OUGD503 Collaborative Practice - Concept Development

OUGD503 - Studio Brief 2/Collaborative Practice 

Concept Development

Having compiled individual research about Gap, their previous campaigns, other denim campaigns and innovative social media campaigns me and Billy felt we had a collective holistic knowledge of denim and social media to begin the development of our concept. Going back to our analysis of the brief and understanding what we wanted to achieve we talked through potential ideas that could create an engaging memorable campaign. I decided to brainstorm the main factors people want from their denim, we asked a sample of students 20 and 21 as these were highly disposable to us as well as a small sample from the 25-35 year old target audience. Responses to this included; 

• comfort
• style 
• versatile 
• make you look good
• suck everything in
• wardrobe staple

Analysing these responses we felt the majority of them were expected from denim therefore couldn't make this exciting, innovative or a USP. Talking through how jeans made you look good identified many people associate denim with a good bum. When analysing this further a high percentage of the people we questioned admitted to looking a/ to see if their bum looked good when getting ready or b/ noticing other peoples bums in public. I felt this has a good sense of humour involved and could be developed into a quirky unique concept. 

When challenged with how we could visually articulate this keeping a fun quirky tone to the concept and not sexualising it or making it uncomfortable we came up with the conclusion of illustrating the campaign using bold illustrations of different bums in gap denim. This completely subverts the current advertising style of GAP which could receive a high level of exposure especially from the creative circle. This would also remove some of the problems I identified with other denim campaigns removing negative issues such as sexuality, body image, race and culture as these illustrations could be playful and diverse to create a bold statement. This would appeal to the confident, diverse and boundary-less consumer profile Gap identifies within the brief.

Collectively happy with this concept, billy started to create some initial development regarding the aesthetic, which he kept me in close contact with to ensure we were both on board with the creative direction and developed an aesthetic we both felt would work in appealing to the target demographic and would be substantial enough to develop across the full social media campaign. We felt this was taking a risk  stepping away from the advertising conventions identified as part of the research however the nature of a social media campaign as a new form of media means by nature it is full of innovation and would be a more acceptable platform for this campaign to standard print.