Fashion is one of the most cutthroat industries. Famous fashion brands compete not only with each other but with smaller and younger brands. What’s more, today’s customers, and especially fashion customers, have become more demanding. They don’t want to buy just a product — they want to buy a story, a lifestyle, emotions. They want to be surprised and be a part of something bigger.
In order to succeed, brands have no choice but to suit the customer’s request. They have to be creative. Therefore, they test every single marketing tactic, trying the latest trends. And that is the reason fashion marketing is so awesome.
Let’s look at some marketing tactics the fashion world is using already.
Collaboration is all about attracting a new audience, and fashion brands have had great success. We’ve already witnessed H&M, known as a mass market brand, make collections in collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld, Kenzo and other high fashion brands. Or Nike, for example: The sports giant surprisingly collaborated with luxury brand Louis Vuitton.
One of the most surprising collections came from Adidas. In partnership with Stella McCartney and the organization Parley for the Oceans, Adidas made a unique swimsuit collection. The crucial thing about it is the fact that the garments are made of refined oceanic litter.
We see that fashion brands successfully combine things that look different: wearable and unwearable, mass-market and elite, sports and fashion. Why are they doing it? They make a new product that fits a new audience. That is an excellent way to extend both a product line and a brand’s audience.
Again, it’s all about finding the new audience. The whole concept of using celebrity to promote a business is not new. The idea is quite simple: Celebrities’ fans adore them and trust their opinion and choice. That’s why when a brand uses a celebrity in its advertising it gets more than a new audience — it gets a loyal audience. Although those in the fashion industry may be celebrities themselves, they still invite big names from different spheres to be advocates for brands. For example, Puma made Rihanna the creative director of its women’s collections. And this tactic doesn’t only work for retail. The Bank of Georgia invited a famous blogger to participate in its Christmas campaign. What did the bank get? Worldwide attention, audience and engagement growth across all social channels, and as a result, massive PR.
The term “newsjacking” was popularized thanks to David Meerman Scott’s book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas Into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking means that the company uses hot news or a trending topic to draw audience attention to the brand. Fashion brands have gone even further. They use hot political trends and put political slogans on clothes. These “political” collections were demonstrated throughout New York Fashion Week by several brands such as Prabal Gurung, Creatures of Comfort, Opening Ceremony and Alice + Olivia. For example, The Row embroidered the words like “freedom and “hope” on certain pieces, and Public School used a play on Donald Trump’s famous red hat.
This move gets the fashion brands opportunity to get the attention of a very new kind of audience — young and politically engaged people. What’s more, these collections were wildly written about not in fashion but in political media, so the brand gets broader media coverage.
There are a lot of news, ideas and events happening every day. The trick is to pick a relevant topic and use it to draw attention to your brand.
The main benefit fashion retail gets from livestreaming is the audience. Live video helps brands reach millions of people. Moreover, thanks to livestreaming, the biggest industry event — fashion week — is no longer elite and a closed-door event. Everyone can watch the show in real-time. And this is the right way to expand the brand’s audience. Although every single guest of the event can make a live video on their own channels, fashion weeks have their own, official channels. They announce and promote these channels before the event has happened, on all social channels, and redirect the social audience to the official website.
The audience, meanwhile, adores live video. For example, let’s look at the incredible spikes of engagement on Louis Vuitton’s Instagram page. That day, a livestreaming of the Men’s Fall-Winter 2017 collection at Paris Fashion Week was announced. As soon as the brand mentioned a live video, engagement tripled.