Somewhere in a Vancouver boardroom, a team approved a drum.
The instrument that Lululemon wheeled onto the Great Wall of China last month, framed by rows of contented yogis and a hired celebrity, turned out to be Japanese, or near enough that those who analysed the footage online could make the case. The timing is unfortunate, with Beijing and Tokyo trading accusations over Taiwan, and the Chinese internet primed to interpret any slight as a national one. Lululemon has since apologised to the celebrity and the public, and attempted to erase the campaign from existence, admitting that it suffered “limitations in [their] professional knowledge”.
That phrase deserves pause. It is the most honest thing any brand has said in this situation in years. Nobody in the room knew enough to see the problem, but, fundamentally, the room was built so that nobody could have.
This is a failure that no amount of talent inside a brand’s office can fix, because it’s a failure not of competence but instead almost certainly of composition. A capable in-house team shares a language, a set of reflexes and a mutual understanding of what is acceptable. The more cohesive a team becomes, the more efficiently it navigates. As such, those instead best placed to analyse whether a message, narrative or a campaign reads as intended – several zones away, to an audience carrying a history no one in the room had considered – are precisely those not invited to the meeting.
The recent record is not short. The most instructive case belongs to fellow Canadian apparel manufacturer Arc’teryx – a brand whose entire identity rests on reverence for the wild – and who, in September, set off an enormous fireworks display across a Tibetan ridge at eighteen thousand feet. In an attempt to honour the landscape, they were instead accused of desecrating it. Over 90 million engaged with the government’s announcement of an investigation into the stunt, and China’s Advertising Association concluded the stunt had destroyed years of trust in the firm’s eco credentials. A company that sells itself on protecting nature was seen to set light to it, and nobody had registered the contradiction, because everybody believed the same flattering thing about what they were doing.
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