Analyzing Dior Sauvage's Comeback strategy with Johnny Depp

In this article I would like to talk about how Dior turned the product perception for one of its most controversial product “Sauvage Men” starring Johnny Depp.

In 2019, House of Dior collaborated with Johnny Debb to come up with an Indo-American style advert. Johnny Debb was signed at a whooping 5 Million dollars.

Soon after its launch, the campaign got into trouble in the United States. Americans pointed out how Johnny Depp was a bad choice for the advert as neither is he Indo-American nor does he has any ties with the community altogether. The issue brought so much controversy for Dior that it had to pull it off within just 2 weeks of its release.

In September 2021 shortly after Johnny Depp won his case against Amber Heard, Dior released one more advert starring him with their Iconic product Sauvage. But this time their marketing communication was different. This time the communications focused more on spreading the message of how Dior supported the celebrity when everyone else backed out. The campaign was said to be Depp’s rebirth in the fashion world and all the credits goes to Dior for making it happen.

And the results were amazing, people went insane. They really liked how Dior supported Johnny Depp and immediately fell in love with the Product. Sales skyrocketed. Almost everyone who is connected to the fashion industry was talking about Dior and Sauvage.

Analyzing the emotions associated with the campaign, here are some observations I made

There were about 5000 mentions of Dior Sauvage on American Social Media in the month of September when they released the campaign.

It was even more interesting to monitor the emotions associated with the Brand after the campaign.

67% of people had a positive image of the brand. Considering the controversy that happened 2 years back this was huge improvement.

Here is the range of emotions used on social media regarding the brand.

And it was not just Males who were talking about the brand and the product, 49% of online conversations were driven by females. This shared a valuable insight, a major chunk of products are purchased by females for their partners. This helped Dior to target their campaigns to not only Men (who are the primary consumers of the product) but also to Women who buys it for them.

And finally it was nice to have a glimpse of the keywords revolving around social median regarding the campaign and the result was not so surprising after all. The most common keyword associated with Dior Sauvage was “#JusticeforJohnnydepp”.

All of this concludes to how Dior converted a controversial campaign to a successful one, increasing their Brand Loyalty and Brand Trust amongst Americans.

Ayush Kesari

28/11/2021