Advertising: Bass Updates Penny Loafer For Next Generation

While the 77-year-old penny loafer is instantly recognizable, no advertising campaign has been based on the shoe in nearly 20 years, and the company was caught flat-footed as competitors have recently revitalized casual footwear with more vibrant styles and colors.

On Monday, G.H. Bass will announce a new campaign that it says will pay homage to the Weejun and, its partner, another American icon, the penny.

“The brand has lost its way over the past few years,” said Kristin Kohler Burrows, the president of G.H. Bass. “It’s really a rebirth. It’s a great opportunity to take an asset like G.H. Bass has and dust it off and polish it off in a modern way.”

Before taking over at Bass about a year ago, Ms. Burrows was president of the Keds Group, part of Collective Brands, where she led a campaign that tried to reposition Keds sneakers for a millennial consumer. Elements of the G.H. Bass campaign include an updated e-commerce Web site that was unveiled on Friday and a Facebook application where consumers can upload their profile photos on a penny with the slogan, “In G.H. Bass We Trust.”

The campaign, which will include digital banner ads on sites like Refinery29 and in-store marketing materials, is geared toward consumers 24 to 45 years old. Bass will also post messages to Twitter using the hashtag #powertothepenny. A video features behind-the-scenes footage of the campaign photo shoot and the song “Penny” by Hanni El Khatib.

Bass executives declined to say what the campaign cost. .

The penny theme will also be used to raise money for the I Have a Dream Foundation, an organization that provides scholarships and other resources for underprivileged children to attend college. For every pair of Weejuns bought, Bass will donate 100 pennies to the organization.

The campaign is beginning when the loafer and casual footwear market is hot, particularly among young urban professionals. In the last few years brands including Cole Haan and Sperry Top-Sider have begun to offer much more stylized and colorful versions of classic shoes like wingtips, oxfords and boat shoes.

“As loafers have trended, there are more brown-shoe brands and higher-end designer brands doing loafer products,” Ms. Burrows said. “To us there’s a huge opportunity to really spin this product into a more fun fashionable color story.”

To that end, the Weejun is getting an updated look with new designs featuring patent leather, studs, camouflage and colors like silver, gold, blue, red, green, pink and yellow. The prices are $98 to $138.

“People are looking for a product that can be dressed up and dressed down,” Ms. Burrows said, noting that the shoe could be worn with jeans, khakis or dress pants. For women, men’s wear styles for the fall also offer an opportunity to reposition the brand, she said.

Stephen Niedzwiecki, the chief creative officer and co-founder of Yard, the agency that worked on the campaign’s visual aesthetic, including photographs of models wearing updated Weejuns beside images of pennies with the tagline “Power to the Penny,” said the approach was meant to celebrate the penny and the penny loafer as American icons. G.H. Bass is “a brand that doesn’t need to make up the heritage,” Mr. Niedzwiecki said. “It’s truly authentic.”

“It was time to regain ownership,” he said.

But regaining ownership was not the problem G.H. Bass had to solve, said Robert Passikoff, the president of Brand Keys in New York, a brand and customer-loyalty consulting company. “Everybody knows their name,” Mr. Passikoff said. “The question is, What do people think about the brands?”

The brand remained untouched for many years, he said, and the company did not tap into the sexiness that other shoemakers had.

“It’s one of those things to be Bass and be the creator of the penny loafer and have the heritage that they have in terms of the penny loafer being the definition of cool,” Mr. Passikoff said. “But it does you no good if that doesn’t matter to people anymore.”

“If you’re a millennial, you’re certainly looking for somewhat of a fashion statement about yourself,” he said.

Bass’s revitalization of the penny loafer could be well timed, Mr. Passikoff said. That other brands are updating traditional shoes is “a dead-on acknowledgment that fashion trumps heritage.”

Restaurant Chains Try to Woo a Younger Generation

For reasons as varied as the economic downturn and a heightened interest in local foods, a significant shift in eating patterns is under way among the millennials, those 18 to 30. Oddly, at least by historic trends, they are eating out less than the baby boomers did at that age. Many in the restaurant business worry that it may be impossible to reverse the decline, which affects 50 million to 60 million young people.

The statistics alone are stark. Restaurant visits among millennials have fallen 16 percent over the last four years, according to research by the NPD Group, a consumer marketing firm, and have failed to pick up as the economy has improved.

“The outlook for the restaurant industry over the next 10 years is dismal,” said Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst at NPD.

Over all, sales are expected to grow less than 4 percent in the next decade, a troublesome projection for not only burger chains like McDonald’s but for the newer “fast-casual” dining businesses like Chipotle. McDonald’s stunned investors last month when it announced that its sales in stores open at least a year had fallen 1.2 percent after rising every quarter for almost the last decade.

And so far, restaurant chains have failed to benefit from the steady improvement in the overall economy.

“The informal eating out industry is either flat or declining in many markets around the world,” the chief executive of McDonald’s, Don Thompson, told investors last month.

It is true that restaurant chains like Chipotle, which has a devotion to explaining the origins of its ingredients that brings to mind the “Portlandia” sketch about a chicken dinner, and Subway, where customers plan their own sandwiches and watch them being assembled, are doing better among the millennials than traditional sit-down restaurants and fast-food chains.

