JCPenney Takes a Teen Trend to a New Level
When you buy a great item at a great price, you want to share your triumph – it’s human nature. Over the last couple of years, teens have done just that but in a new way: YouTube. Teens have been posting aptly-named “haul videos” on YouTube and other social sites; the videos outline shopping sprees, showing the items bought, for how much, where and offer editorial regarding their value and how they’ll be used. Usually fashion-oriented, haul videos became a new go-to for teen shoppers who wanted to know what’s really cool vs. what they were being sold by brands – their own video version of Yelp. Many teens have even started their own video shopping blogs, with summer hitting a high point for back-to-school haul videos — to date, more than 160,000 haul videos have been posted on YouTube alone, and a site dedicated to haul videos has popped up online as well. Enter JCPenney.
Major retailer JCPenney, in partnership with Forever 21 and American Eagle, worked with six haulers to develop haul videos. The kids were given gift cards worth $250 – $1,000 and some were even provided free transportation and lodging to shop near JCPenney’s home town store in Plano, Texas. The videos were the uploaded on YouTube (by JCPenney), as well as on JCPenney’s Facebook page, Twitter feed, JCPenney’s mobile site and jcp.com/teen, where one new video was posted each week between July and September. In each video, the hauler notes (per legal requirements) that they were given gift cards by JCPenney and encouraged to check out JCPenney’s new fall fashions.
The videos are insightful, fashion-forward, and somewhat scary: they present a teenager so into fashion they can advise, credibly, thousands of other teens… And influence back-to-school spending that’s expected to reach nearly $50 billion this year. The teens get increased visibility, and JCPenney is able to tap into the market with a resonance that the brand might not have otherwise had. So far, so good.
Now that JCPenney and partners have crept into what was once a brand-free, teen-only environment, it’s natural that competitors will follow – perhaps as soon as this upcoming holiday season. Now the question is: will a death knell sound for the haul video? Will savvy teens realize they’re no longer watching an online friend give them fashion advice, but a global marketer telling them how to dress? Or will more teens may clamor to get the exposure — and the freebies — that sponsored hauls provide. Either way, JCPenney has been smart to jump onto a trend created by teens themselves and capture a vital part of that ever-growing back-to-school spending… And maybe even a little extra respect from the teens they market to as well.
