Now that fall fashion marketing is here and the industry is working on what’s next, what should fashion brands do differently to make up for a terrible fiscal 2009?
Everyone’s a brand strategist these days, including people in the fashion industry whose core business is to produce fashion shows, generate publicity and create ad campaigns. In which case you’d expect fashion brands to be more distinct from each other, wouldn’t you?
Considering fashion is all about change, the fashion-marketing model is really old fashioned. It took a recession for people to accept that the selling cycle doesn’t work, and although advertising isn’t as effective as it used to be, brands still invest heavily in formulaic print ads, along with the same old sponsorships, trunk shows, pop-up shops, collaborations and now blogs, videos and social networking.
The fashion advertising model. Broken?
The fashion-marketing model has its place and it’s cost of entry – tactics mostly differentiated only by the aesthetic and personality of a designer/retailer and their collections, which, for a lot of mainstream brands isn’t actually that different. Brands can pr, collaborate and twitter all they like, but without a differentiating brand strategy that creatively frames a different way for consumers to think about them, beyond a cool image or shinny mobile app, brands will always be focused on outdoing their competitors latest tactic.
Daniel Chu, Executive Creative Director of marketing agency Momentum, who has worked with brands like Nike, Thom Browne, Kenneth Cole and Target, points out that,
“In fashion, we create mystique, and that’s the strategy. The mystique of creative collaborations, the mystique of pop-up shops, the mystique of photography – these are the tools to reframe the context of a fashion brand within culture. To make it more complex, fashion is a culture that thrives on itself, at its root, fashion is and always will be about itself. It creates to impress itself. In other product categories, strategy avoids mystique and relies on clarity. Strategy provides a clear consumer message, or emotional benefit, to products and categories which have no emotional or generational resonance.”
I understand that in respect of brands like Margiela where the mystique and creativity of the designer is the brand, and he is uncompromised in delivering it, but that’s one strategy for one brand, and the point of marketing is to create difference. Chu goes on to say, “Obviously as demand increases, fashion becomes a populist commodity.” My point exactly.
Before starting her own brand consultancy Vernon Company, Kim Vernon was CMO of Calvin Klein. Kim points out that the biggest change in fashion right now is that brands are trying to adapt their take-it-or-leave-it aspirational marketing to involve the consumer online.
“We are right now seeing a quick shift in fashion brands jump into the SMM [social media marketing] pool, DKNY, Diane Von Furstenberg, Oscar de la Renta etc have put their foot, not toe in the [SMM] water in past months. Many companies are hiring partners to develop a strategy that goes beyond fashion shows and fragrance ads online. The first and most powerful companies with big SMM strategies have a goal to reach many people in a general target and fashion brands are going to teach agencies how to view brands online in an even more particular way. It is an exciting time for SMM as the image and great product brands won’t fear the medium but have fun with it and have conversations with the customers in a way not possible with a page in Vogue, or a billboard on sunset or even a simple e-commerce website.”
Which is great, given that digital is just the world we live in, but isn’t building the future of a business around SMM as tactical as placing an ad in Vogue? I recommend reading ‘Impatient CEO’s are all of a Twitter, but it doesn’t work like that’.
It’s not that the fashion industry isn’t strategic, of course it is, some of the most revered and successful brands in the world are in fashion. It’s that the words are misused and tactically thrown around so much that anything and everything is a ‘brand strategy’ when it’s not.
A good brand strategy creatively reframes what the brand stands for in culture beyond a product description and tactical marketing ideas. It’s a directional creative idea that drives everything the brand does, and goes much deeper than the surface aesthetics of the fashion business. One of the best brand strategies that I know of came from a road side recovery service in the UK, that became market leader after reframing their brand as the fourth emergency service alongside the police, ambulance and fire services – brilliant because no other brand could ever literally or emotionally replace them.
The fashion industry thinks they already have issues with replicas. They don’t know the half of it.
Gill writes about the business of fashion for Mpdclick – a leading commercial online fashion trend forecasting service. To discover more, please visit www.mpdclick.com. She is the co-founder of The Joneses a creative brand and communications company in New York. You can contact Gill at gill@thejoneses-nyc.com
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Fashion isn’t inevitably about itself. It’s inevitably about the person wearing it and how the fabric flatters and highlights their own beauty, taste, attitudes and appeal.
Branding in the fashion world should be about giving the wearer more tools to express themselves with. The appeal of (RED) went beyond pure aesthetics because its purpose was to say something about the wearer that went beyond the value of the fabric or the creativity of the design.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Brian, I have to amend your first statement. Fashion selection is ultimately about the consumer. Creation, is about fashion itself, a constant innovation. The fact that many people want to wear it is a bonus.
September 21st, 2009 at 3:57 pm
This is the most important part of the article: “A good brand strategy creatively reframes what the brand stands for in culture beyond a product description and tactical marketing ideas. It’s a directional creative idea that drives everything the brand does.”
There’s a serious lack of brand or business strategy when it comes to traditional or new media marketing methods for fashion brands. The industry predicts seasons, patterns and colors; we also need to predict and forecast business trends. Coupled with creatively delivering a brand’s message in a personalized manner, brands start building a recipe for success.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:10 pm
It sells the only thing we all (supposedly) want but will never have, youth.
That’s their strategy and it works
September 21st, 2009 at 4:30 pm
One of the sour truths that I like to highlight, but that doesn’t always get talked about, is the fact that there’s a lot of brand strategists who have a ton of approaches on how to improve fashion marketing. It’s like a death grip they have on something they want to explain but can’t.
