Bonds can be like Bud, a local brand for a global market

Underwear brand Bonds’ ubiquity in Australia will only serve to make it more coveted elsewhere, just like Budweiser and Mini when they launched abroad.

I studied alongside Americans at university. Not in America, however. I went to Lancaster University to do marketing (of course). And by some administrative error, I ended up in a corridor completely populated with exchange students from Minnesota. I must be the only student to attend a British red-brick uni and develop a strong appreciation for Grain Belt beer, Kirby Puckett and hotdish. Go Gophers!

My college mates were demigods to me. They were a couple of years older and back then America was way ahead with the kind of gear that Brits had yet to glimpse: MTV, half-top sneakers, the swimwear edition of Sports Illustrated, and White Castle. Mythical stuff to a working-class lad from West Cumbria.

But I wasn’t the only one getting their mind blown. My American friends could not believe the way Budweiser was venerated in the UK. It was widely seen as a special, imported brand that sat almost above anything else and sold in bottles for prices that – after a couple of seconds of dollar conversion and then a re-check because the numbers did not stack up – would draw various dirty aphorisms of American amazement. How was this possible for Bud? A middle-of-the-road, basic beer back home.

That was the point, of course. The prevalence of Budweiser in America – its centrality in daily beer-drinking life – made it exclusive and coveted in foreign fields. Ordinariness there made it special here. Americans just saw a beer. Foreigners saw an American beer – The American Beer – and if that was something that they desired Budweiser was massively appealing.

I never forgot that lesson. That the more central and quotidian the brand is within its original culture, the more exotic and desired it can become elsewhere. I saw it when Muji opened in the UK. This zero-image, commodity retailer whose name literally means ‘no-brand’, picked up tons of brand equity with those keen to buy a genuine Japanese aesthetic.

And it worked in reverse too. The Mini was meant to be a small, economical car that could carry four people functionally and for not much money. But the fact that it launched just as the Swinging Sixties began, when British culture was aspirational almost everywhere, meant that it became far sexier than anyone back at British Leyland could have imagined. Its central, prosaic location on every British high street made it exotic and desirable everywhere else.

As worn Down Under

That’s now a key consideration for legendary Aussie underwear brand Bonds as it embarks upon a major launch into the USA. There are complexities to Australian brands that make things tricky. Foster’s, for example, is a pretend Australian beer brand that no one drinks Down Under. Speedo, by contrast, is a real Aussie brand invented on Bondi Beach that no-one knows is Aussie.

But Bonds is the real deal. It’s all Australians wear down there. It’s hard to think of a more prevalent, more established, more legitimate Aussie brand than Bonds. And that means it has potential elsewhere.

When brands successfully migrate to new markets based on provenance, they usually charge more too.

A move into the US is a tricky thing. There was a time when geographical isolation, population sparsity and an absence of global competition led to totally shithouse Australian marketing. The last two decades have seen it evolve to the point where it punches well above its weight, but the exception is global marketing. Chances are you know several Australian brands, but the chances are even greater that these brands are not owned by Australian companies. Ugg, Foster’s, Billabong, Castlemaine XXXX and Aesop are all great examples of brands that project an Australian image but are now owned elsewhere.

And Bonds is the same these days. Its corporate HQ is in Salem, not Sydney, having been acquired by American underwear behemoth Hanesbrands a decade ago. Aussie origins and American ownership might prove a successful match in this instance, however.

Bonds’ head of marketing Kedda Ghazarian is a Melbourne girl. More importantly, she spent the best part of the last decade as Bonds’ brand manager before her promotion. She gets the brand. And she gets the fact that the implicit centrality of Bonds within Australian culture means it must play a very different game if it is going to succeed in America.

Cue a long, lingering zoom from the face of Robert (son of Steve ‘The Crocodile Hunter’) Irwin. He’s in his Bonds dackers (obviously) contemplating his six-pack and the Hills Hoist over his right shoulder. He appears completely unconcerned by the various deadly indigenous Australian animals surrounding him, as a suitably mellifluous voiceover explains Aussies stay cool because they wear Bonds. A clever double-entendre strapline reminds viewers that ‘Bonds are made for Down Under’.

It’s a great ad from another successful Aussie export – Special Group – even if the whole premise of the ad is total bollocks. In my experience, Aussies (while wonderful) aren’t especially laid back; I actually think the Poms are far more horizontal. And while the image of Australia is somewhere filled to the teeth with deadly predators, the country’s population is so concentrated in urban areas it is only 103rd on the global league table of snake-related deaths this year (behind exotic places like Spain, France and Japan).

Yet the point here is not to speak to any Australian reality, but rather the purported image of that country to others. If Americans think Aussies are cool, six-pack wielding hotties who don’t care if the dingo eats their baby, so be it.

Unlike Bonds’ domestic advertising, which is far more utilitarian and focused on fit and value, Ghazarian and her team know the only way Aussie undercrackers can beat American brands is by playing up an exotic image story.

The good news for Bonds is that, if it can crack America, it doesn’t just have the magnitude of the USA and its tenfold-bigger market to look forward to. When brands successfully migrate to new markets based on provenance, they usually charge more too.

Muji’s merchandise is often priced 50% higher abroad than its Tokyo RRPs. Minis were a borderline luxury vehicle in some of the markets they originally sold in. And ask a bunch of now-aging American hockey coaches and construction managers from Minneapolis about their beer drinking on exchange at a British university, and they can tell you first-hand about the ludicrous price for a bottle of Budweiser and a young English idiot they took under the wing 35 years ago.