Innovation in the UK Fashion Retailing Firms - Class and Glaze - Case Study Example

Innovation in UK Fashion Retailing Firms

Abstract

C&G (Class and Glaze) is a fashion-retailing firm that was recently established and got a chance to take part in this year’s British Fashion Week. The firm received excellent reviews and it wants build upon the reviews it received during the fashion week but it has limited resources for marketing. The purpose of this report is to advise on how to use social media effectively to raise awareness of the brand. It will highlight on the two forms of social media that are relevant to marketing in fashion retailing; this section will discuss two different forms of social media that C&G can use in its marketing strategy. The next section will present a plan of action that C&G can use to implement a marketing strategy with its limited resources. It will be divided into sections that will present the different steps of the action plan that will also act as milestones for the action plan. The last section of the report will provide a review of how C&G can exploit and protect its intellectual property.

Introduction

Company Background

C&G (Class and Glaze) is a fashion retailing firm that was launched on 3rd December 2015 in the United Kingdom. C&G has a collection of modern wardrobes that include classic whiter shirts, denim, and khakis. It also includes accessories and apparel for men, women and kids. Since its establishment, it has made an impact in the dynamic fashion market in the United Kingdom. C&G was among the fashion firms in this year’s British Fashion Week where it received excellent reviews. The firm want to build upon the reviews it received during the fashion week but it has limited resources for marketing. The purpose of this report is to advise on how to use social media effectively to raise awareness of the brand. It will highlight on the two forms of social media that are relevant to marketing in fashion retailing, a plan of action and a review regarding how the firms should exploit and protection intellectual property.

Forms of Social Media

In this section, I will discuss the two forms of social media that C&G can use in its marketing strategy. The fashion industry was once an exclusive industry but in the 21st century, it is more accessible to the average consumer than ever. The accessibility is associated with the increased use of the social media from 2009. Social media acts as a real-time platform that touches every corner of the world, which has influenced how consumers interact with the fashion products and industry at large. Social media has presented new channels of marketing and advertising for fashion firms to reach their target consumers (Chadwick, 2015). Among the new channels, include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Blogs and Instagram to name a few.

In a recent study with Retail Week on digital marketing innovation in the fashion retail, it studied 1750 shoppers in the United Kingdom to establish how they are interaction with the fashion retailers today. The study revealed that fashion buying habits and expectation of the public consumers are changing at a high rate. The study showed that over three-quarters of the shoppers across all age groups preferred to discover new fashion products and trends online particularly through various social media channels. Notably, the study showed that more than a third of the consumers between 18 years and 44 years of age engage with fashion retailers and brands mainly on their mobile devices. A half of the consumers between 18 and 24 years of age and a third of those between 25 and 34 years of age always share images of themselves or fashion product with friends online before they make a buying decision (Hall, 2016). The most interesting part of the study indicated that 72% of consumers between 18 years and 35 years of age desire to shop straight from the social media if they encounter something they like.

It is without a doubt that social media will go a long way to creating brand awareness for the C&G. Nonetheless, not all social media channels are best suited for marketing and creation of brand awareness in the fashion retail industry. There are some forms of social media that are best suited for this role. Social media comes in different forms, which include, social networking such as Facebook, microblogging such as Twitter, Bookmarking such as Digg, and Multimedia such as YouTube and Instagram. The two ideal forms of social media that are relevant to fashion retailing are social networking and multimedia.

Social Networking

In this category, the ideal social media platform is Facebook. It is one of the largest social media platforms regarding its fan base and extent of use. It has over 400 million users in different parts of the world; this presents a large market for the retail firm to exploit. Opening a Facebook account is free of charge, but there will be some costs incurred if the company wants to promote its product so that it can reach more audience. Different fashion firms are using Facebook as the basis for their marketing strategies for example Lacoste, HauteLook and Victoria’s Secret (Bullas, 2011).

Multimedia

From this form of social media, two platforms are best suited for fashion retail marketing which is Instagram. Instagram is a visual social media channel that is entirely based on images and short video posts. It is owned by Facebook and has over 400 million active users. Besides, it can be easily integrated with Facebook and Twitter. Video sharing has been on the increase according to the Pew Research Centre (Indvik, 2011). There are examples of fashion firms that are promoting and marketing their products on Instagram. For example, Zara & Topshop and Prep Obsessed are two fashion retailing firms that are using Instagram to market their products and provide links for the customers who want to purchase the products posted on their Instagram accounts (Stacey, 2014).

In this section, I looked at the different two forms of social media (social network and multimedia) particularly Facebook for social network and Instagram for multimedia that C&G can use in its marketing strategy. In the next section, plan of action, I will highlight on a plan that C&G can use to implement a marketing strategy with its limited resources.

