California Apparel News

Los Angeles’ hipsters may soon find themselves having to ’fess up to whether they’re cool or not.

The question is part of the Beverly Center’s first guerrilla marketing campaign, “Am I Ordinary,” which the center will unveil April 1. Created by Santa Monica, Calif.–based advertising company Colby & Partners, the campaign will feature nontraditional strategies to encourage potential Beverly Center customers to visit the campaign’s Web site, amiordinary.com. On the site, consumers can answer lighthearted questions to judge whether their lives are ordinary and find incentives to visit the designer shopping center.

The Beverly Center’s campaign will not merely ask Angelenos to tell the truth about their standard of hip, said Barbara Bach Garrison, marketing and sponsorship director of the shopping center, owned by Taubman Centers Inc. of Bloomfield, Mich. It will state that the 23-year-old center is a crucial destination in a less-than-5-square-mile area dominated by some of the highest-profile shopping districts in Los Angeles, including celebrity-driven Robertson Boulevard; the growing designer boutique district of Melrose Avenue; and West Third Street, with its up-and-coming specialty shops—not to mention The Grove shopping center, Rodeo Drive and Sunset Plaza.

“The campaign will solidify current center positioning with a young, upscale audience that spends disposable income on themselves,” Bach Garrison said.

Appealing to this marketing-savvy audience and breaking away from the pack of alreadystellar shopping choices in Los Angeles requires bold steps. The nontraditional tactics of the “Am I Ordinary” campaign will include street teams posting signs with quirky statements and quips on prominent places at gyms, cafeacute;s and nightclubs, as well as on street-light poles. These teams also will distribute T-shirts and gym towels that will feature slogans such as “I Enjoy Walking Around the Locker Room Naked” and “I Watch Game Shows.” The quips will be printed above the campaign’s URL and the Beverly Center’s logo.

The shopping center management hopes the unorthodox delivery will draw people to the Web site. But the test of ordinariness will not be the only entertainment at the site. There will be an advice column, new information on Beverly Center tenants and incentives to visit the shopping center.

The campaign also will feature more traditional communication methods, including billboards and print ads in magazines. Bach Garrison declined to state the cost of the campaign for the center, which has a gross leasable area of 871,000 square feet. Shopping centers of that size spend typically $1.71 per square foot on marketing expenses, according to the New York–based International Council of Shopping Centers.

Other shopping mall owners said the stakes are high for attracting fashionable, wealthy shoppers.

“They have a great location, but they’re surrounded by all of this wonderful stuff,” said Shaheen Sadeghi, owner of The Lab and The Camp specialty shopping centers in Costa Mesa, Calif. “Trying to get people into the box will be a real challenge.”

During the past three years, the Beverly Center has executed two marketing campaigns, including “Am I Ordinary.” Internet surveys conducted last year by the Beverly Center found that its “For Life Less Ordinary” campaign had resulted in a greater awareness of the center as a fashion and shopping leader, Garrison Bach said. She would not release the specific findings of the survey. —Andrew Asch