In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual

Please check out my first article as a writer for AdAge, In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual.

In ‘Poor But Sexy’ Berlin, Brands Need to Understand Casual: To market successfully, you need to understand college kids

This is my first post for the Global Idea Network and I am happy to be here. I aim to post once-a-week about my experience in Berlin and around Europe as an expat. Today, I want to talk a little bit about Berlin, the city its Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, called “poor but sexy.”

Berlin is sexy, poor, and the most casual city I can imagine. Everyone wears jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, and some sort of field jacket. At first I mistook this casualness as slovenliness or poverty. No. Berlin’s casualness is very intentional. In spite of limited cash, Berliners are slaves to fashion and remain current. The moment jeans went skinny, Berlin went skinny. When the world became obsessed with Chuck Taylors, Berliners sported them. Current, as long as the fashion palette keeps to caps, jeans, t-shirts, jackets, and sneakers. When my friend Mark wore the wrong sort of casual his friends staged an intervention: the jeans were all wrong, the jacket was uncool, and the shoes had to go.

It occurred to me that successful marketing in Berlin requires marketing to college kids, who are the epitome of poor but sexy, across the board and for everything. How would you sell a car, a cell phone, a pair of panties, a watch, some gum, a bank account, or a credit card to a teenager and you’ll probably get it right here in Berlin.

When it comes to purchases, Berliners judge each others’ fashion sense like they do at college, where how you were dressed had more to do with style and selection — how you wore it — and less to do with the total cost of purchase and where you bought it. Competition in the marketplace comes from flea markets, hand-me-downs, swap meets, and eBay as easily as it may your competitor. Lots of those skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors were scored used from the 80s. I learned from my friend Libia from Mexico City that Berlin is world famous for its used clothing and consignment stores. There is no stigma associated with getting stuff used and cheap — quite the opposite.

There are other concerns when marketing to Berliners: biking, weather, exposure, and the elements. Like college students, Berliners take public transport and ride bikes every day in all sorts of Central European weather. In fact, I have been told again and again that bicycles are neither recreational nor optional. They’re essential to daily life. Like students going to class in the morning, Berliners need to carry everything they need for the day with them. Necessity demands that Manolos are pretty impractical, as are skirts, heavily-styled hairdos, and exceptionally-delicate makeup rituals.

Berlin casual is not limited to kids in their teens and twenties, however. I am talking about my 39-year-old friend Frank, who pretty much dresses in hooded sweatshirts and jeans all the time (with a fierce family brand loyalty to the G-Star brand, universally popular in Berlin) and, coincidentally, dresses just like his two sons, 8 and 10, as you can see in the photo illustrations. Yes, Frank, who runs a production company called The Lime Machine, approved this post.

I have been invited to be a European correspondent to the AdAge Global Idea Network. I am a resident of Berlin, Germany, and will be mostly reporting my experience in Central and Eastern Europe; however, GIN is a moveable feast — it is global, after all. I hope you enjoy the post. Please consider subscribing to the blog. I plan to post at least once-a-week. Plus, there are a wide assortment of other great bloggers from around the world.