Client: Carhartt
Services: Comprehensive brand and performance media strategy, planning, buying, optimization, and analysis.
Overview and Challenges:
Carhartt, a global premium workwear brand, set bold eCommerce growth goals while navigating significant external headwinds, ranging from inflation and a shortened holiday shopping window to intensified market competition. January Digital was charged with implementing a full-funnel strategy aimed at driving incremental revenue, driving new customer acquisition, and leveraging social commerce to surpass Carhartt’s aggressive goals.
In addition, the campaign would be one of Carhartt’s largest marketing investments in recent history, which meant the entire organization was highly involved and invested in success – from the CMO and CFO to creative, retail, and operations teams.
Goals:
- Increase eCommerce revenue, with a focus on incremental growth
- Grow brand awareness, favorability, and purchase intent across priority channels
- Attract and convert more new customers on Carhartt.com
- Measure and optimize marketing spend rigorously for efficiency and business impact
Our Work:
January Digital deployed a fully integrated, full-funnel media strategy across brand and performance channels, leveraging real-time data to maximize efficiency and impact:
- Activated Two High-Impact Cultural Moments
- Yellowstone x Luke Grimes Partnership: Carhartt partnered with actor and musician Luke Grimes during the final season of Yellowstone, aligning brand values with cultural relevance through premium placements and talent integration.
- National NFL Media Integration: In-game NFL ads reinforced Carhartt’s brand themes of grit and durability, amplifying the message across national live sports programming.
- Executed a Cohesive, Cross-Channel Media Plan
Unified all aspects of media from upper-funnel brand storytelling to lower-funnel performance into a single strategy that aligned channel investment, messaging, and optimization tactics. - Shifted to Incrementality-Driven Measurement
Transitioned Carhartt to an incrementality-focused measurement model, reducing inefficient lower-funnel spend and reallocating budget to higher-performing upper-funnel efforts that drove new customer growth. - Ensured Omnichannel Consistency Across All Touchpoints
Aligned campaign messaging across digital, retail, and wholesale channels to deliver a seamless brand experience and maximize the impact of every customer interaction.
Results and Business Impact:
Carhartt’s integrated campaign with January Digital delivered record-breaking performance across every major objective:
- Achieved record eCommerce revenue, including the strongest Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance in brand history
- Surpassed all revenue targets, with eCommerce revenue exceeding goal by +31%
- Delivered record new customer acquisition, including 1.4 million new site visitors
- Increased brand interest, with a +26% lift in Google search volume and a 30 percentage point outperformance over Google’s retail industry benchmark
- Outperformed industry benchmarks across brand lift metrics:
- CTV: +9% lift in brand awareness
- YouTube: +2.5% lift in ad recall
- Meta: +3.3% lift in top-of-mind awareness and +7.9% lift in purchase intent
- TikTok: +2.5% lift in brand favorability
