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T-Shirt MarketingThe advertising world took a while to notice the shirt's human billboard potential. Ever the innovator, the military caught on first. As if jar-head haircuts weren't humiliating enough, the armed services began stenciling rank and company on T-shirts. About the same time, Ivy League schools clarified the student body pecking order by way of the imprimatur of school fraternities on tees. The first corporate-advertising tee didn't appear until the '60s, when Budweiser featured a can of Bud on the company's T-shirts. Since then, however, advertisers have grown more savvy in terms of their demographics — especially the captive market of college students. One example of how brazen companies have become with their T-shirt promotions can be seen at Northwestern University. They'd give you free stuff, and the free stuff of choice was a T-shirt [with credit card logo]. Brilliant marketing! If there's one thing people in college hate to do, it's laundry. You give students T-shirts and they become a billboard for whatever product is being sold. The on-campus tee, corporate or not, continues to define class and cultural orientation. Phish shirts and frats are synonymous, Then there's people who want to show they're 'ironic' by wearing Miss Piggy or some other childhood icon. Today, rock T-shirt sales are an over $500 million business. Whether you're a stoner wearing the new Spiritualized tee, or a self-anointed outcast draped in the latest Marilyn Manson misery-wear, the tee continues to be the transmitter of instant cultural/psychological affiliation. The T-shirt is ubiquitous — from corporate sports gatherings to seedy leather bars to the runways of high-fashion, the tee continues to spell it all out. With the advent of inexpensive printers and appropriate software, the T-shirt has become an even more egalitarian mode of expression. And since anything can be printed on a T-shirt by most anyone, it hasn't lost its ability to shock. Or at least annoy! |
