Fashion Marketing: Find better fitting bras online with Playtex and Zafu

Fashion Marketing news: Research shows that most women wear the wrong bra size. Both Playtex, the intimate apparel maker, and Zafu, a site that matches your body measurements with perfectly fitting clothes, want to offer solutions, online.

Finding the perfect bra size is crucial for women, say Playtex and Zafu.

Both companies try to be light, even funny, about the problem. Yet, if Playtex sends consumers a clear message about its positioning and its features, Zafu’s campaign does not explain what value the company can bring. And some people actually find the Zafu campaign offensive.

Playtex’s Girls Talk campaign

Playtex is launching this week an ambitious multi-channel marketing campaign (TV, print, internet) called Girl Talk. The marketing message is loud and clear. The company wants:

• to make women aware of a problem: most women wear bad-fitting bras

• to bring a solution to the problem: Playtex’s website "www.playtexfits.com" and its virtual bra fitter

Overall, this is consistent with Playtex’s tag line: "Who knows you like we do?".

The most convincing part of the site is indeed embodied by Roz, the bra fitter. The woman playing Roz has the right tone and helps you navigate an interactive tool that is supposed to help find the right size. ( Article continues after the picture).

Playtex’s promise: "Changing women’s lives one bra at a time"

As expected, there had to be a Fashion 2.0 flavor to the campaign. Women are indeed invited to create the new lines for Playtex’s next marketing campaign. They either make up lines of their own or votre for lines proposed by others (and by the Playtex marketing department, I guess).

Some of the lines are funny, even risqué. For instance, vote whether you like “Gravity is no longer my enemy, but brownies are.".

I like the site, the tool, Roz and the clear link to Playtex’s positioning. Yet, I found the site hard to navigate – is it because I use a Mac?. Some images would not download properly. The site is definitively a tool, not a place to hang out: come in, find your size, go shopping. It is not a bad thing: apparel companies do not all have to try to create the next myspace.com/fashion.

Zafu: inefficient and/or offensive campaign?

When your company’s main asset is a website where "mathematical calculations, product databases and body shape libraries enable (…) to ask a woman a few simple questions and use her answers to recommend clothes that will fit her best", how do you convey your message in an ad?

Zafu has recently launched an interactive tool that gives each woman a list of the bras that should fit her perfectly. The tool does look more advanced than that of Playtex’s playtexfits.com.

Yet, Zafu has launched a campaign featuring a random guy in white lab coat in a parking lot, in order to advertise this perfect)fitting bra finder. Watch the video below (Article continues after the video).

Zafu’s Bra Scientist

Well, I am not sure that after watching this video, you understand what Zafu is about. Sure, the video may go viral, as it is relatively funny. But what does it say about Zafu? Nothing.

It is a bit like Tivo’s first TV commercials: they were funny, but no one had a clue about what service Tivo could bring to consumers. Obviously, in both Tivo and Zafu’s cases, marketers do not want to spend too much time speaking about algorithms. Yet, the customer value has to be articulated somewhere in the message, I think.

Grokdotcom has a very interesting analysis of the Zafu campaign, with its pros and its cons (Would You Buy a Bra From This Man?). Reader comments are also good to read.

For more information on the Playtex campaingn, DMNews has a detailed article "Playtex gets women talking".