Is digital now the center of the universe?

This question is answered in many different ways by different brands. For example, there are brands that still see digital as a channel. They will create the imagery and the campaign and put it on Facebook and Twitter. They will create blogs and a website. But I don’t consider digital only as a channel. I think digital is in everything we do.

The world today is not sequential; it’s more in parallel. If you are going to buy apparel, you would probably have seen it in a magazine, on a billboard and on a website. You will interact with content many times before you end up purchasing anything.

It is a lot less about the control of the image and a lot more about managing and steering the messaging that’s already out there. The more you let go, the more your brand becomes real and true to the consumer, to the people who use and experience it.

That’s pretty scary for some people.

It freaks out some people when you start talking about letting go of your message. But that is the world we live in. It’s not about being digital-centric. It is about having a digital mentality that’s full of experimentation, along with some paranoia about disruption — because in this digital world you can always be disrupted.

Digital gives wings to imagination and creativity. It provides marketers with new and innovative ways to deliver the things people want. I see digital media as a way to enable our brands to express themselves in ways that were never possible before.

How do you see digital evolving?

More and more I believe people will want open systems. It’s not about what companies want; it’s about what consumers want. The evolution is an acknowledgement that consumers are in the driver’s seat more than ever.

People are training themselves not to look on the sites where the advertising is and just to focus on the middle of the page. That’s why the importance of entertainment content merged with brands is a trend that is likely to evolve very quickly.

Will privacy concerns change the way brands approach digital media?

No, I don’t think it’s going to change the way people approach digital media. What will change are the controls and regulations that people will need. We have a partnership with Facebook, which is a very open one, and we had a conversation with them about privacy. They are really attentive to it. Protecting our privacy should be the duty of all of us, but it doesn’t change the nature of what digital represents.

What have you learned from your partnership with Facebook?

The purpose of the partnership is not only to attract sales to our e-commerce sites or to advertise at a lower cost-per-thousand, which is the normal way of doing things. It really is to team up with Facebook, and they’ve been great partners.

We want to learn what the behaviors are about — not the individual behaviors but the mass-trend behaviors. What does it mean to “like” something? Does it mean that you usually take action? Does it mean that you create more affinity for the brand? What makes people “like” one pair of pants versus another?

With digital, what you have is the possibility of actually talking to millions of people and being a lot more precise, a lot more accurate and understanding of their needs.

What is the thinking behind the Levi’s advertising strategy?

The idea is that real people and real work can drive real change for society. Our campaign aims to engage consumers in an open conversation about work and its importance within the events and energy of our time.

At the same time, we wanted to construct a real-life example that the work-wear attitude can make a difference — we wanted to make it practical, honest and true to the values and heritage of our brand. Our agency, Weiden+Kennedy, came up with the idea of featuring the people of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Braddock was once a town of 30,000 and the hub of the steel industry. Today, it is a town of just 2,500 people. The question we asked was, “Can we help the people of Braddock in a tangible way by bringing the spirit of work-wear back to town?”

We partnered with the town in a meaningful way by helping re-build its community center, which is used by the older residents and younger, underprivileged youth. We also used the town’s people and the places in our advertising. Real people, real work, authentic Levi’s clothing, working together for a better future.

How does Levi’s involve the consumer?

There is not a direct solicitation, but there is a call-to-action for us to make a difference in all the communities. We don’t necessarily expect everybody to go and help Braddock. Levi’s is a global brand and there a lot of cities like Braddock that need help. We want to make a difference every day in the communities we operate in, in the world we live in.

Is Levi’s planning to help other struggling communities?

Yes, if in the future something comes up that is worth a try, we will definitely do it. But we are more focused on what the brand represents. What truth is really required for the country and the society we live in? We wanted to make an example out of Braddock, but it is broader than just Braddock.

Are you concerned that some people might be cynical about that?

I’m not concerned, but I’m sure there are people who are going to be cynical about it. We know it’s really genuine. If you try to fake it, people will know it. They recognize very fast when a message is a true message versus when it is not.

Where does the Levi’s pop-up print workshop in San Francisco fit in?

The idea of the workshops is to combine the minds of creative people and people who want to get stuff done with a higher purpose and create a conduit for that.

As a company, there are several ways you can motivate people. Usually advertising or promotional monies are used to promote the brand. I’m a firm believer that those days are quickly going away. People want to see themselves with things that are relevant to them and to the society we live in.

Within that, I believe the role of our brand is to facilitate that connection. It’s a question of creating a set of ways in which people can express themselves.

Opening a print shop seems ironic in a digital age.

It’s funny you say that, because when one of the people here came up with the idea of a print shop, I laughed. From my prior experience at Kodak, I know that people who have passion for imaging feel that a lot of the joy of taking pictures is retrieving that image and forming something tangible.

It’s all about the process. It’s all about the joy. I think we all want a little bit of that — dealing with your own garden, your own cooking or whatever your hobby is. Most people, in surveys, say their hobbies are something tangible, not something intangible.

Looking at a picture on a screen is a tangible thing. But having that picture in your hands, and finding ways to reflect what you have in your mind on a piece of paper, is a very fascinating thing.

Do you have hobbies yourself?

