After several years of building a strong emotional universe, Lacoste needed to make a creative shift to recruit a younger, fashion-oriented audience. To do this, this challenger brand had to differentiate itself from the competition by relying on the universality of its famous Crocodile to better anchor itself in the reality of the post-covid context, revealing it as the link that unites people beyond their differences.

Since 2014, Lacoste has been able to stand out thanks to several particularly impactful campaigns and an emotional universe built around a memorable signature: "Life is a beautiful Sport". Over the past few years, the brand has thus strengthened its fundamentals, building a territory anchored in a sporting heritage, and telling individual stories of surpassing oneself.

2022 marks a turning point for Lacoste: in order to meet the challenges of the market, and to reinforce a positioning that is increasingly proprietary and relevant to its target audience, the Crocodile brand was looking to define a renewed creative territory that would bring to life their new brand mission built around the liberation of movement and the connection between cultures, thus moving towards inclusion, collectivity and the celebration of differences.

Lacoste has a very distinct territory, between sport and fashion, in which the brand is fundamentally legitimate. But in a very competitive market, many players are exploring this space, through their positioning or through collaborations. It has become necessary for the Crocodile to choose a new direction to continue its evolution.

This new campaign must respond to three distinct challenges.

Firstly, recruiting younger, fashion-oriented consumers was a crucial first step in broadening the brand's audience, and therefore changing its perception.

Secondly, we wanted to recreate desirability for Lacoste collections. It was necessary to move from a 'safe choice' to a truly active choice by becoming more desirable, surprising, and aspirational with its products, and by rehabilitating a fashion aspect that had been less emphasised in recent years.

Finally, it was important to change the brand's elitist image by demonstrating Lacoste's unifying and inclusive character.

To successfully connect with a universal audience, it was necessary to understand the global context in which we were evolving.

Following the Covid 19 crisis, the need to belong and to feel surrounded by people who share the same values had become a necessity.

Consequently, fashion brands embraced this paradigm, to accentuate the shift from messages about self-expression to messages about the importance of belonging to a group. Most campaigns in the category have highlighted a diversity of individuals and cultures, a juxtaposition of differences in the same picture.

Lacoste understood the need to reveal the beauty of interactions when people meet. Our ambition was to highlight the reactions, emotions and "happy accidents" that result from the encounter of several worlds. Thanks to this approach, Lacoste was able to connect with the reality of the public, while differentiating itself from the competition.

The campaign "Unexpected Encounters", demonstrates that Lacoste transcends time and gender, being worn by people appropriating the Crocodile in their own way.

Inspired by the diverse Lacoste community, the campaign reveals that moment when two very different people meet by chance and discover that they have something in common: a piece of clothing bearing the Lacoste crocodile.

To reinforce the authenticity of these encounters, the protagonists are largely embodied by a street casting of people who had never been models before and took on this role for one day, with spontaneity and freshness.

Starting with its iconic pieces, Lacoste returns to a fashionable universe, highlighting its silhouettes. It also establishes a new tone of voice, fresh and full of spirit.

This new Lacoste brand campaign features the power of the crocodile. It unites as much as it allows everyone to express their differences.

This campaign was a real success as the global results show: with 816 million impressions, 108 million video views (100% complete) and 3.3 million clicks, its overall impact was massive.

In France, it was voted the most impactful campaign of 2022 by Kantar, being among the top 20% of campaigns on engagement, and the top 10% on attribution. In terms of commercial impact, the campaign is in the Top 30 that generated the most buying interest, which is even more remarkable for an image campaign. Moreover, in terms of impact on brand image, Lacoste is in the Top 20, both in terms of communication and differentiation.

In the US, the work on brand awareness was also a great success, with 10.9 million impressions, with a significant impact on 25–34-year-olds, who were the most likely to improve brand awareness (8%), which is our ideal audience.

Lacoste occupies a very distinct territory, between sport and fashion, in which it is fundamentally legitimate. But in a highly competitive market, many players are exploring this space, through their positioning or through collaborations. It had therefore become necessary for the Crocodile to choose a new direction to continue its evolution and assert its competitive differentiation. Thus, the brand could observe that the economic growth of this segment was less and less carried by a "casual sportwear", such as Tommy Hilfiger, and increasingly pulled forward by a "fashion sportwear" like Moncler.