Plan of Action

I will highlight on a plan that C&G can use to implement a marketing strategy with its limited resources. I will split the section in different steps of the action plan that will act as milestones for the action plan. To create brand awareness, the C&G will have to implement an innovative social media campaign in the next one year. By then end of this period, the firm must have established its social media presence characterised by a high conversion rate and large social media following. C&G will have to create its social media content that will be shared on the three social media channels stated above. Creation of the social media content, distribution and monitoring its impact is a very long process, which at times can be confusing and overwhelming if it is not carefully planned and well managed. Designing a plan of action will help create an effective social media campaign. To allow the effectiveness of the plan, the fashion retail firm must hire at least one social media expert who will be in charge of managing the social media platforms. Also, he or she will be an important part of implementing the plan of action.

State the goals and objectives

The first step will be to establish what the campaign wants to achieve. The general objective is to create brand awareness. Nevertheless, there is a need to have specific and actionable goals and objectives. There must be at three specific objectives of the campaign that follow the SMART approach. For example, the specific objective is to implement a social media campaign that will create brand awareness in the next one year, for Instagram, share images that present the brand and product by posting five photos a week that will achieve 30 likes, 30 shares and 10 comments each. The goals and objectives should be aligned with the larger marketing strategy in that all of the social media efforts drive towards the overall business objectives.

Conduct a social media audit

Before implementing the plan of action, it is crucial to evaluate the current social media use and how it is working for other fashion retail firms. It will require C&G to establish the people who are connected through the social media that it targets and how the social media channels it wants to use target the market. Here below is a social media audit template. The social media expert hired will come in handy in executing this part of the plan.

Create the social media accounts

The next step after the social media audit will be to create social media accounts because the firm does not have a social media account. From the audit, the firm will have established the social media form that best meets its social media goals. The firm will have to create social media profiles on Facebook and Instagram from the ground up with the broader goals of the campaign and audience in mind. Every social media platform had different audiences and thus treated differently. The firm will have to optimise its profile to meet the objectives of the campaign. Significantly, optimising the profits for SEO (search Engine Optimization) can help attract and generate web traffic (Malecki, 2014). Besides, the firm should cross-promote social accounts which will help it grow the quality and reach of its social media content. Consequently, the social media profiles should be filled out completely and the text and images optimised. Here below are an example of well-filled Facebook and Instagram social media profiles (LePage, 2014).

Research

Establishment of comprehensive social media profiles is a milestone, and the next step will be to do some research. It will be paramount to conduct a background research on fashion campaigns conducted through the social media by analysing old reports and data that were created by fashion retail firms. In addition, it will be a chance to look at previous campaigns and what other firms did to support their campaigns and see whether they were successful or they failed and the reasons behind the failure or success (Jones & Ryan, 2014). The research will enable to the firm to identify what to pursue and what to avoid. The research will be a perfect opportunity for C&G to conduct a context mapping whereby it will analyse what is happening right now in relation to its campaign. It will be able to look at the current events, and the events will take place in future and their impact on the brand awareness campaign. The research step is an important milestone because, at this step, the firm may rearticulate its goals and objectives to incorporate what has been identified in the research.

Identify the target audience

The target audience refers to the people who C&G wants to appeal to so that it can achieve its objective of creating brand awareness in the United Kingdom. On the same note, there are participants who represent the people who will be part of the social media campaign. Participants are easy to establish because they are the people at the firm who are going to create the content, watch the media and help distribute it (Chadwick, 2015). Establishment of the target audience is challenging, but if the marketing department had already classified them, it would be easier. After the identification of the target audience, C&G must then create a profile for each of the audience through variables such as demographics, culture, media habits, geography, and attitude.

Crafting content for the social media platforms

The next step will be to create content for the social media platforms. C&G has to be creative when developing the content to ensure that it appeals and attracts customers. The content developed should represent the brand and its values. Social media content includes images, videos, and articles. The firm will have to develop content before launching its social media campaign. For the images and videos to be used on Facebook and Instagram, the firm will have to hire an experienced photographer who will be able to take quality photos and videos (Todwal & M. Wanjari, 2015). C&G will have to maintain a creative team that will come up with brilliant ideas for the photos and videos. The photos will have to have creative captions and for Instagram have, creative hashtags that and make sure they are relevant to what is trending now. The photos and videos will then be edited to include the firm’s logo and name embedded in the images for copyright reasons. The firm may then use a blog to go along with the social media channels (Jones & Ryan, 2014). The blog will be an extension of the Facebook and Instagram where the images will be posted alongside articles that SEO compliant to drive more traffic to the retail firm (Zilincan, 2015). The content will be crafted to appeal to the target audience and where possible the firm will customise to appeal to the different target markets. C&G will ensure that the content it develops creates conversation because there are enough firms on the social media that are in the broadcast mode. Consequently, when the time comes, the firm should strike conversations with others by mentioning them in their posts and occasionally turn the spotlight elsewhere. Following this strategy, the firm will be able to get better engagement, more followers, increased clickthroughs and eventually high conversion.