I have a lot of hobbies, but little by little, at least on the sports side, they have been shut down. I used to play fútbol, or soccer. After I hurt my knee, I started playing tennis. But now my hobbies are reading books and traveling whenever I can.

What kinds of books?

Theological, or spiritual books. These aren’t self-help books but I am continuously trying to find a way to improve as a human being. Maybe it’s a little bit of a cliché, but it is the truth. It is literally how I feel.

It is a difficult thing to exert humbleness. My definition of humbleness is finding a way to acknowledge that everything good you have comes from the fact that you are almost born with it. If you believe in God — in my case, it comes from God.

Does that inform the way you approach your work as well?

It’s interesting that you say that because my background is as an engineer, which is all extremely fact-based. But over the years you come to understand the role of judgment and your values, and how you apply knowledge from facts into something that has true meaning for people. So, yes, a lot of what I do is informed not only by facts and values but also by my personal beliefs.

Does that also affect the role of brands?

The role of brands is really changing from selling stuff to finding ways for the stuff we produce to be coveted. It’s a real change in optics. This is very, very dear to one of my beliefs in terms of gifts.

A gift is not necessarily something you want to give. A true gift is when you are giving something that the other person wants to receive. This requires a lot more work because it requires me getting to know who you are. It has become more difficult to find ways for people to love you and care for you and be the advocate for your brand.

For years and years and years in marketing, loyalty was a key performance indicator. Those days are close to gone. It is not only loyalty that matters in marketing. It’s really advocacy because advocacy is active, not passive.

People are not only buying or relating to a brand in a certain way; they’re also defining what that brand stands for. That is a lot more powerful. It requires a lot more work than in the past because we’re now not talking only about advertising; we are also talking about the consumer experience.

Engaging with consumers has become a much more complex matrix that involves several areas of marketing — customer-relationship management, social media, community, commerce, and other web services.

Then you expand that to the non-digital world, where you may have a great social or community program. If you think about Harley Davidson, when they started in the mid-80s, it was a lot less about digital and more about the willingness of people who shared the same values to be together.

Do the Levi’s workshops create that kind of community?

Yes, there is a little bit of that in there. When you are on a journey, like Levi’s is on a journey to regain its place in society and culture, there are several ways you can approach it. It’s much less about the breadth of the media vehicles you use because the idea trumps the medium every time. It’s much more about the depth of the dialogue consumers can engage in with us and vice versa.

I’m not saying that the workshops are the perfect solution to the problem. It is one element of it. We’ll see some things get a lot of traction and some things will get less traction and we’ll be adjusting along the way. Hopefully, we will give people a chance to express themselves in many different ways.

How should non-digital worlds work together with the digital?

If you are a Levi’s fan and you go to one place to another, ideally you would always have an experience that is compatible with the brand. You would always have that same sensation of originality, of truth, of honesty that the brand represents. That’s what we’re after.

It’s a lot more difficult now because of the number of touchpoints. We have to make sure we exert expertise in each of the areas because the person who is very good at creating workshops may not be the person who is very good at judging copy and advertising on TV. That’s where managerial judgment comes in.

How does company culture need to change to keep pace?

The new culture is not about measuring marketing investments; it’s a business-model change. Creating a community is not a marketing program; it is a business program.

You don’t measure marketing ROI on a community; you measure the business-model change that the community represents for the company. That is a big, big cultural shift, and it requires what I call an “organizational unlock.”

How can organizations unlock?

We need to re-think the ways that we’ve organized in the past, which is into marketing departments and functions. We are not going to make everything work together with separate departments. You have to have a network of people who understand the rules and responsibilities and know how to play to position, like on a sports team.

You have to know when to hand over the ball, when to receive the ball and play through a network, both within the company and with its agencies.

You have to separate the strategy from the execution, because there is so much that has to be learned. It becomes much more difficult to strategize and execute all the time at high levels. You have to find a way to make those things work together.

How do you know when you’ve succeeded?

That’s part of the dialogue we’re having with our partners and vendors right now. My only success criterion is what I call “justified fame.” This means getting fame for the right reasons. When that happens, a lot of people will carry your flag for you.

I believe that if the brand does the right thing for consumers, consumers will do the right thing for the brand. This is an inverted logic from the past, when we always put what’s right for the brand first.

The moment people start to talk about the Levi’s brand as being the best thing on their bodies is when we will know that we are starting to represent something for people. The moment people start recommending our brand to others on Facebook; and start writing blogs about the truth of our campaigns; that’s when we’ll know people are carrying flag for the brand.

Maybe the next Levi’s pop-up shop ought to be a tattoo parlor.

You think? That’s funny, because when I was in Russia, we were introduced to a guy who tattooed our brand, our “back pocket,” on himself. It can happen! We were joking about tattoos, but that’s what Harley Davidson’s fans ended up doing. Today, people tattoo Harley Davidson, not because of the brand or the motorcycle, but because of what Harley Davidson represents for them and the lifestyle.

What would be the lifestyle equivalent for Levi’s?

We would like people to think that we are the embodiment of the energy and the events of our times, and that we are the original and definitive American jean. That’s fundamentally who we are. Levi’s was present at the most important times in our society and we continue to be. We will continue to adapt to make sure we still are.