ch.15 Integrated Marketing Communications

  -American Apparel's promotional strategy
American Apparel is well known for its "provocative" advertisement. They create real images of real people, not models, who are mostly their employees. But, it has been controversial because of its images. The images in their ads are amateur-porn-style. "Sex sells." Besides that, American Apparel has been doing advertising and campaign called "Legalize LA” and "Legalize Gay" to express their political point of view. Also, they advertise their business model "vertical integration” using the phrase "manufacture with pride in the USA". 
In order to increase sales, American Apparel mostly focuses on displays. Their retail stores are decorated with unique posed mannequins and each item are displayed according to the colors. They display new items in front of the main door to captivate customers’ attention. They started offering, "Buy three, Get one free" on a few items like socks, underwear, and shirts. In online store, American Apparel suggests visitors to register for e-mail updates and send them 10% promo code for online purchase. They also offer free-shipping service for customers who buy over $75.
   - Explaining American Apparel's denim Advertising with communication process.
American Apparel has launched its first line of jeans last week. Dov Charney, CEO and founder of American Apparel, said, "Jeans are an iconic, essential part of the modern wardrobe, just like the t-shirt. No one does basics like American Apparel. We've mastered the basic t-shirt, now we're getting excited about jeans," The company aims to add a new denim basic to women's wardrobes. And they emphasize that the jeans are made in USA not like other competitors. Thus, American Apparel launched a new campaign of the denim line "J E A N S". In order to encode their message to the receivers, American Apparel uses just the word "jeans" in a simple font and "manufactured with pride in the USA". That's all. Also, they use simple images of a girl wearing a pair of jeans and a white t-shirts in a white room. The ads just stress the jeans simply. 

Then, for transmission of the message, American Apparel uses various forms of mass media, such as Twitter, Facebook, their website, blogs and magazines and their retail stores itself. When people receiver the message of American Apparel's new jeans advertising, people can easily find that it's basic yet still very American Apparel-ious.
Sometimes, there is miscommunication of promotional messages with consumers. American Apparel' advertising has been controversial because of their sexual images. For example, one ad in the enormous billboard in downtown Manhattan was very criticized by people. In the ads, there is a young-looking girl, shirtless but in tights, bent over with her legs spread, and it was written " GEE, I WONDER WHY WOMEN GET RAPED" across the front of it. It was a hot potato that women who saw it felt very offensive.