One Gainsbourg family, two different marketing strategiesFor Autumn/Winter 2015, Charlotte Gainsbour

One Gainsbourg family, two different marketing strategies

For Autumn/Winter 2015, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Yvan Attal are the respective faces of French fashion brands Comptoir des Cotonniers (Comptoir) and Zadig & Voltaire(Zadig).

She’s Serge’s daughter, an actress, singer and fashion force in her own right, no stranger to advertising after years of collaborating with Nicolas GhesquièreandGerard Darel. He’s her partner, an actor and a director I’ve had a soft spot for since his turn in the original Anthony Zimmer. Completing the advertising family is their daughter, Alice, also posing for Comptoir.

Charlotte & Alice for Comptoir

2015 has been a key year for Comptoir: it turned 20 and it hired a new creative director, Anne Valerie Hash, a Chanel, Dior and Chloé alumni who used to run one of the few real haute couture brands in the world.

To celebrate, Comptoir updated its well-known mother-daughter campaign, which has been running since 1997. Picking Gainsbourg guaranteed the brand blanket coverage in France, the company’s home market, where Charlotte, both by birth and talent, is a national treasure. Her global appeal, and the fascination her “jolie-laide” style inspires in the fashion sphere, guaranteed press and interest in other countries, where Comptoir runs 400 stores.

Though the brand has been owned by Japanese retail holding company Fast Retailing since 2005, its ads exploit the company’s French, specifically Parisian, origins. The campaign could illustrate Caroline Maigret’s bestseller How to be Parisian Wherever You Are or Ines de la Fressange’s similar advice book, Parisian Chic: A Style Guide.

The little black blazer, the jeans, the long trench coat… Charlotte wears all the staples of the fantasised Parisian wardrobe. But the marketing strategy goes beyond trading on Comptoir’s nationality, as it demonstrates meticulous planning.

The Gainsbourg assets have been released in monthly waves, with the last one planned for this month. Every single product-focused email, from one advertising a 20% reduction on cashmere to one on the Mademoiselle Plume puffer, has been illustrated with the appropriate Gainsbourg shot. The same is true of the site, where Charlotte and Alice pop up on category pages, product pages and landing pages. This means that before it started shooting images, Comptoir knew which product it would hero each month.

Comptoir clearly saw its collaboration with Gainsbourg as a season-long initiative that would help shift products month after month. It has given owned and bought media a unity rivalling that of the collection itself; creating a universe customers can recognise and relate to for six months.

Yvan for Zadig & Voltaire

Whereas Comptoir made this the season of Charlotte and Alice, Zadig have used Attal very little, beyond the first buzz his photos generated. On the brand’s website, Attal has limited visibility, apart from a few assets illustrating the products he wears in the campaign, such as the John Patch C Men Sweater, the cashmere-knit-of-the-season.

Though French, Zadig has always had more of an LA off-duty, rock-chic vibe. It doesn’t trade much on its French-ness. The faces of each season are picked for their name-recognition as well as their perceived lifestyle and coolness: Sasha Pivovarova, Freja Beha Erichsen or Jamie Bochert for womenswear, for example.

Whereas Comptoir presents itself as a brand with family values, that can be shared by mother and daughter, Zadig is the party brand, that brand you’d go to if you wanted to look good on a date. By featuring two people from the same family, who have been together for 18 years, Zadig and Comptoir managed to demonstrate, in one season and a few images, their different brand ethos and target market.