#laurenlitt

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I found this advertisement for Arrowhead water and found it very interesting. The company takes the angle of showing how recycling can affect the world in order to promote their "new and improved" water bottle that uses 50% less plastic, therefore is better for the environment. It is interesting that they pair their water bottle with recycling because now a days it is seen bad to use a water bottle when you can just use a plastic reusable bottle, but with the recycling statistics, they are encouraging people to recycle and to continue to buy water bottles. 

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From following Lululemon on many social media sites, such as Facebook, twitter, and instagram, it is very easy to see their main message they are trying to market to their consumers; “Creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives. We want to see how you live #thesweatlife”. This quote can be found on most of their social media pages, giving insight as to what their platform is. The hash tag used is to promote people to share with them how they are living the active lifestyle that lululemon is trying to convey.

Amongst all of their social media outlets, they promote pictures of their new clothing, different yoga positions and inspirational quotes. The inspirational quotes all have to do with living a healthy lifestyle, and the motivation to do so.  On Facebook, they have multiple different pages that are oriented in towns that seem to have many young active people. I began following the ‘Lululemon Athletica Bucktown” page because it was the closest to my home. On the page they promoted many different events to get people in the community active along with their own “Running Club” that posts updates of when the club is participating. As I was browsing through their different sites, one of the only places I could find a slight sign as to how they were trying to address the November 2013 leggings controversy was when they made their cover photo promoting the “New FullOn LuOn” Leggings, but nothing was said directly about what had happened.

As for their twitter and instagram pages, they are both quite similar. They both advertise their newest clothing with pictures of people wearing them being active. The twitter page posts many links that people can go to to look for fitness facts and for healthy food recipes. Their tweets try to go a step further in how they advertise the new clothing. Instead of being blunt and saying it’s a new product, in many of the tweets of people wearing the clothes they will talk about what they are doing and how the clothing is benefiting them. One tweet of a new active wear bikini showed a picture of a girl in the ocean and said “Keeps you covered when you decide to dive in”. Overall, from these three media outlets, it is very prominent that Lululemon is trying to attract people who are serious about their health and fitness, and who want clothing that will help support their lifestyle. 

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Lululemon is a top of the line, high quality yoga work out Clothes Company, or so we would like to think. In March of 2013 Lululemon went under major criticism for their supposed “sheerness” of the leggings. Woman complained that for the price they were paying for these leggings, a problem of sheerness should not be a problem whatsoever. After the problem was corrected, woman began to complain that there were issues of pilling of material in the thigh region of the pants. After doing more research about the topic, I found two articles regarding the issue. The first article is from ABC News presenting what was going on. The most intriguing part of this article is when the point of the question of are the products really worth the high costs? When consumers are spending about $100 for a pair of pants, the quality that is supposedly their “core value” should be supported, but evidently is not. ABC reports that through the company’s Facebook site, people were commenting how they have yoga pants from place such as Target that have lasted and held up better than these products have. The co-founder, Chip Wilson spoken to the public saying that not every woman’s’ body type will work for these pants.

In the second article, from the Christian-Science Monitor, a mother who buys the lululemon products spoke in regards to the way Wilson went about his apology. She talks about that fact that she is an active yoga participant with her family, and that if she could in fact afford pants that are around $100, she wouldn’t be buying them from Lululemon, from the way they they had behaved and how they “tried to come to a solultion”.  Lululemon has also been known for not wanting to make plus size clothing. From both of these articles, you can see that it is not only important to make a quality product for the price people are asking for, but to represent a brand properly. Because of the companies actions, people do not want to spend their money there, and start going to other larger companies with better quality, such as Nike.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/lululemon-founder-chip-wilson-blames-womens-bodies-yoga/story?id=20815278

http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2013/1113/Lululemon-yoga-pant-controversy-Namaste-turns-nasty

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Brand Project

For this project, I chose to study the Lululemon workout clothing line. Last year, there was some controversy with how the co-founder of the company handled a problem with a line of their yoga pants. When the pants were recalled in March for being too sheer and then corrected the problem in July by making them thicker style of pants called the “Full-On Luon”. After the problem had been allegedly fixed, women were then complaining about how the new product had been pilling with wear in the inner thigh region. After the continued complaints about the improved product,the co-founder Wilson made some very controversial and rude comments about how these woman who were complaining did not have the right body types that would work for his line of clothing. I had not been a consumer of their products at this time, and actually had never heard about his controversy until recently, so I was very intrigued to research more about the product and what the company had or is continuing to do about the problem. As a rather expensive line of workout clothes, problems like this should not be happening to the clothing that people are spending so much money for top quality, but not receiving that.