Innovation in UK Fashion Retailing Firms - Coursework Example

Word count: 2744

Abstract

This paper deals with the detailed study of the use of Social media marketing in the fashion industry and how to formulate successful social media campaign for a product. There are a number of applications through which the campaigning can be done but it depends on the entrepreneur to choose among them. The key to successful social media marketing is proper vigilance and communication with followers. The innovation in the fashion industry needs to be protected from misuse and protection of intellectual property rights is the need of the hour. Many fashion houses implements them and provides their signature fashion to the loyal customers.

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Two forms of social media marketing helping fashion industry to grow: Instagram and Pinterest4

Two forms of “social media” relevant to marketing in fashion retailing5

Plan of action to implement an innovative social media campaign7

Examples of successful social media fashion campaigns11

Intellectual property rights and social media campaigns12

Conclusion14

Reference List16

• Introduction

The publicity of fashion is now not limited to the ramp walks, fashion is one of the most common categories that is looked up on the social media (Lynch and Strauss, 2007). It is one of the common observations that companies that are involved in the social media marketing enjoy higher sales than their rivals who are not engaged in any kind of publicity on the social media (Kim and Ko, 2012).

Fashion houses now keep a close watch on the things or personalities who are having greater followers on the social media are mostly chosen to endorse the products of the company to increase their sales. With the advancement in technology, social media has become more important to the people as it is now not only the connecting medium but also the platform of publicity and thus, creating the required hype for the product before introducing the product formally on the racks for the customers to take their desired fashion home (Lee and Cook, 2015).

This paper studies two of the popular medium of marketing on the social media, the strategic use and implementation of the marketing campaign and devising a medium to secure the innovation in the strategy from exploitation.

• Two forms of social media marketing helping fashion industry to grow: Instagram and Pinterest

In this section I have undertaken a detailed study on the application and importance of social media marketing.

Internet as a means of publicity reaches to greater audience and consumer base as they are able to view the latest fashion with a single click instead of going to the stores in order to purchase the latest fashion magazine. Word of mouth being one of the most influential modes of advertisement can break the interpersonal barriers and increases the viewership of any fashion (Lundby, 2009).

• Two forms of “social media” relevant to marketing in fashion retailing

Instagram: in 2016, fashion houses’ most favourite platform for marketing is Instagram. Greenlight, a digital marketing agency, published a report stating a whooping 5602 Instagram posts regarding London Fashion Week 2016 followed by 1178 tweets on Twitter during the same timeframe unlike 2015, when 6000 tweets made Twitter the top marketing platform on social media (Greenlight, 2016). Topshop, a UK based fashion retailer announced the appointment of Nick Knight for capturing the company’s fashion show and the images of which will be available on the retailer’s Instagram account for fashion followers (Wightman-Stone, 2016). People are on the internet 24*7 and are scrolling through the application to be a part of their favorite fashion brand that are sporting their latest collection on the global scale. Photos, live videos bring the fashion from the ramp to the customer instantly, just like any other fashion magazine.

International fashion brands like Burberry used Brooklyn Beckham modeling their latest collection on the basis of his Instagram popularity and the brand boasts of having more than six million followers on the popular social platform encouraging further involvement of Burberry with Instagram showcasing their fashion to gain customer’s attention (Moses, 2016).

Figure 1: Engagement Ratio (Average interaction per post per 1000 followers)

(Source: Chaffy, 2016)

The above figure explains the popularity of various social media applications and Instagram dominating the others.

Figure 2: Instagram subsector engagement ratio

(Source: Chaffy, 2016 )

The above figure showed the sectional distribution of engagement ratio showing maximum browsing in terms of outware.

Pinterest: Pinterest’s growing popularity made it one of the most important platform for marketing new products, finding new brands, connecting with new and existing customers (Burnett, 2016). The platform being visual gives ample opportunities to highlight the characteristics of a product on the boards. The basic idea is to inspire customers’ interest by revealing the relevancy of the product to customers’ daily life. Bobbi Brown, a renowned make-up brand has boards with beauty and make-up tips, charities associated with the brand (Minor, 2012). J. Crew celebrated the opening of the Paris store by pinning all things in French (Adams, 2015). Pinterest, in the last four years has been able to attract 70+ million users (one-third being male users) making it a strong force in the fashion marketing. 45% of the activities on Pinterest like, search, favourites and pins are related to fashion making fashion the third most popular category (Burnett, 2016). Pinterest boasts of having 30 billion pins across 750 million boards, out of which 4.5 billion pins corresponds to fashion which grow by 25% every quarter. For a Pinterest user, average order value per session is $199.16 surpassing Facebook’s $92.27 and Twitter’s $58.02 (Delzio, 2015). The viewership of Pinterest is about 23% of global. The average time spent by a user on Pinterst is 15.8minutes, whereas data shows 55% of the global population spends only about 15 seconds on a website (Beese, 2015).

