Instead of reacting to the noise online, the brand needed to “get a read from real Americans,” Brommers said. What they saw “gave us a lot of confidence” to stay the course.
“You have a crisis communications industrial complex that is telling you to do this playbook that has been around for decades,” he said. “We actually did the opposite. We actually did nothing, and just read the room for a moment.”
While CMOs in Brommers’ shoes may have feared losing their jobs over such a ruckus, Brommers said he had “1,000% support” from the CEO and the board.
“Five years ago, the playbook could have been: CMO gets fired. The campaign immediately gets taken down. Someone writes a big check to the ACLU,” he said. “I knew that I didn’t have to worry about that.”
He also noted the brand’s relationship with Sweeney throughout the controversy helped both weather the storm. “She stuck with us, and you better be damn sure that we will stick with her,” he said. “There were some hairy moments in that, and both of us stood by each other.”
Quiet time
Because American Eagle is publicly traded, the company was in a “quiet period” for more than two months following the campaign’s launch, meaning it couldn’t share results or respond to criticism until weeks after the fact.
For Brommers, that—in light of what he viewed as “unrelenting negative coverage by so-called crisis communications experts,”—was frustrating. “It pissed me off, because no one took the chance to say, ‘What if this is working?’” he said.
Eventually, the company was able to reveal that the campaign drove one million new customers to American Eagle within six weeks. Brommers spoke about the campaign’s impact on the business on American Eagle’s Q2 earnings call on Sept. 1.
“There is a very rare instance when a chief marketing officer is asked to participate in his or her publicly traded company’s earnings call,” he said. “I have had that privilege.”
When asked what he would have done differently, Brommers was clear: “I would have bought more jeans inventory. Some of these things sold out so quickly.”
