Calvin Klein and perfume company COTY are using an increased amount of social media and Internet marketing to promote CKFree, a cologne aimed at men ages 18 to 34 who identify themselves as independent, modern thinkers.
“Calvin Klein has a huge fan base and it lends itself to social media,” explained Grant Johmann, SVP of marketing at Wiredset, the digital agency handling outreach marketing on the CKFree campaign. “There are great odds that you are going to be successful when you give value to the consumer, combined with the tools that are going to bring awareness.”
In the past, Wiredset has helped COTY and Calvin reach out to Web forums and bloggers covering men’s lifestyle and fashion. For the CKFree launch, the companies also debuted a Google maps smash-up application, which allows men to recommended locations for the best places to live free and to design postcards to send to friends. For example, Calvin Klein model Jamie Dornan notes that North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway is a destination where drivers can freely enjoy the open road.
The app also embeds into Facebook. The companies also bought ads on Facebook targeting groups of men, such as Calvin Klein enthusiasts and fans of competitive men’s fragrance brands. They did so using lifestyle keywords, targeting each group with different copy.
The effort’s custom Twitter page, @ckfreethinkers, is running giveaways for consumers who retweet one of the page’s quotations from the world’s free thinkers, including Jack Keroauc, John Lennon and William Shakespeare.
“There were no benchmarks set around the performance of these applications,” Johmann said. “This was new terrain for COTY and Calvin Klein. The map page is the fifth-most viewed page on the entire CK Web site so far, which speaks to the overall marketing impact it’s having.”