While developing the content, C&G will then invite ideas on the social media campaign that will be accompanied by the new content. It is paramount that the firm comes up with a unique idea that has not be tried by other fashion retail companies. Uniqueness will have a massive impact on the market, which will be one way to create brand awareness (Jones & Ryan, 2014). The campaign should be branded well to represent C&G whereby it will use its logos, colours, and the visual identity of the firm. The images and videos will be important elements of the campaign, therefore; they should be branded as well.

Creation of an editorial calendar

Before the implementation of the campaign, an editorial calendar that lists the dates and times that the firm intends to post Facebook posts, update the blog and upload images and videos to Instagram. The calendar will be created in advance and schedule posting and messaging in advance instead of regularly updating throughout the day. Here below is an example of an editorial calendar (LePage, 2014)..

Launch of the Social Media Campaign

By this step, C&G is ready to launch its social media pages as well as the social media campaign it will have identified in the previous step. Because it is the first time the firm is launching the social media platforms, C&G may advertise its campaign on fashion blogs so that the public is aware of the launch. After the social media accounts have been launched, the firm will initiate the campaign that will be able to attract the followers and eventually create brand awareness.

Evaluation of the social media campaign

After the campaign has run for three months, C&G will have to conduct and evaluation. It will be used to establish the effectiveness of the campaign. The firm will look at the followers it has gained in that period, the level of engagement, the number of times people have spoken about the brand and most importantly, the number of sales obtained from the social media platforms. After the evaluation, the firm will determine whether it was effective and decide to invest more in the campaign. If it were not successful, C&G will have to establish areas it failed and restructured the plan and re-implement it again. In this section, I have presented the plan of action that C&G will use to implement an effective marketing strategy putting in mind that the firm has limited resources. Each of the topic represented a stage and milestone in the plan of action. The plan of action requires C&G to create content to be used in its social media platform; this content represents its intellectual property. In the next section, I will discuss the different ways in which C&G can protect and exploit its intellectual property.

Theoretical Model

The success of this plan is based on the innovation of the key players at C&G. consequently; a Multi-Dimensional Framework for Innovation is well suited for the firm. It brings together leadership and innovation in one process that will assist in the implementation of the marketing plan especially because C&G has limited resources. The opportunity driven bridge building model is best suited for the company. An integrated innovation process depends on the management of technology in marketing and strategic planning (Crossan, and Apaydin, 2010)

Protecting Intellectual Property

In this section, I will discuss intellectual property and the different ways in which C&G can protect and exploit its intellectual property. C&G will be posting images and videos on the social media platforms. The images and videos are a representation of the intellectual property of the company. As the online activities of the company increase so are the challenges and concerns that are related to intellectual property protection online. There are cases where people have used other peoples’ images, videos and articles without permission, which is a violation of the intellectual property laws (Hilfer and Hilfer, 2013). Some of the social media platforms such as Facebook has copyright notice has not been effective in protection of intellectual property. However, C&G will have to agree to the terms of service of Facebook and Instagram whereby it will agree that for any content that has intellectual property that is posted on the two platforms, the firm will give non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sub-licensable and global licence to use the content. It means that both Facebook and Instagram have the right to license, transfer and use C&G’s content royalty free (Hilfer and Hilfer, 2013). To individuals, it is not big deal but for C&G it is a huge deal because it is trying to make money off the content. People can easily sell the C&G’s content to third party and not pay, it is for this reason that C&G has to protect its intellectual property. The firm will use its audience to share its images, videos and articles with other people thus; it must protect its property. Therefore, the firm must create its intellectual property, and if it is to get it from other sources, it must buy the rights. The firm must make sure it brands its intellectual property to ensure that it is protected.

C&G must perceive its intellectual property as an important asset, thus it should seek formal protection by registering some of its intellectual property rights. It is an action that will allow the firm to prevent other entities from using its intellectual property without official permission and in some cases, some payment should be made. In addition, C&G will be able to select the people to whom it wants to grant the rights to its intellectual property. To ensure the effectiveness of its protection strategies, C&G will have to renew its intellectual property periodically after their registration. Nonetheless, C&G must be ready for this process because it is time consuming and expensive but it is a necessary process because intellectual property is important for the success of the business. C&G can exploit its intellectual property in ways that it gains business and financial benefits (Jones & Ryan, 2014). One way is by using its intellectual property itself to make unique products for its business. Secondly, C&G can license some of its intellectual property whereby it can allow other people to use it in return for payment such as royalties on the profits that they will make from their profits. Lastly, C&G can sell its intellectual property to other entities for example patent or valuable returns in return for payment. In this section, I have discussed intellectual property and the different ways in which C&G can protect its intellectual property.