Diesel - WE DO THE THINGS WE LIKE!










We have chosen to start this column on the communicative style of firms by speaking about Diesel. We could have had no better start considering the richness and expressive iconoclasm which have always characterised the Veneto-based firm's approach to communication.
Diesel has been all along a watershed for taste and look in garments, indeed a benchmark for shaping young people's culture on the world scene; an expressive energy that finds its primary and most important medium of communication in the product itself.
 
Diesel marketing di moda
 
WE DO THE THINGS WE LIKE!
It may sound peremptory but it has the sweetness of a utopia! It is around this sentence that the whole of Diesel's creativeness is shaped: from the design offices, to marketing, the press office and quality control....
All those who recognise themselves in the product of Diesel's activity, be it a pair of jeans or a shirt, a bag or the TV commercials, become ‘Diesel people' themselves.
Since 1991, when their first international marketing and communication strategy was started, the world has been conceived as a boundless macro culture: it is the world Diesel relies on and which provides the firm the vital energy to fuel its activity.

Diesel state of mind!
Their communicative strategy does not consist in making the public, targeted by market surveys or sector studies, take in a product but in facing the more challenging task of contributing, year after year, though repeated initiatives, to define the features of young people's culture in the world. As soon as they are defined such features prove changeable, like any attempt at providing a restrictive definition of a generation, and as changeable as the mood of the people who work at Diesel.
Diesel Wall is, in this respect, the paradigm of the firm's communicating strategies:
- to address a wide public through a wall without considering them as mere customers;
- to communicate with people and places on the wall;
- to summon through a contest all those who want to contribute their idea to the Diesel image from the wall.

 
 
The wall is not seen as a dividing, splitting, parting barrier but as an instrument of union, exchange and debate.
An outlet is conceived as the place where the people who promote Diesel culture can meet: the young people who work at Diesel, plus those who consider Diesel a landmark. Therefore traditional outlets are planned "as we like them", and dot the country to form a network open to the world and to the features of every single area. That is why the concept store in Corso Porta Ticinese, Milan uses the communicative language shared by those who live in the area, whereas another store in Corso Venezia is supposed to adopt the signs and symbols typical of that district.		   Diesel wall
 
Stores are like junctions in a network, aerials which by osmosis with the surrounding environment pick up all that an area expresses: habits, customs, trends, as many stimuli to create ideas.
An endless osmosis for a firm where people have dropped hypocrisy and have the nerve to believe in what they like.

txt: Luca Dal Bò
photo: Fabio Gambina