Lingerie & Intimate Apparel

Advertising has always been a very creative and innovative medium. It shapes our perceptions of products in interesting and unusual ways. The more unusual, the better. With so many clever and persistent attempts to draw our attention, what ads are the most memorable?

It’s hard to argue with repetition. It is a legitimate and effective teaching method. Some of us are old enough to remember Mr. Whipple sternly admonishing his customers “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin’”. Although that campaign was ranked by test viewers as consistently annoying, it was so memorable that Charmin became the standard by which bathroom tissue was measured.

Humor makes anything a little more palatable. If an advertisement is amusing, we are far more likely to remember it, and remembering the product is the whole point of advertising. The trick is to amuse the potential customer without making a joke of the product itself. We have seen this done most cleverly. We would like to present to you some of the best examples of the art of advertising lingerie.

In 1949, Maidenform began one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. At the end of World War II, women found themselves displaced from the jobs they had held while American men were overseas. Once again, women were faced with limited opportunities. Maidenform launched the “I dreamed…” campaign to celebrate the possibilites to which women could aspire. The campaign was not only amusing, and the new ads, eagerly anticipated, but they became a regular source of encouragement.

The ads featured beautiful women in elaborate sets, photographed in magnificent outfits, but only a maidenform bra from the waist up. The ads ran the gamut from historical to fantastical, and the tagline for each was based on the formula “I dreamed I (insert something remarkable here) in my Maidenform bra. The message was that a woman could be or do whatever she dreamed, and Maidenform was there to help. The company encouraged women to participate in the campaign, when, in 1955, they sponsored a contest, in which participants could win up to $10,000 for submitting their original dreams to be used in a new advertisement. Engaging customers in this way won them many loyal fans.

The original “I dreamed…” series of advertisements ran from 1949 through 1969, but Maidenform kept the “dream” alive with ads that were contemporary to the times. The “Maidenform Woman” appeared in many of the situations and circumstances of which her predecessors had only “dreamed”. In one of our favorite ads, the company reflected the women’s rights struggle in an elegantly clever way, reminding the viewer that every woman had the right to be respected.

In the arena of lingerie advertising, we count Maidenform as the example to follow. Their ads have entertained, encouraged and challenged women for over 60 years. We should also note here that no advertising campaign can be so successful for so long, unless it is based on an excellent product. Maidenform bras excel in quality and comfort, and have been supporting American women for even longer than their ads have been making us smile.