The fact is, fashion marketers (or those who know how to market fashion) and product marketers (or those who know how to market goods and services) will never agree. We’re speaking two different languages. And that’s okay – we’re not meant to speak the same language because selling laundry detergent or Nike shoes or wealth management just doesn’t have the same boxes to check as selling a frilly summer dress or a flowery patterned skirt inspired by Roccoco architecture or fur-lined capes inspired by Mongolian tribes. Sound ridiculous? Because it is. I’m not here to hold fashion up on a pedestal. On the contrary, I’m letting you know fashion isn’t highbrow. Take Anna WIntour – she’s made it to icon status simply by pouting and wearing sunglasses. I hope you catch my drift.
Fortunately (or unfortunately for brand strategists), fashion marketing will and should, always be about the color of the season, or the cut, and the ‘IT’ bag, because folks – and this shouldn’t come as a surprise – fashion is all about trends. And trends aren’t meant to live forever. The way people consume information is changing so fast, neither should your brand strategies.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Additionally, I want to address new media.
I get dizzy with excitement every time I hear talk of digital marketing strategies and new media opportunities. Having helped steer Nike+ and NikeWomen.com to award-winning success, the bottom line for new media, mobile, and digital engagement strategies to a company or brand, regardless of category, is about one thing and one thing only: driving sales.
For a brand, living online, in mobile and through digital is like having a cash register on every mobile device, desktop, laptop, and TV screen in the world. I have to giggle a little bit when I hear or read how brands should see online opportunities as a way to stretch their social media legs and have fun with their consumers. That’s all about creative, and therefore, purely textural. The substance is the strategy behind it and that strategy is no different from the bricks-n-mortar model: sell.
The real opportunity/challenge is for small-businesses and boutique brands who are choking in this economic environment. Is it possible to succeed solely on your online presence? Knowing that more and more people are moving towards digital, and more and more bricks-n-mortars are disappearing, where should the real emphasis be placed? Having to contemplate these types of real scenarios should make any marketer think twice about which best foot to put forward.
September 21st, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Daniel, agreed. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving sales.
Brands attempting to “stretch their social media legs” are brands attempting to build affinity and maintain a degree of cultural relevance with their consumer. In the end, that’s most of what traditional advertising intends to do (because top of mind relevance drives sales.)
The value of digital is not that you can put a register at the end of every engagement (it’s nice, but direct response TV achieved the same thing). But rather that it is the only medium where consumers can take an active role in shaping, consuming and ultimately propagating the brand and its message. And messages are much more powerful when they come from our peers.
Traditional media allows brands with deep pockets to insist they are relevant. To succeed in new media, brands must actually be relevant.
September 21st, 2009 at 6:24 pm
All a good strategy comes down to is having a discernable point of view that’s relevant to you and your audience.
If you’re Westwood, Largerfeld, Ford et al then their p.o.v. is their own taste and profile, and great, that drives each season’s collections and people buy it.
But what if your Theory, H&M, Diesel, Gap, French Connection, TopShop, Uniqlo?
There’s no designer defining the brand and what it stands for. So to suggest they don’t need a strategy isn’t right, and, generic words like “youth” is not a strategy, nor is “sell”.
Also, I would argue it’s more than about driving sales. It’s about driving incremental profit. I could drive sales by cutting the price or sticking a BOGOF promo on anything. Our overall purpose is to develop creative strategies and ideas that generates desire in someones head into a purchase, for a product or service that’s priced at a premium. Therefore incremental profit is a more important and accurate measure of what we do for clients, than just # sales.
As for digital, quite honestly, I couldn’t give a **** about it until I know what a brand’s point of view is and why I should care. Then think about how you might use all the new and wonderful revenue generating channels to communicate this with your audience and how they “participate” and “share” and “co-create” and all the other awful cliches of communication strategy :)
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Sorry if this comes across as 101 but I think there are some points being missed. It is the job of all marketing, whether offline or online to create demand and the job of sales to satisfy the demand. It is only natural that for a fast paced exciting market such as fashion that demand has to be constantly recreated with ever more interesting and creative ideas. Digital lends itself well to this as it offers an immediate environment where new ideas can be tested and then rolled out extremely cost efficiently.
Having a strategy is essential for that as different digital channels yield better or worse results depending on the aims of the overall campaign (testing out something new, moving old stock, seasonal collections etc). The brand strategy though is surely the creed by which every campaign and every project adheres to. If the creed says that thou shalt not use pink and thou shalt build your brand values around the founder of the brand then all communications should feature the founder and never use pink. It therefore sets the rules of the game for every campaign and probably shouldn’t change that much or that quickly lest the brand itself become confused.
As a Strategy agency Interactive Mix works within a brand strategy and creates digital strategies which obey the creed of the brand. That isn’t the same thing as rehashing last year’s marketing communications plan or blindly copying what your competitor did. Surely the fashion industry is a bit more clued up than that?
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:37 am
Quite an interesting exchange. AdAge has an article on a study conducted at NYU Stern school on luxury brands moving online here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=139188
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:42 am
Great points here. Fashion is such a traditionally closed industry that accepting social media is a tremendous paradigm shift. But there are so many other reasons why being a designer is tough.
http://www.dahlight.com/seamless-a-designers-journey/
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
NO offense but your name- it sounds like an amalgamation of Simran Gill and Paris Hilton!
Cool still.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:16 pm
This industry never lacks for creativity, inspiration and reinvention. What your article highlights is that there is not enough tension in the industry coming from a marketing focus. In other words, the best this industry has to offer comes from the collision between artistry/inspiration and marketing (the meeting of consumer needs). Unfortunately, so much attention is paid to the design side of the equation that this industry has been effectively left in the dust as it relates to building marketing expertise and infrastructure.
When I look at American design, Ralph Lauren has done the best job at managing this tension. You may be bored by it, but RL consistently meets consumer needs while subtly infusing and influencing trend direction with design.
September 24th, 2009 at 10:17 am