So Tiffany have been repositioning: “Not your mother’s Tiffany”. I’m hearing lots of arguments against it: it looks cheap, it’s aggressive, it’s offensive, Gen X could afford the product more easily than Gen Z etc etc. But mostly that it’s madness to reject your existing audience so overtly.

Personal reactions aside – I’m slap bang in the middle of the generation they clearly don’t want any more, so it’s not designed to please me – there’s one thing I do admire about it.

After seeing countless briefs over the years that say “we want to attract a new audience, but still keep the old one”, I’ve got to respect that Tiffany is going all out. Recognising that if the audience you’ve got and the one you want are different, there’s probably a reason for that. That if they want Gen Z, they have to do something different – and that something different might not appeal very much to Gen X. That if you try to be relevant to everyone, you probably won’t stand out for much of anything.

Maybe it’s too heavy handed. Maybe it’s meant to be tongue in cheek and nobody’s getting the joke. Maybe it will backfire horribly. Madness or not, time will tell. But for single-mindedness at least, I’m all for it.

Thing is, though, then you take a look at their website. Aside from a few images from the new campaign, and the odd product that’s ever so slightly edgier than their usual range, it gives me the impression that it’s aimed at a posher version of my mother. So, to Gen Z, it’s not your mother’s Tiffany, it’s your grandmother’s. If this is a genuine repositioning and not just a clickbait ad campaign, it’s a bit of a wasted opportunity – to go all-out ballsy in one medium and hedge your bets in another. The 20-somethings who see the poster campaign will probably go online to buy: if the story doesn’t carry through to all touchpoints, it may well be over by the time the poster edges start to curl.