Victoria's Secret Rebranded - a Bad Strategy case study - Part 1
Part One of two.
For more than four decades, the Victoria’s Secret (VS) brand has been synonymous with lingerie. The first two decades saw VS rise quickly into mainstream popularity, thanks to its luxury appeal at affordable prices and the aspirational marketing popularized bye Victoria’s Secret Angels.
However, for the past decade, the VS brand has steadily lost market share. As our society has shifted—particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement—women have embraced a larger narrative of inclusion and body positivity, increasingly rejecting the overt sexualization of women and outdated ideas of beauty. Victoria’s Secret has struggled to meet this moment while its competitors have moved into the lingerie space that it once dominated.
While VS has recognized that the history of the Victoria’s Secret brand is problematic, acknowledging that the messages it sent over the past four decades contributed to a toxic view of women, body shaming, eating disorder culture, sexism, transphobia, racism, and misogyny, it has never fully owned this legacy. A new podcast from Cadence 13 and Campside Media, Fallen Angel, explores the fall of Victoria’s Secret and its trademark “Angels,” revealing in great detail how the brand lost its iron grip on the lingerie business—exposing the imperfect underbelly of a world built on male fantasy.
As a feminist and strategy-first marketer, examining the case of Victoria’s Secret provides an opportunity to discuss not only what went wrong but also what could have gone right if the powers that be at Victoria’s Secret had understood their audience better and genuinely cared about what consumers were telling them during the past decade of declining sales. Instead of building a way forward with a strategy in tune with the severity of their PR crisis, Victoria’s Secret forged ahead in 2021 with a piecemeal rebrand that is unlikely to turn the tide.
This post will discuss the Fallen Angels podcast, the history of VS, examine their rebranding efforts, and suggest a strategy more likely to yield positive results as they attempt to move forward.
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE TOXIC MEN.
From the beginning, the VS brand was targeted toward men purchasing lingerie for women in their lives. The Victoria’s Secret brand was never about what women wanted—only what would please their partners. They did not create a space that positively impacted women on their journeys with their bodies and their sexuality. As a result, they contributed to a culture that objectifies women and values only a certain type of beauty. Women have been deeply offended and hurt by the actions of former VS representatives and affiliates, as well as by the abusive and toxic male culture surrounding the brand in its imagery and messaging.
Furthermore, the Fallen Angels podcast details a work environment that didn’t allow for body autonomy or authenticity. Instead, tales of unrealistic expectations and pressures created a culture of fear and pain for VS models behind the scenes. Women on both sides were affected.
The podcast delves into the cognitive dissonance that kept the Victoria’s Secret brand from truly seeing what consumers, critics, and society were trying to tell them: their brand was toxic and needed to change. According to Bloomberg reporter Jordyn Holman, “When you think about culture-shifting, it wasn’t just that consumers wanted new merchandise and products; they also wanted to ensure that the companies selling them were representative of the world. Lots of people say that Victoria’s Secret did not respond quickly enough to that.”
The body-positive movement has been around since the Victorian era, but the idea of what an attractive body could look like has recently been driven by women-led businesses, in particular. These smaller brands, like Aerie, ThirdLove, and Savage X Fenty, market themselves as brands for every body with increased sizing and messages of self-love and body positivity. As the industry evolved, Victoria’s Secret lagged behind, retaining a board of directors full of old white men. The brand refused to evolve with the times until, finally, in 2016, owner Les Wexner looked up from those pink-striped curtains and realized that the world around him had changed.
But was it too little, too late?
Probably. Wexner’s efforts since 2016 have continued to miss the mark. Removing swimwear, cutting the VS catalog, and moving away from their core product—push-up bras—in favor of unpadded “bralettes” may have made sense to Wexner to reduce marketing costs (the VS catalog cost $150 million to print every year), but profits continued to fall despite moving $5 billion worth of merchandise a year, as costs rose on the back end and VS began to flood the market with nearly constant sales promotions.
By heavily discounting their products, the VS brand began to lose its identity as an exclusive lingerie retailer. Since its inception, VS had positioned itself as the American version of the high-end French lingerie retailer La Perla. By offering constant sales, they undermined their position in the marketplace and confused customers.
Wexner’s obsession with malls (and certainty that Smart Phones were only a “fad”) didn’t help the situation either. Even as late as 2018, he failed to understand that women wanted to shop online, bypassing awkward trips into a VS store where you never quite felt like you belonged, no matter how good you looked that day. As e-commerce grew, VS retail stores began to close, pushing the VS brand even further from customers’ minds.
As Les Wexner stepped down and the COVID-19 pandemic forced all businesses to reimagine themselves, Victoria’s Secret attempted to break away from its toxic brand image by becoming a publicly traded company with no ties to the previous problematic brand.