Corporate Pressure Killed Lululemon’s Creative Soul

​​Last week, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and let rip. His critique cut through the familiar boardroom haze, painting his former brand’s decline with the vivid urgency of a plane crash.

His words carried particular scorn for the board’s governance, faulting them for “systematically dismantling the business model” and losing key creative talent, as well as the institutional knowledge that made Lululemon great. 

The financial data backs him up: Lululemon shares have plunged more than 50% over the past year.

At the heart of Wilson’s critique–and the top of his list of fixes–are words often forgotten as growth and corporate gentrification take hold: product, brand, entrepreneurial, and creative. 

Each is essential to success. Each is gradually threatened as a business grows and forgets the very things that made it grow in the first place.

Wilson calls this process “GAP-ivization.” It’s a terrible word for an acute observation. Corporate America is great at short-term, conservative growth, but entirely useless at maintaining the fire that built a company’s early success. 

Let’s review each word in turn and remind ourselves what is required.

Brand

To build a brand like Chip Wilson did, you must embrace differentiation. Not the McKinsey version with bland charts and value curves. The prehistoric version. The massive, flashing risks that follow a different path and create something unlike everything else.

There is no such thing as “brands” in general. That would be an oxymoron. There is just “The Brand:” capital “B,” no plural “s.” When Lululemon launched, it was not like anything else. When you have that degree of differentiation, consumers become price insensitive and brands grow.

Maintaining difference is crucial—but tricky. Growth is a potent enemy here. It brings copying competition, adds layers to the corporate hierarchy, attracts generic people with generic thinking. 

Before you know it, you are the boring center of the category, and everyone else has moved on. GAP, in other words.

Product

When the Four Ps were invented 60 years ago by the late Professor Jerry McCarthy, marketers had a clear manual for their field’s tactical levers. But a succession of marketing blockheads spent years suggesting other words—all astonishingly, starting with P—to replace the existing four. 

In any other discipline, 60 years confers permanence; only in marketing does it signal the need for replacement.

We’ve had passion, process, purpose, and a pile of other pathetic proposals. While we fiddled with these substitutes, we lost the heartland of our discipline. Marketers vanished from product development and lost input into pricing or distribution strategy. Today, most marketing departments just handle communications.

But Chip Wilson knows that product is the most important “P,” and that marketers should be able to understand their consumers enough to improve, evolve, and advance the product in line with the brand. 

That’s hard for most modern marketers, because they have zero experience and no remit to work on the products they sell. We have become so estranged from our products that we now need Product Marketers, because most “marketers” only know about advertising—if you’re lucky.

Entrepreneurial

If there’s a secret to resilient brand management, it’s the sheer bloody-mindedness of entrepreneurial thinking. 

Far too many marketers tuck themselves into the warm embrace of process, consensus, and political correctness while tiptoeing around risk and innovation like there’s a prize for mediocrity. But the entrepreneurial approach—biting off more than you can handle and attacking, not supporting, the orthodoxy—is the only antidote to irrelevance.

Every breakthrough brand, from Apple to Nike, was led not by caretakers, but pirates willing to chart new territory and occasionally run their ship aground in the name of progress. 

But it becomes logarithmically harder to maintain an entrepreneurial streak as the potential risk from failure increases. Jeff Bezos was amazing at growing Amazon, but even more astonishing at maintaining its entrepreneurial edge as his company grew bigger than almost any other.

Creativity

Too many marketers confuse marketing prowess with creative leadership. 

I’ve been lucky to work with great creative people in my career. The first step in mastering creativity is realizing most of it isn’t coming from marketers. We are more creative than the finance department, but once you’ve worked with Parsons-trained talent, you appreciate that the role of marketing is to select, support, brief, and appreciate true creative talent. Not to be it.

Good marketers should learn to brief—a skill most are abjectly awful at. But their arrogance combined with the cowardice of agencies (who talk openly about the disastrous inability of clients to brief but say nothing to them directly) means nothing changes and creativity is always the loser.

Chip Wilson is a divisive figure. And he is sure as shit unpopular with the company he founded. But he has a point. Actually, he has four. And while Lululemon’s board is probably going to ignore his memo, you shouldn’t. 

GAP-ivization is an ugly word, but it’s a beautiful opportunity to remember what real marketing and brand building are all about.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and award winning columnist. He is the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing, which teaches all the many laws of advertising effectiveness as part of its outstanding syllabus.