How Kate Spade Uses Content to Clearly Communicate its Brand Message

When it comes to communicating Kate Spade's brand's voice, content is king.

This was a key takeaway during a presentation by Mary Renner Beech, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Kate Spade & Company, at Luxury Interactive in New York City yesterday.

"Clarity of brand voice still wins; we believe this very strongly at Kate Spade," said Beech. "Even more today, you have to be crystal clear in the brand you're putting out to consumers because he has to or she has to catch it so quickly with everything else going on."

To communicate that brand to consumers, Beech said it's all about content.

"At Kate Spade, we believe content is king," said Beech. "It's incredibly important that you have great content, and that the content clearly communicates your brand’s message and mission.”

And what is Kate Spade's brand promise? "We inspire women to lead a more interesting life," Beech said. "It's a distinct and very unique brand promise."

To illustrate her point, Beech discussed Kate Spade's popular #MissAdventure campaign, a series of five- to six-minute online films that follow interesting women leading interesting lives. The campaign, which launched in 2014, has featured actresses such as Anna Kendrick, Zosia Mamet, Lola Kirke, Kat Dennings and Marisa Tomei to help tell the brand's story.

The campaign has been hugely successful, according to Beech. The films have had 170 million views, and Kate Spade has seen increases in search activity, purchase consideration, keyword interest and traffic from social media as a result of the films, Beech said.

A screenshot from Kate Spade's popular #MissAdventure campaign.

Having great content is just one piece of the puzzle, however.

"While content is king, distribution is the queen and she wears the pants," Beech said. "In today's world, you have to create your content to be distributed and have those distribution vehicles in mind when creating your content strategy."

For example, this past summer Kate Spade rolled out another #MissAdventure film featuring actresses Anna Faris and Rosie Perez that was designed to be cut down for distribution. "We created 66 different pieces of content from this film, and used different pieces of content depending on where we were distributing it.”

In this case, that meant many social network platforms, including "using Giphy for the first time … which was incredibly successful,” Beech added.

Overall, Kate Spade had 45 million of views of its #MissAdventure films, 52 percent of which were organically driven. What’s more, the campaign created half a million clickthroughs to katespade.com, which was a key goal of the program, Beech said.

Beech also discussed another type of content Kate Spade produces, the company's popular Talking Shop videos, which feature Tiffany Whitford, who was once the store manager at the kate spade new york Madison Avenue flagship store, but is now a district manager. In the "haul" videos, Whitford offers viewers a personal walk through the store's new arrivals.

"These videos were really popular with consumers and customers because they were authentic and personal," said Beech, who added that they were very easy to produce. "A junior associate took the videos with her iPhone."