Jonathan Bottomley on How Calvin Klein Taps Into Culture | BoF Professional Summit 2024

On January 4th of this year, when Calvin Klein dropped its new spring 2024 campaign with a shirtless Jeremy Allen White wearing the brand’s signature underwear, it set the internet ablaze. Social media feeds flooded with reaction videos and media outlets covered the campaign widely. The following week, Calvin Klein saw a 30 percent year-over-year increase in underwear sales. While the brand could never have predicted the gigantic response the campaign would generate, Calvin Klein’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Bottomley says the brand did everything it could to put the strategy in place for it to do so. “In a culture that's very flat, how do you create those spikes … we adopt what we call an entertainment mentality,” said Bottomley on stage at the BoF Professional Summit in New York. This week on The BoF Podcast, BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed sits down with Bottomley to unpack Calvin Klein’s marketing strategy and how they cut through the noise to create cultural moments. Key Insights: - Calvin Klein’s entertainment mentality can be broken down into three main parts. “Firstly, we put a lot of focus on creating stories and creating content that people are going to want to spend time with. The second thing is we think really hard about the talent, not just in terms of reach of engagement, but the opportunity to create a cultural character, show them in a way that maybe you haven't seen before,” Bottomley explains. “And then the third thing is media. We work