Jennifer Sey
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Jennifer Sey, Global Brand President, Levi Strauss & Co.
An alumna of Stanford University, Jennifer Sey is an industry household name. She has been part of Levi Strauss & Co. for more than 21 years and is currently serving as Levi’s Global Brand President. Jennifer is one of the most talented and multifaceted creative leaders in industry. As a child, despite having suffered a devastating injury at the 1985 World Championship, she won the US National Gymnastics Championship in 1986. As a result, the US Olympic Committee bestowed her with the Gymnastics’ Athlete of the Year title. In her career, Ms. Sey has received numerous prestigious awards. Among others, Ad Age’s ‘Top 40 Marketers Under 40’, Brand Innovators’ ‘Top 50 Women in Marketing’ and Billboard Magazine’s ‘Top 25 Most Powerful People in Music and Fashion’.
“Music provides a means of breaking through and connecting, whether it’s six-second content or two minutes. People can skip ads, but if they’re engaged from the outset with a great track, they tend to listen.”
— JENNIFER SEY, GLOBAL BRAND PRESIDENT, LEVI STRAUSS & CO.
Uli Reese: Can you talk a little bit about your role at the brand?
Jennifer Sey: My role between 2013 and 2020 was as the Chief Marketing Officer for Levi’s. I oversaw Signature and Denizen, which are value brands, and Dockers, a casual pant brand. Right now, I’m the Brand President with expanded responsibilities, which includes all the brand functions, including design, merchandising, marketing and brand experience.
Reese: How important is audio in building a brand?
Sey: Music has always been central for Levi’s and a means of conveying what we call ‘center of culture’, which puts the brand at the center of the story and also culturally, as well as resonating emotionally. Music means so much for so many of us, but in our attempt to appeal to Gen Z, and solidifying a relationship with younger consumers across the decades, music has been central. We doubled down around 2014 when I stepped into the role. It always played an important role, primarily in advertising, and now it’s woven throughout all our activities
“For Levi’s, music is the language of self-expression. Our goal is to put the brand at the center of culture, and music is a great tool to do that.”
There are other tools, and I think when our efforts were more dispersed around things like film, we just weren’t as pointed and resonant, so we made the purposeful choice to focus on music. That includes a range of activities; for example, in 2015, we initiated something called the Levi’s Music Project, which combines the company’s philanthropic efforts with the brand’s focus on music. The mission is to bring music education back to schools and community centres. Music festivals are also really important to our PR efforts.
Reese: You’re iconic within pop culture but what does the future hold for Levi’s?
Sey: I don’t pretend to be a seer, but music provides a means of breaking through and connecting, whether it’s six-second content or two minutes. More often than not, the Levi’s brand doesn’t talk, although, in our most recent ad, there is a voiceover. But generally speaking, if you look at Levi’s ads from across the decades, there isn’t dialogue. We operate in nearly 120 countries and can use a single track to connect with people in many different languages.
Reese: So music content is still very important to you…
Sey: It’s incredibly important, as video content becomes more and more consumed around the world. Traditional television advertising is still very effective for us, but today it’s often things like video on demand.
“People can now skip over ads, but if they’re engaged from the outset with a great track, they tend to listen.”
Our ‘Circles’ campaign in 2018 was about the idea that we’re all connected in our differences. It featured a track called ‘Makeba’ by a relatively unknown artist called Jain and is instantly captivating. There’s also our Levi’s laundrette ad, with Nick Kamen, who passed away recently, so it’s getting some play again. It featured ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye, which is such an iconic track. It ran in the Eighties, so it was old and new. We’ve even crafted a track for the ad itself, so it’s wide ranging. We don’t have a single rule when it comes to music.
Reese: CMOs want their brand to appear authentic but it’s difficult because culture changes. What’s your approach to that?
Sey: I like to use the analogy that the coolest people we know are the most authentic people. For us, finding that center point of being truly who we are as a brand has made us cool again, but it takes cultural acuity. Yes, there’s an art and science to this, and you can copy test the heck out of things, but you need creative and strategic people on the brand that really understand what’s happening in culture and when something feels real. If you don’t hit that mark, consumers smell it a mile away.
Reese: But so many brands still come across as inauthentic…
Sey: I don’t know what I would do if I worked on a brand that had to try to be authentic. Levi’s is the originator of the blue jean, and there’s nothing more authentic than that. In 2014, I told my team that we would be focusing on music, and folks were concerned that we were going to leave too much other stuff out. But I said,
“Here’s the thing, we didn’t choose music, it chose us”, and now we’re running with it. Artists since forever have chosen to wear Levi’s on stage, from Elvis to Beyoncé, to the Beastie Boys and Snoop Dogg. They’ve chosen Levi’s because they feel they can be their most authentic selves in them. My task is to leverage the authenticity that’s already there."
Reese: Can you advise other CMOs on how to futureproof their brand?
Sey: First, you have to figure out who you are and what you stand for. Not just the service you provide, but the aura and the emotion, and that may not be music for every brand. It may be philanthropy or film, and there are many ways that brands can act. Nike uses great tracks, but their connection to people is not through music; it’s through performance and finding that willingness to push harder. Silence is another really interesting way to break through the noise of the world we live in. But it’s not easy. How many brands can you think of that were old that died a slow death? We had 20 years of poor performance when we didn’t even know if we would make it, so I would argue it’s not easy.
Reese: There has been an explosion in screenless ecosystems in the last five years. How should brands react to that?
Sey: I’m a huge podcast listener, but in a sense, these aren’t new mediums; it’s radio, only you get to choose what you listen to and go more in-depth. For us, as a brand, as we take on sustainability, which is a complicated and nuanced issue, we’ve moved into the realm of words. Our latest campaign, which is called ‘Buy Better, Wear Longer’, is all about conscious consumption, and music takes a backseat. And we used Instagram Live as a tool during lockdown. We pulled most of our ad dollars because everybody was nervous, our stores were closed, we didn’t have a lot of revenue coming in, and we wanted to find a way to stay engaged with our consumers, so we launched 5:01 Live, which was a series of 20-minute concerts at 5:01 every day. We also moved away from music and into education with a series called Use Your Voice Live which started around Pride and then moved into voting issues. It was a series of live conversations with informed, educated activists and advocates leveraging words and conversation to provide content.
Reese: In that case, what advice would you give other brands when it comes to voice, in how you search for the right voice and make your decisions?
Sey: That’s a great question. The ‘Buy Better, Wear Longer’ campaign is voiced by youth activists because that’s who we're speaking to. It was crafted with Gen Z in mind, although it is very resonant with older consumers as well. But the fact that young people know about Jaden Smith’s activism in the water space and Emma Chamberlain and her commitment to vintage just furthers the message. You just have to think about the message you’re trying to convey and who you’re trying to connect with. In this instance, it was Gen Z, but it also resonated with the over 40’s. You need keen judgement, and you also need to create more content. If you have this overriding idea at your core of who you are, you can dial it in various ways to appeal to different audiences. But there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.
Note: The interview took place in California in May 2021.
Copyright regulations apply when using material from this document and when using the supplied video or audio files. This document is intended to be exclusively viewed by the recipient and its subsidiaries. Under no circumstances may the content or part of the content made available or forwarded in any form orally or in writing to third parties, in particular to competitors or affiliates. The publication, reproduction, distribution, reproduction or other utilization of the presented ideas, texts, layouts, concepts, films or audio files without express written permission by amp GmbH.
