In my opinion, this campaign is particularly inspiring for family businesses, as it presents the concept of filiation in a new light.
Le Vieux Campeur, a historic French player in sports equipment and a family business for three generations, expresses both its family character in semantic terms (“enfants”, “Vieux”) and visually (black and white portraits), and the concept of communities (it’s not the founder’s children or grandchildren we see here, but employees, professional sportsmen or consumers, all with an almost family attachment to the company).
Of course, this isn’t the first time that a company, in this case a family business, has featured its employees or consumers in an advertising campaign… What is new, however, is the fact that it refers to them as its “children”, in a tone of connivance and complicity. The “Old Man” is the nickname given to the brand by long-time consumers, in a process of friendly personification.
Using a tone of complicity, this campaign succeeds in talking about filiation in a different way: it uses the codes of family filiation to talk about a broader filiation: community filiation.
