Brand Disasters - Victoria's Secret

Victoria’s Not Victorious

A Lesson in Brand Misalignment

It’s enough to make the angels weep: last month Victoria’s Secret canceled their long-televised and even longer-running fashion show. The lingerie brand’s extravagant ladies-in-diamond-underwear showcase garnered millions of viewers since its inception in the 1990s. Changing times and tastes (#MeToo, anyone?) reduced the audience to a fraction of its former level, resulting in the cancellation. 

This latest move by parent company L Brands is an acknowledgment of Victoria’s Secret’s very public brand decline. Fortune Magazine reported that sales fell 7% last quarter, continuing a marked decline every quarter for the last two and half years. In October, L Brands announced it would lay off about 15% of their employees.

It wasn’t a decline in sales alone that drove Victoria’s Secret’s decline. During the past few years, the brand weathered multiple controversies, including CEO Leslie Wexner’s relationship with acknowledged creep Jeffrey Epstein (was there another one???). Additionally, the prevailing attitude on social media indicates that the company is out of touch with the times, an aging relic of the pre-empowerment era whose influence diminishes with every passing year.

So what’s a gal in a sequined headdress to do?

Victoria’s Secret has fallen victim to a classic branding gaffe - they’ve forgotten that branding doesn’t come from the company, it comes from the customers. Brands live in the customers’ needs and desires, as well as their perceptions of their connections. Their needs and desires have been changing for years, but Victoria’s Secret hasn’t been listening. 

The fashion show is just the most visible example of the brand misalignment that exists between this company and its customers. When the show first began in 1995, it was not televised, and was by all accounts a simple fashion show that focused on lingerie.

The first national television broadcast of the fashion show in 2001 ramped up the spectacle. Attracting more than 12 million viewers, the unattainably haute, runway-only lingerie was interesting to see, but largely inaccessible for the young women of Middle America.

Victoria’s Secret continued to play into customers’ perceptions of the brand as luxurious and sexy, defining “sexy” as impossibly thin, statuesque, and conventionally beautiful. As the years went by, and the culture around beauty and perception changed, Victoria’s Secret doubled down. The models continued to look the same, with a few nods toward diversity, and the show continued to ramp up the pageantry. The divide grew, the viewership and sales decreased. Now here we are in a post-diamond-bralette world.

For a long time, it felt like Victoria’s Secret owned “sexy” or at least the brand was the arbiter of how Americans define sexy today. But when their customers began to embrace body positivity, the company failed to listen. They famously refused to cast more diverse models, and stubbornly declined to rethink their rigid ideas of what sexy could be. If they want to regain relevance - and improve the perception of their brand - they’ll need to start listening to their customers. They’ve already got competitors like Savage x Fenty and Aerie waiting in the wings, ready to embrace customers that want to feel comfortable in their bodies.

What kind of an angel wears a sapphire thong, anyway?

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