Loewe Chief Marketing and Communications Officer: Storytelling Underpins Great Marketing

10 Feb, 2023

In this week’s Little Grey Cells, Charlie Smith, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for fashion house Loewe, explains how storytelling underpins great marketing, his metaverse curiosity and the need for experimentation. 

1.      What inspired you to pursue a career that embraces marketing?

I always knew that I wanted to do something creative but at the same time entrepreneurial, and marketing seemed to have an appealing mix of creativity combined with business requirements.

2.      What are the biggest challenges currently facing your marketing team?

When you are rapidly growing like we are, it is a constant challenge to scale up the team and tools to meet the changing demands of the company, and it is having the right talent on the team which enables us to grow further.

3.      Science vs Art: With scientific data-driven marketing at one end of the spectrum and genius creative ideas at the other - which side do you lean towards?

Fashion is a creatively driven sector so a lot of what we do is based on feeling and instinct. That being said we use data to increase the effectiveness of all of our digital targeting and to analyse performance across both offline and online channels so that we can learn from our successes and failures for the next time. I think one of the best things we have culturally is an acceptance that we need to experiment and try new things but that not everything is going to work, and that’s fine as long as we learn from our mistakes.

4.      The Metaverse: are you ‘in’, ‘out’ or ‘not sure’?

First off I find this term a bit misleading because there isn’t really one metaverse, there are multiple different emerging online worlds and I don’t think any of us know which of them will one day become ubiquitous. We are curious about how we can translate our brand codes into virtual worlds but we are yet to launch what you might call a web3 project.

5.     How is Loewe 'Riding the Storm' of economic turbulence and increased cost of living?

I think one of the most important things as a cultural brand is to have a sensitivity to people’s lived experiences around the world. We are living through extraordinary times and I think people respond to brands who acknowledge and adapt to this in a non-didactic way.

6.      How do you adapt a business and marketing strategy to embrace the latest trends and keep ahead of the competition?

I think being constantly curious and spending time where your potential customers are is incredibly important. For example I have been spending A LOT of time on Tiktok to understand what our brand voice should be on the platform, what kind of content people like engaging with, how people expect brands to be a part of the conversation etc.

7.      What role does your company’s purpose and environmental strategy play within your marketing strategy? 

We aspire to be an innovator and that means  we want to be innovating in areas such as sustainability. That being said, it is a very complex topic and we also don’t want to green wash so we are focussing on putting plans into action rather than on communicating on the subject.

8.      How important is storytelling when maximising your customers’ engagement with a campaign?

A lot of fashion brands have historically focussed solely on image and not on storytelling. We have seen success by combining the two, for example by explaining about the different artists or artistic movements that inspired our collections. For me personally, storytelling is a big part of what I enjoy about marketing.

9.      Creative agencies rail against the time and resource spent working on pitches to win accounts: is there a realistic, fair alternative to the pitch process?

As an ex-agency person I fully understand how frustrating the pitch process can be so I try to avoid pitching out projects unless they are business critical and large budget. Instead I prefer to have conversations with different agencies about upcoming challenges or projects and then engage  with them directly.

10.  From a marketing perspective, what’s coming up for your brand or business in 2023?

While we have become better known over the last few years, increasing awareness is still our primary aim, so that means everything we do is through the lens of increasing visibility. We have a lot of exciting projects in 2023 so stay tuned!

Charlie Smith was interviewed by Tim Healey (Little Grey Cells), on behalf of Worth Your While 

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Senior marketers have more time, less stress and clearer marketing strategies by collaborating with best-selling author and outsourced marketing director Tim Healey www.shoot4themoon.co.uk