Future of Dolce & Gabbana

We all know that high-end fashion print advertisements seem to have nothing to do with fashion. They usually portray bunch of people doing random things that seem to make no sense what’s so ever. For example, Louis Vuitton has print advertisements of people in exotic places laying down or doing things that you don’t really see in regular fashion advertisement. In my quest to investigate these high-end fashion advertisements, I looked through the February issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ). I came across an advertisement that caught my eye.

Dolce & Gabbana is known for creating print advertisements that are random like other high fashion advertisements. We know that they usually make advertisements that are controversial and using sex appeal to get people’s attention. However, in this new issue of GQ, they have changed their ways of using sex to sell. On the left, it’s an advertisement from Dolce & Gabbana’s spring/summer 2011 print advertisement that appeared in previous GQ. On the right, it’s the present print campaign that is appearing in this February issue of GQ. It appears that they changed from selling sex to using families as a position in this season’s advertisement. We know that sex sells because it’s what catches our eyes and we are drawn to these promiscuous photographs. But the question is why they suddenly changed their stance on using provocative images to using pictures of families. Possibly from all the controversy? Maybe they feel that connecting to people on an emotional level of feeling warm and fuzzy might be better? It’s very different from their previous advertisements because whatever the season, they used to always have photographs of half-naked people doing random things but now, they are focusing on Italian families to represent their fashion.

I think it’s a new and fresh way to look at their company and it definitely caught my attention but, when I first saw the print advertisement in the magazine, I couldn’t recognize that it was Dolce & Gabbana. That’s possibly the negative factor in changing their positioning. Many companies feel that they need to change their brand identity and change their “look”. But it’s a huge risk to change something that people are already familiar with. Other brands such as Tropicana change their package and got many complaints because people did not like it and they recognized their old juice boxes. So, they had to change it back to their original form because of the consumers. It’s a tough decision to make because it’s gambling the companies identity. Is it worth it? You tell me.