How a brand faked itself for two years – Love Jozi / Luv Jozi

This short video case study (via Mark Lives) fascinated me. Brand ‘Love Jozi’ (after the nickname for Johannesburg) created a range of iconic t-shirts with the idea of getting people to think differently about South Africa’s much maligned largest city…

…and then to make the range go beyond the minority that shop in designer clothes stores, they created their own cheap Chinese style fakes that they called ‘Luv Jozi’, the name obviously being a nod to the ridiculous rip-offs you sometimes see along the lines of ‘Kelvin Klein’ and the like.

They sold the cheap stuff at flea markets and ‘robots’ (traffic light junctions) – at a third of the price of the original stuff – and built a fake website. Fairly soon, people noticed with one blog writing, “we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry wen we spotted these ‘fongkongs’ or rip-offs of local design label Love Jozi being sold…”

It’s always dangerous to pull the wool over people’s eyes – see the Danish tourism viral as a prime example – but this was done in a fun and clever way, with the end effect that the ‘fakes’ I imagine will actually become sought after in their own right.

Indeed, Love Jozi designer Bradley Kirshenbaum intends to do exactly that, creating a range of “cheaper and more accessible Love Jozi products.”

Amazingly, Love Jozi actually kept up the sideline business in cheap rip-offs for two years. Talk about commitment to making word of mouth marketing work!