| Behind every great bra campaign, is a man with a mission. Michael Gazal, Chief Executive of Gazal Corporation Limited, owners of Lovable® is that man and is set to make Lovable® one of Australia’s top three lingerie brands within 3 years.
HISTORY
Lovable® USA first launched the Lovable® brand in Australia in the mid 1950s. The business soon grew from small beginnings, having particular success with the Lovable® training bra, every young girl’s first bra.
Gazal initially became involved with the Lovable® brand in 1986, entering into a licensing deal with Lovable USA to design, source and market the brand in Australia and New Zealand, and soon increased its market share of the lingerie department and specialty stores.
In 1996, Gazal acquired the rights to the Lovable® trademark for Australasia from Lovable USA for A$6 million and went from being a brand renter to a brand owner.
Despite relatively modest magazine advertising spends in the late 1990s, Lovable® continued to hold its market share by offering consumers a good basic range of superior fitting lingerie and sleepwear styles. However consumer’s perception of the brand became known as ‘reliable’, ‘safe’ as well as ‘ the girl next door’ brand.
After Gazal commissioned and conducted extensive market research in 2001 Lovable®’s customers were saying, "hey, the product is great, but the brand is lacking in aspirational values". Further, in terms of market share, Lovable® was not in the top 5 selling brands in the intimate apparel category. Other competing brands had increased their market share, making substantial marketing investments in a very competitive category. Gazal realised it needed to promptly re-invest in the Lovable® brand in a major way for the future.
STRATEGY
"Our Group strategy is to build strong brands in the apparel industry that consumers will want to buy not just today or next year, but in 5, 10, 15 and 20 years time. That’s what the Lovable® re-launch campaign is all about", said Michael Gazal, CEO of Gazal.
"As a first step we set ourselves some goals — to inject some life back into the personality of the brand, to break the mould of what lingerie companies do in the market, and to increase Lovable®’s market position from currently being outside the top 5 to be one of Australia’s top 3 lingerie brands within three years. We have also started to move the product range in a more fashionable direction and we need to communicate this to the market".
"With this campaign we realised from an early stage in our planning that we needed and wanted to be different. To simply find another supermodel or female pop star to promote our brand was not original and would not give the necessary cut-through we required. So in line with our ‘break the mould’ objective, we embarked on the idea of finding a guy — a young Aussie male actor — to become our Lovable® mascot in an unorthodox way".
" The creative concept is such a cool idea and its never been done before! And we could not have found a more perfect man for the role than Samuel Johnson".
The multi-media campaign is spearheaded by two 30 second television commercials featuring Samuel Johnson and co-starring Australian model Lisa Cazzulino. The ads will go to air in early September 2002. "We have already previewed the TVCs with our major customers, Myer Grace Bros.,Bras ‘n Things and David Jones and they are very positive." said Gazal.
The total re-launch campaign, including personalities, TV, magazines, outdoor and an extensive PR program comes at a sizeable commitment of $1.5 million for a Summer 2002 launch only, but Gazal says its money well spent. "The return on investment is envisaged for years to come. We think long term."
Yet Gazal says a campaign of this scale needs an excellent team of professionals to pull it together and make it work. "You can never be one hundred percent sure but we are confident that it’s going to be a success, because we have the best group of people assembled for the task. At the beginning we brought in former David Jones PR head, Skye Leckie as the brand strategy advisor who helped set the direction and identify the right partners to work with for the project. We then appointed leading ad group George Patterson Bates as our new creative agency, fashion authority Peter Metzner and his team at The Arc Factory as public relations co-ordinators and Arc Retail Vision to handle visual merchandising and point of sale execution".
Gazal Corporation, headquartered in Sydney, is one of Australia’s largest publicly listed apparel companies marketing such brand names as Mambo, Nautica, Van Heusen, Oroton (lingerie and underwear), Lovable®, Kookai (lingerie and swimwear) Tigerlily, Crystelle, Maui and Sons, Bisley and Midford.
For further information, please contact
Sally Poole or Saffron Howells
The Arc Factory
Ph 02 9332 4744 or saffron@arcfactory.com.au | 