But between the proliferation of artisanal food trucks and items like cupcakes made of Valrhona and Callebaut chocolates and topped with a fondant daisy for $2.75 at Georgetown Cupcake, or Fresh Direct’s offering of “heritage” pork from the Flying Pigs Farm in upstate New York, millennials tend to spend their dining dollars sparingly and in a more calculated way.

“This was the group hardest hit by the economic crisis, and there’s a debate right now about whether their purchasing behavior has changed fundamentally as a result,” said Tony Pace, chief marketing officer for Subway. “I think, personally, that there appears to be a structural change. There isn’t a single point — ta-da! — that points to it, but there are a lot of little things that do.”

Vera Chang, 26, who lives in Vermont, is one of those consumers who pays attention to the ingredients on the menu and the origins of the food they favor. She says she rarely eats at chain restaurants, finding places instead through Edible Communities, which gives advice on restaurants, chefs and food, or the local newspaper, which tells her about the chef and the provenance of the foods served.

“I like to know the story about the places I eat,” Ms. Chang said. “I think it’s key to feed one’s heart in addition to one’s stomach when going out.”

She said it was harder for chain restaurants to tell stories about the people behind the food they served and about themselves.

David Palmer, who follows the restaurant industry for UBS, underscored Ms. Chang’s points, noting how particular the younger clientele could be, especially during tough economic times. “The austere crowd has cut back, and pretty significantly,” Mr. Palmer said. “It’s partly that they’re economically challenged by the job market and student loans, but they also want authenticity in ingredients and the ability to customize meals in restaurants.”

According to NPD, it is not that millennials have abandoned fast food altogether: Hamburger chains like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King get nearly 28 percent of the millennials’ fast-service patronage. They just tend to eat there less often, or they have switched to newer burger places like Shake Shack, Mooyah, In-N-Out Burger and Smashburger.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the chief executive of McDonald’s. He is Donald Thompson, not Donald Taylor.

Carmakers Try to Figure Out the New Generation

Among car companies, which are displaying their latest products at the Paris Motor Show now under way, there is a growing recognition that young people may simply not care about cars as much as their elders. Smartphones now rival automobiles as the default symbol of adulthood, and the portals to the world beyond home and school. Electronic technology competes ever more for the younger generation’s disposable income.

As a result, in Paris automakers seem to spend more time talking about how well their cars interact with an iPhone than they do about engine performance. Connectivity is the new horsepower.

“Before we talked about steering, ride and all those elements,” said Gunnar Herrmann, vice president for quality at Ford of Europe. “You could argue those are dropping down in importance. Connectivity is getting more important.”

That means not only docks for smartphones but also technology like voice recognition to allow devices to be used while driving, or Internet radios that can stay tuned to the hometown station even when hundreds of miles away. Audi showed a concept car in Paris with onboard Wi-Fi so that passengers could remain connected while on the road.

In essence, for the generation of mobile apps, carmakers are offering app-mobiles.

“I think it’s true that the generation coming up now, who will be the car buyers for the next 20 years, are fairly unique,” said Douglas C. Speck, senior vice president for marketing and sales at Volvo. “They grew up in a world where computers and cellphones and connectivity all came together at the same time.”

Few auto executives are ready to concede that young people will not want actual cars.

“‘They like iPhones and iPods more than they like cars’ — you hear that,” said Ralf D. Speth, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, which is undergoing a renaissance due to investment from its new owner, Tata Motors of India. But, he said in an interview here, “everyone still needs to get from A to B.”

There is a consensus, though, that younger buyers will want to get from A to B in a different kind of car. It must be more stylish. Performance is still important, but it must come wrapped in technology that appears more environmentally responsible.

“They like technology. They like innovation. They like design,” said Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the chairman of Ferrari, who noted that many of the company’s U.S. customers were young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

The shift in the market reflects not only competition from smartphones and other technology, but also the growth in the number of people around the globe who are living in urban areas. Cars are often unnecessary or even burdensome in places where there is good mass transit or networks of bicycle lanes of the kind that cities like New York and Paris have expanded in recent years.

If a younger urban buyer wants any vehicle, it may be a fashionable small car like a BMW Mini or Daimler Smart that is easier to park, or even a radical new vehicle like the battery-powered Renault Twizy, which is beginning to appear on Paris streets. Half scooter, the narrow Twizy has four wheels, but the passenger seat is behind the driver.

Younger buyers, raised in a social-networking environment, may also be more open to car sharing as an alternative to car ownership. Rental car companies and car-sharing services like the municipal Autolib’ in Paris or the commercial Zipcar in the United States may become even more important as fleet buyers.

The digitally distracted consumer, meantime, may be happy to embrace cars that can drive themselves, freeing the driver to concentrate on Facebook, Twitter or whatever social media may be prevalent when self-driving technologies mature in a decade or so. (Google has already built working prototypes.)

More immediately, manufacturers are trying to find ways to balance the craving for constant connectivity with the need for drivers to keep their eyes on the road. Voice recognition technology is already available in cars by Volvo and others as a way to operate some of the onboard electronics, and will become more sophisticated. BMW and others have heads-up displays that project information on the windshield in the driver’s line of sight. These technologies are likely to become less expensive and more common.