Be Stupid - by Diesel

At first I thought this campaign was tailor made for me, even though I really don't like Diesel and all its 'successful living' concept. But ok, this one seemed like a nice campaign, repositioning the brand by not encouraging this 'money-sex-success-I'mbetterthanyou' image they did before.

The thing is that at first glance, this new campaign seems to be talking to another kind of 'cool people', this chilled, creative, artistic kind who don't take life too seriously and aren't apparently worried about the image they're projecting. Nothing to do with the former Diesel standard, who obviously worried about projecting success. But as I started to search for more information about it, I noticed that 'stupid' as they use it is not really addressed to creative people that might be seen as stupid by conservative people (that they call 'smart'). It's addressed to all those who want to project this image of being supercool doing virtually anything - because oh, you think you are so smart, but you wouldn't dare doing what I do, then I'm cooler than you. So nothing really changed.

Ok, really coherent with the brand's DNA, I see. So this campaign is just a new way to addressing those supercool people and telling them to show that they're on top of the worlds by wearing Diesel - for a successful living. This "I'm creative, I do whatever I want, I don't care about rules and about what other people think" is just the new form of "successful living", brought to this post-recession times. It's all about simple things, so they cut the glamour out of the ads, and bring in this artistic, creative aura. They're very nicely following behaviour trends in their communication, but not really changing anything about the main message - that is always something like 'you are better than this bunch of losers'.

So here are the ads. The obvious insight here is the resignification of the word 'stupid', into something really cool. Which I like, for obvious reasons. But I was truly amazed in a bad way about how they just resignificate and stereotype 'smart' into boring, life-lacking people who are unhappy and unwilling to try anything new.

But ok, being creative (or stupid, whatever) is really nice and it's a cool concept for the campaign. I like it. It just didn't make me feel any different about Diesel, but ok, it wasn't supposed to. With all this 'stupid' idea I thought I could identify for once with the brand, but no. I'm not their target after all. I just figured out I'm not the kind of stupid they want.

 

And this is the catalogue, which is nice/cool/stupid: Catalogue.pdf