Don't Buy This Jacket

Why it works

On Black Friday 2011, the biggest shopping day in the American calendar, Patagonia bought a full page in The New York Times to tell readers not to buy its product. Beneath a photograph of the R2 fleece, one of its best sellers, six paragraphs of copy confessed the jacket's environmental cost: enough water to meet the daily needs of 45 people, and nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide to get it to the warehouse. It asked people to buy less of everything, Patagonia's own products included, as part of the company's Common Threads Initiative. It is studied as the defining example of demarketing and of a brand purpose that visibly costs something, using its own product as the case study for overconsumption. Patagonia's marketing chief told The Guardian that telling people to buy less had not hurt sales, if anything the reverse, and the ad set the radically candid tone the company has kept ever since.