Work · Proof
Diesel
Strategy and content marketing for Diesel, working with the brand's headquarters digital team from 2018 to 2020.
Nizzar Ben Chekroune worked on strategy and marketing for the Diesel brand from 2018 to 2020. He worked with the digital team at Diesel's headquarters on content marketing and strategy, alongside Paul Tholen, Digital Manager.
- Relationship
- Engagement
- Role
- Strategy and content marketing
- Period
- 2018 – 2020
- Where
- Diesel headquarters, Italy
- With
- Diesel
- Attribution
- Independent engagement, before Quantum Branding
Inside the headquarters, not around it
From 2018 to 2020 I worked on strategy and marketing for Diesel, with the digital team at the brand's headquarters. The work was content marketing and strategy, and I worked with Paul Tholen, Digital Manager.
Working with a headquarters team is a specific position. An agency serving one market or one campaign receives the brand as a finished thing. A headquarters digital team owns the brand's voice in every market at once, and content decided there travels to all of them.
It also changes what counts as a good idea. A piece of content that works brilliantly in one market and cannot travel is a problem at headquarters level, not a success.
A loud brand in a feed
Diesel has one of the most recognisable attitudes in fashion: irreverent, provocative, built over decades of advertising that refused to look like the rest of the category. For a brand like that, content marketing is not short of things to say. The difficulty is keeping the attitude intact when it is cut into daily formats, on platforms that reward frequency and flatten tone.
Strategy, in that setting, is deciding what content is for before deciding what it looks like: which pieces carry the brand's attitude, which carry the product, and how the two hold together without one diluting the other. A headquarters team has to answer that once, clearly enough that every market can apply it.
Where it sits in my work
Diesel ran alongside very different work. Until 2019 I was Cluster Development Agent for UNIDO in Marrakech, where I created La Minute Créative, a short video format that made creators and their skills visible. From late 2019 Arroz Con Pollo, the studio I co-founded with Nabil Nadifi, rebuilt the digital strategy and content of the art magazine Diptyk.
Diesel was the global fashion house among them. The discipline was the same in all three: make a voice visible in content without losing what makes it that voice. The scale and the stakes were not.
The work
The work ran with the brand's digital team on content marketing and strategy, across digital and social. A project image from it is shown in my public portfolio.
What I take forward
I can work inside a global brand's own team and hold its voice across formats, the same discipline I applied to institutions and cultural media in the same years.
People
- Paul Tholen
- · Digital Manager, Diesel headquarters digital team
Sources
Related work
- DiptykThrough Arroz Con Pollo, I led the brand strategy and implementation that transformed Diptyk’s digital presence and led to its New York Times recognition.
- Arroz Con PolloCo-founder
- La Minute CréativeCreator of the format; cluster development, visibility strategy and storytelling
- Verne JewelsFrom a first consultation to a full handover: I ran marketing for a fine jewellery house as its fractional CMO, then left the team a system it runs alone.