Inside Levi’s new low-risk, high-reward marketing strategy

Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” album, which debuted at the end of March, was a perfect test of that strategy. One of the tracks on the album is the intentionally misspelled “Levii’s Jeans.” Beyoncé’s choice was purely organic — Mitchell said his team, though they’d worked with Beyoncé before, was unaware the brand would be getting a shoutout on the album.

It was a golden moment that no brand could engineer – “Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good,” Mitchell said. But it also required quick thinking and flexible marketing priorities to properly capitalize on it. Mitchell landed on a quick and simple response.

“We converted our Instagram and TikTok handles to the double-I spelling to take advantage of the song,” Mitchell said. “Queen B changed our name.”

Between the song name, Beyonce posting an image of herself wearing Levi’s jeans a few days before the album release and the press generated by the brand’s name change on social media, Levi’s got a significant boost off the moment. Mitchell said the name change led to billions of organic impressions, and data from Pass_By showed that foot traffic to Levi’s nearly 1,200 stores increased by 20% in the week after the album was released.

Mitchell described temporarily changing the brand’s social media handles for a month as low-risk and high-reward. Since joining the company, Mitchell has championed a marketing philosophy from Snap that focuses on moving fast for these low-risk decisions and saving long deliberation processes for bigger, riskier moves. That can be hard for a company as large as Levi’s, which does $6 billion in annual revenue and has over 19,000 employees.

“Snapchat moved really fast,” Mitchell said. “I’ve tried to encourage a faster, riskier approach for ideas I think of as ‘two-way doors’ that are easily undone. If we changed our name on Instagram and it didn’t produce any results, we could just change it back. No harm done. We should save the careful measuring and long planning for one-way doors that aren’t as easy to take back.”

Agility has become a common buzzword among marketers amid the proliferation of fast-moving TikTok microtrends. Agility and adaptability are often cited as two of the most desirable skills among marketing leaders at brands today.

Mitchell said Levi’s CEO Michelle Gass, who was president of the brand for over a year before becoming CEO at the beginning of 2024, has been a staunch supporter of his new, agile marketing strategy. Gass gave both Mitchell and chief digital officer Jason Gowans, appointed by Gass early last year, the remit to “move at the speed of culture.” This maxim has been a driving force in Levi’s marketing strategy under Gass.

“We place a lot of emphasis and investment into making sure that Levi’s brand remains in the center of culture,” Gass said on the brand’s April 3 earnings call.

In January, speaking at the National Retail Federation show, Gass laid out a similar strategy, connecting it back to the legacy of Chip Bergh, the CEO before her.

“One thing Chip did over the last 12 years was put Levi’s at the center of culture, connecting it back to music, sports, everything that’s relevant to our consumers,” she said. “It’s a heavy lift but it’s incumbent on us to continue that.”

But while the marketing team may be able to move faster now, Mitchell said there are still roadblocks that the team contends with.

“Our go-to-market process can be quite long,” Mitchell said. “You have to work within the confines. We’re doing a lot of work to reduce our go-to-market time so we can move on trends in a more timely way and take advantage of a specific moment, but that’s hard for a 170-year-old company. We’re working on condensing things in product development to add some agility to that area of the business, too.”