The next section deals with social media marketing strategy that needs to be followed by the entrepreneur for a successful product launch.

• Plan of action to implement an innovative social media campaign

This section primarily describes the stages of social media marketing and how the entrepreneur can incorporate them in his or her business model.

Starting a campaign:

Goals to be achieved-Before devising a campaign, the company needs to be clear about the goals that it plans to achieve with the campaign. These goals need to be measurable so that the progress of the campaign can be measured and alteration can be made if things are going astray. The tools of the social media need to be selected which measure the viability of the campaign.

Scheduling the timeline of the campaign- It is important to be clear about minute details like the messages sent to the social platforms and when they are sent to keep the audience intrigued about the final product. Here, the timeline is one year so the campaign can be designed in the way that every two months some glimpse of the progress is uploaded to get the reaction of the people and gauge their interests about the product.

Choosing a campaign hashtag- Hashtags do not reveal the entire content but are effective in representing the brand and the reaction that it is creating all around.

Setting up monitoring stream- It is to track the reaction of the people when they are talking about the campaign without the hashtags and internet links.

During the campaign:

Monitoring for anomaly- A close watch needs to be kept on the streams to check if there are any typos, broken links or any issue with the landing page. Effective management of the issues reduces the chances of any long-term damage to the success of the campaign. This regular vigilance brings up the popularity of the campaign as well.

Use of analytical tools-

Using following tools to gauge the reaction can be helpful.

Mention- It is a tool that analyses the presence of a brand across the web. Any mention of the brand on the social media is captured through this tool and it also allows replying to any comment regarding the campaign.

Buffer- It updates information on the chosen social platform and it’s strong built in analytics notes the reason behind the success of certain posts and the apt time of publishing next update to keep the audience engaged to the posts.

Quintly- This tool is used for an in-depth analysis of the brand’s performance across a wide range of social marketing platform. The newly added benchmark feature makes a comparative study of the brand’s performance with respect to the performance of its rival and industry averages. After getting the quantitative data, the brand can make required adjustments and can also check if anything is not working in favour of the campaign and keeping the people interested by interacting with them on their comments.

After the launch of the campaign:

Utilizing the reaction of the campaign- The data thus gathered during the campaign needs to be forwarded to the company’s customer relation manager who can analyze all the aspects of the campaign and define ways for launching the product in the market and finally a fine-combed analysis of the campaign to check any loopholes or any attributes that can be added for future reference.

Figure 3: Stages of social media campaign

The above figure shows the stages of social campaign according to which the company should firstly devise its target audience prior launching the campaign with a suitable hashtag. The company being small in nature does not have much human capital to depend on and the entrepreneur in order to set up his or her business needs to undertake all the stages of social campaign by himself or herself. Then the entrepreneur needs to keep a track of the reaction that the campaign gets with any of the analytical tool mentioned above and constant communication with the followers should be maintained. Since the campaign is scheduled for a year the entrepreneur can use a gap of two months to launch small segments which will keep the crowd hooked to the launch of the product and in order to build a successful social media campaign the entrepreneur can go through the following examples.

• Examples of successful social media fashion campaigns

Misha Nonoo’s collection on Instagram- Misha Nonoo is one of those designers who have always relied upon the traditional medium of publicity like fashion magazines, press interviews but for the first time in 2016, she went on Instagram to showcase her latest collection in a unique mosaic format (Ogunnaike, 2015). Her Spring / Summer collection of 2016 was illustrated in endless photos in a mosaic format. The response was beyond expectation and when famous personalities like actress Meghan Markle, political consultant Audrey Gelman posted their photos on their personal Instagram accounts wearing clothes from the same collection the publicity increased many folds (Arthur, 2015).

Dr. Martens- It is a famous shoe brand popular for its unique, edgy lace high boots. This brand used diverse social platforms for publicity. The hashtag for the brand is ‘#standforsomething’ since the brand always uplifts its core values pertaining to diversity and individuality (Patterson, 2015). The campaign was launched with a video demonstrating the growth of the brand over the years and to make the audience a part of their campaign, the question “What do you stand for” was put forward encouraging the viewers to upload their own stories and experiences. The results were 30% rise in sales by March 2014, 500% over-delivery of target impressions, 17% rise in year-on-year sales (Quin, 2015).

Burberry’s success on the social platform marked the importance of digital marketing resulting in the increase of budget allocation to 60% (Milnes, 2015). Burberry uses diverse platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Printrest to showcase their products gaining maximum viewership. This strategy is by far the best one because if one person is not active on one social platform but he or she may be using any other social medium (Moses, 2016).

