Duluth Trading Company wanted to re-energize its underwear marketing from the bottom up. The apparel merchant launched a cheeky campaign that showcased its latest mascot, the butt-shaped Max Gluteus.

The Importance of Underwear

Underwear is a key category for the brand, as the product is often the first one a shopper makes at Duluth Trading, making it important to customer acquisition, said Garth Weber, Senior Vice President of Brand and Marketing. The reason is likely because the brand can hook shoppers with humor, and underwear is a lower price point than the rest of its workwear apparel, Weber said.

“It’s easy to make that first purchase with us,” Weber said. “Then the quality of our underwear has led to a lot of loyal customers over many years.”

This tactic has worked consistently, as Duluth Trading has applied its signature brand of humor — witty for the rugged consumer — to its underwear marketing.

“We see the expansion of categories from underwear all the way up into our outerwear, for example,” Weber said. “Of course, this isn’t the only way that they enter the brand, but this has been one that has consistently worked for us. And it’s a little bit easier as you can imagine to tell some underwear jokes than it is to tell some outerwear jokes.”

Campaign Results

The brand’s recent campaign is “For Folks Who Work Their Butts Off,” and the results have knocked Weber’s socks off.

On social media platform Meta, the return on ad spend has been as high as $100 to $1, he said. And on Performance Max, which is Google’s AI-ad inventory, Duluth’s ads are $9.50 to $1, which Weber said is “crazy high.”

“Our ROAS in the lower funnel has been roughly twice what we would typically see from our campaigns,” Weber said. “The fact that it’s so strong out of the gate is really exciting for us.”

Duluth Trading launched the campaign during the NCAA basketball tournament March Madness with linear TV ads and has continued to run them through the next few weeks. It also is running the ad on connected TV, YouTube, search and social media, he said.

In conjunction with the ads, Duluth Trading also ran a 20% off promotion, which also likely helped with the return on ad spend, Weber said.

The campaign features men’s underwear, as 75-80% of its underwear sales are for men’s product. Although, women are roughly half of Duluth Trading’s customers, but are more often purchasing men’s products than the brand’s women’s products. Duluth Trading finds that when its marketing features men’s products, it will still attract women to buy products for themselves.

Moving the Tagline Beyond Underwear

Another surprisingl element to the campaign was how well the tagline for the campaign, “For Folks Who Work Their Butts Off,” resonated with consumers.

On linear TV alone, Duluth Trading’s brand awareness increased 13% for the tagline and was not necessarily tied to the campaign.

“We anticipated with the creative that we had here that it would perform, people would remember it, but pleasantly surprised by how well the line in and of itself has been recalled,” he said.

While the tagline was “on the nose” for the underwear campaign, it fits with the essence of its entire brand. After these results, Duluth Trading plans to use the tagline for other campaigns for the rest of the year, Weber said.

Right Sizing Linear TV

TV is still a “powerful” channel for Duluth Trading and consistently helps drive traffic to its stores, Weber said.

“It finds both our core customer, who’s been with us and knows as well; it also finds the new customer and in ways that we really need and want to,” Weber said. “The fact that the two are together in this area, it’s in many ways, therefore, an efficient channel for us.”

Most of the brand’s linear spend is during live sports. The brand used to spend heavy in the History channel, as it was effective at reaching its core customer. But the TV channel no longer helps it acquire new customers like sports does. So Duluth Trading no longer spends heavy on the History channel, Weber said. The brand has “right-sized” its percentage of marketing spend in linear TV to accommodate other digital marketing, like connected TV, Weber said.

Brand Campaigns ‘Masquerading’ as Product Campaigns

Besides selling more underwear and attracting new customers, the campaign is meant to reinvigorate its core customer. Duluth has followed this strategy in the past, in which it uses its signature brand of humor through the lens of a product to tell its larger brand story of finding a solution to a problem that exists with workwear — and solving it with a product’s design, Weber said.

“One of the things that Duluth has been famous for since 2010 is having brand campaigns that masquerade as product campaigns,” Weber said. “We’ve had customers who are very loyal. Our core customer has been with us for 20 years, and they love this sort of stuff. It was about elevating the brand again, reinviting some of our core customers back in, get them excited again in ways they’re used to.”

It took about six months to create this campaign, which it worked on with agency Planet Propaganda.

The only hiccup was getting approval from the networks because of the content of a butt running around looking for underwear. There was back and forth that delayed the campaign slightly, Weber said.

“I have some funny email threads of certain requests they were making about the shape and form and things like that,” Weber said.