How high street fashion brands are picking up on trends through advertising and celebrity endorsements - Dissertation Example

Fashion has become much more accessible, the process from catwalk to high street taking a maximum of 9 weeks which means that consumers are becoming allot more trend – savvy. With the many styles that are available, one of the core ways in which consumers are making decisions on style is based upon what they see celebrities wearing. Therefore, brand managers have had to adapt. Choosing the right celebrity will greatly affect the success of a fashion product so it is an important decision for a brand, usually based on many qualities, such as appeal, looks, popularity or even just a fantasy figure.

In today’s highly competitive fashion marke high street brands such as Topshop and Miss Selfridge are at loggerheads when it comes to products, each having a similar product to that of the rival. It is harder for one brand to gain quintessential advantage; such as advertising, service, promise of trust and even price factors. A key celebrity endorsement will take tip the competitive edge from one to the other. Advertising seems to be the best platform from which brands compete, which requires hiring the best advertising agencies in order to get the biggest and best celebrities to advertise for brands.

The company needs to invest in a good creative agency, a large enough promotional budget and a huge star to endorse the brand to ensure success over the competing brand. Brand communication delivered by celebrities and famous personalities generate a higher appeal, attention and recall within the fashion industry than those executed by non celebrities or models. The attraction to the celebrity creates a quick message that can reach the consumer with an impact that is all too essential in today’s competitive market.

Because of the core importance of celebrity endorsement, the different models applied by brands used to achieve the full potential of such endorsements, highlight the need for a convergence between the pragmatic and theoretical approaches of brand building and effective advertising. The opportunity and importance of a celebrity brand match and the various roles played them as brand associates shows the momentum this strategy has gained over the last few years. Celebrity endorsements offer the opportunity to maintain the contact with potential customers, sometimes without them even being aware of the advertising aim.

Advertising concepts such as ‘positioning by association’ ‘diminishing celebrity utility’ and the multiple effecters which show the triangular relationship between the brand, the consumer and the celebrity provide a framework in which to create an understanding of the importance of choosing the right celebrity to endorse a brand in order to add to the mythology of the product. When a brand is created for a company, more than just a method of selling a product is put into place. Brand identity is the emotional context in which a consumer will form a relationship with a product or product name.

In fashion, the way in which the product is identified with one celebrity or another can make or break a brand. Juicy Couture did no advertising during the first few years of their emergence onto the fashion scene. However, through the power of celebrity endorsement alone, through getting their track suits on people with highly visibly branding of their own through their celebrity, such as Madonna and Jennifer Lopez, the brand was able to make a powerful mark on the fashion industry (Steele 2010, p. 129). Without large amounts of spending, a fashion entity can get their products onto the right people when they are getting photographed by paparazzi and create a powerful buzz