The correct time for any fashion campaign is prior to any global showcasing of their brand making the anticipation grow in leaps and bounds. Burberry’s most successful campaign was ‘Art of the trench’ in 2009, which Burberry had the largest fan following on Facebook (Milnes, 2015). The success of any social media campaign depends on the engagement of the audience with the campaign and that is why it is very important to leave provision for contribution from the people like asking them to share something personal as a comment. Organizing photo contests over social media is one of the best techniques which not only invites people to the brand page but also increases the pace of publicity (Foster, 2015). The rewards of such contests can be in the form of living a day of the brand’s model, meeting with any celebrity model, or getting the product of the latest collection for free etc. Brands should highlight their upcoming news on the account page, which makes the crowed visit more to get latest updates regarding their favourite brand.

Fashion industry is driven by innovation and to prevent misuse of someone’s creation protection of Intellectual property rights play an important role which is discussed in the next section.

• Intellectual property rights and social media campaigns

This section presents the discussion on the use of intellectual property rights by various fashion houses with the mention of certain controversial cases.

Intellectual property rights represent exclusive rights of a person over his or her creation (Acemoglu, and Akcigit, 2012). The use of social media as a marketing platform possesses a threat that a content uploaded by one can be used by other without any intimation to the person who is the owner of the original product.

Table 1: Types of Intellectual Property Rights

Type of Intellectual Property Rights (IP)

Nature of IP

Industry Type

Company using IP

Trade mark and Copyright Laws

formal

Fashion

Pickwick, Yahsir Waheed Designer Lawn Collection

Patents

formal

Fashion

Grindi Srl.

Trade Secrets

informal

Fashion

ZARA

(Source: Wipo Magazine, 2005)

Pickwick, an Italian company started its business to design for the adolescents across Europe with its trademark over the design illustrating a young, faceless boy with spiky hairstyle (Wipo Magazine, 2005). Novozymes patented its technology which was used for the treatment of ‘stone washed denim jeans’ while another Italian company Grindi Srl. Applied for a patent for its innovative fabric made of cork having a number of useful characteristics. Yahsir Waheed Designer Lawn Collection was previously known as “Brimful designs” had suffered from inferior quality copying resulting in negative publicity. The designer, since 2004 has been operating under the security of copy right laws changing its collection name (Wipo Magazine, 2005). ZARA developed a new proprietary information technology which could reduce their production cycle to 30 days unlike its competitors taking four to twelve months.

In 2012, Sion Fullana found that two of his photos were being featured on the Vogue Spain Instagram account (Alfonso, 2012). The case between Daniel Morel and Agence France-Presse was a famous one; Morel found the brand was using one of his photos taken during 2010 Earthquake in Haiti without his consent (Laurent, 2013). According to the author’s further research, Morel won the case and was awarded $1.2million as compensation after almost three years of struggle in the courtroom. This negative publicity caused the brand not only the money but also the loss of trust and prestige only because they choose not to put enough time in getting a perfect shot or asking Morel to get the photograph instead of stealing it from his Twitter account. This practice is because of the problem of acquiring photos through consent.

Enterprise and regulatory Reform Act, commonly called ‘Instagram Act’, changed the face of property rights (Manishin, 2013). This law permits the exploitation of images and contents where the owner has missed out to give his or her information making those contents to be categorized under ‘orphan work’ and placing these work under ‘extended collective licensing’ schemes. Instagram Act is not prohibiting sub-licensing which allows the company to use any content on a wholesale basis without any expenditure done on the firm’s part (Manishin, 2013).

Lobster.Media is trying to make this process of acquiring intellectual property easy by providing a market for digital content where users can put up their creation on sale. Buyers can acquire cheap license to purchase any image or content in the market. Currently, the database of Lobster contains around 250,000 images which can be licensed at a low price of $0.99 per image (Lobster, 2016).

• Conclusion

Fashion brands are utilizing social media for their product campaigns as social media platforms provide larger audience making the publicity of the product on a much higher scale. There are three stages for designing a successful social media campaign firstly the issues that required addressing prior to the campaign then constant vigilance to keep a track of those things that are stimulating the campaign and those attributes which are dampening the publicity of the campaign. In the second stage the analytical tools like- mention, buffer, quintly come in handy to make the brand aware of the people’s reaction so that timely adjustments can be made to keep their anticipation high.

Instagram Act legalized the commercial exploitation of ‘orphan work’ but many fashion houses have applied for different types of protection of their intellectual property rights. So the entire process of social media campaign for the fashion industry is brainstorming any the ability to receive instant reaction gives a great idea of the market demand of the product.

• Reference List

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Adams, E., 2015. J.Crew Unveils First Store in Paris. [online]. Available at < http://www.racked.com/2015/3/6/8161177/j-crew-store-paris > [Accessed 26 April 2016].

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Beese, J., 2015. 8 Pinterest Statistics That Marketers Can’t Ignore. [online]. Available at < http://sproutsocial.com/insights/pinterest-statistics/ > [Accessed 26 April 2016].

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Lundby, K., 2009. Mediatization: concept, changes, consequences. Bern: Peter Lang.

Lynch, A. and Strauss, M., 2007. Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Meaning. Oxford: Berg.

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