot of marketing and branding scenarios that happen from it. I'm sure maybe fashion might have been taken aback by it at first, but now it's been enough time where it's pretty clear to some of these people, they have to know the marketing aspects of it as well, and that's what we're about to get into. First and foremost, when it comes to creating these thought-provoking pieces and putting them in an era where it's on social media, a lot of the results become similar to trolling. And because of that similarity, you have to look at the results in a similar fashion as well. So, what are the things when you are a luxury brand and you're creating something that actually might provoke thought out into the industry, but even bigger than that, provoke thought into the community at large? Well, it looks a little bit something like this, and let's pretend someone is doing this intentionally how that would play out. Let's say I have a high, high fashion brand. We're talking about traditional conservative, the purity in how it's been looked at before. We already know that those environments were lacking in diversity, right? There's a certain type of people who were in those rooms when we think of traditional high fashion, Italy, Paris, blah, blah, blah. So let's pretend that I'm trying to continue to stay pure to that and that demographic. Well, there's elements of that demographic where it's high, it's luxury that doesn't look at this other demographic in a certain way. They don't look at them positively, right? You have it from a class standpoint, and even in some cases a racial standpoint. But when this demographic over here actually likes your product, when they find value in your product, that actually devalues your product to your original target demographic. So what that means is you might say, I want to rescue my brand. I need to go on a rescue mission, and a good way to do that might be doing something that angers this demographic over here, maybe even get some to boycott in some sense. And when that happens, at least two things occur, right? I get to assure to these people, look, bro, I'm for y'all. I'm not making stuff for them. It's, it's his, it's us, we here. And two, just them necessarily not wearing it alone allows these people to feel exclusive and luxurious, continue to feel included in this club over here and excluded from that environment that they want to feel apart from. They want to escape. At the end of the day, so much of luxury is aspirational and better than and it's hard to feel better than if you're included. In the masses, just from the superficial standpoint. So again, this is a rescue mission and step number one is bow. We are dropping a product out there that's going to create some polarization, which leads into step number two. You actually have to do this beforehand, which is create context. And when we think about creating context, what does that actually mean? Well, look at the product monkey. The product monkey has another monkey as well. That's a different color, same monkey, different color. And then that monkey is a part of a collection and that collection has different animals. They're all different colors, right? So at the end of the day, creating this context allows them to say, yo, this had nothing to do with creating something that offended you guys. This is just a colorway of something that had been happening already. There's a lot of different colors and a lot of different combinations. Black and red look good together. Y'all are being oversensitive in this case. And what this context allows you to create is one, the idea that this was not intentional. I wasn't trying to offend you. But also it helps when it comes to the people who are less sensitive to whoever might have been offended. Because not only will some people already be like, y'all are tripping or we're on this side, we don't care. We're going over here. But you'll have some people who are a little bit in the middle. They're a little bit more indifferent. And then they'll feel like they're being objective. They take in all the information and they look at the context and say, yo, these people are tripping because they're ignoring the fact that this other evidence exists that lets them know that they're not creating this to mimic blackface. This is just another color in a larger collection. So that's step number two, create context. So you can kind of manage the idea that it was intentional. And then step number three is to apologize swiftly, right? Just to once again say that this was not our intentions. Look, this was a part of something greater. This was not our intention at all. So again, drop a product that's gonna polarize, create context in the first place to help things be received and manage the perception of things. And three, make sure you apologize. And in scenarios like this, oftentimes it seems like for whatever reason we're not gonna get into that deeper conversation. These groups of people who get offended can be rather forgiving. So at the end of the day, even if you lose a little bit of those people's business in the short term, they might just come back to you later anyway. Or the things that it takes to make things better aren't necessarily hard to do, it's low effort for you. But that is something that seems to be happening. Once again, I don't know which companies have done something like that on purpose, but I do know if someone was found out to do something like that on purpose, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised. And I also do believe there are these genuine mistakes of just not having the representation in a boardroom and some boardrooms to actually comment and say, yo, this is gonna be received like this. Do you wanna double back and kind of change things? That's a genuine thing as well. So I would love to know you guys thoughts though. Do you think certain companies are doing it on purpose? Do you think that it's all just a mistake and a lot of people are tripping? Either way it goes, how can you use it for yourself? If you like this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.