Today, I will talk about the combination of fashion and social media, my two favourites. Let's start with the recent rising of fashion bloggers, who have ruled front rows in fashion weeks of high-class brands, which is not a surprise anymore. They are young, quirky and stylist, from a 13-year-old girl, Tavi Gevinson to the shoe-loving teenager, Jane Alridge and many other twenty-something online writers. With a combined audience of half a million readers and the power to make items sell out instantly with their recommendations, these bloggers were clearly people worthy of fashion’s attentions. So, the questions are: Where is this power actually coming from?And why in fashion and beauty industry?
• Power of Word-of Mouth
There is a fact that the fashion and beauty business has always enjoyed a certain word-of-mouth evangelism. When it comes to the promotion of these kinds of products to enhance people’s appearance, consumers listen and believe more in advice coming from friends or acquaintance that they can trust. Keeping that in mind, the fashion industry has tried different approaches to leverage the power of word-of-mouth product endorsement.
Levi’s is a good case. This year, they launched a campaign named “Levi’s girl”, targetting the female fan base, to find a voice for their brand on Facebook community, following their successful “Levi’s guy” last year. That person should ideally already have a strong social media presence and be passionate about fashion and style. Videos of finalists will be shared and voted by Facebook community members. This campaign is just great as it helps the brand to engage with existing Facebook fans and attract new fans from contestants’ social networks. What’s more, it will create a huge word-of-mouth for Levi’s on social media.
On the first generation of fashion brand websites, marketers have promoted and sold products directly. They did miss the word-of-mouth factor, which has been playing an important role in consumers’ mind for building their own “colour”, image and personality. Consumers want to be fashionable and beautiful in their very own way. Therefore, the absence of this important dimension to personalized selling was soon corrected with consumer-created content. Many brands, such as Nike, Longchamp, etc, allow their consumers to design and personalize the product themselves online through the interactivity of web 2.0. Inspirational online stores and social shopping trends are also blooming.
• Peer Recommendations
Blogs, social networks, discussion boards, and so on are containing consumer’s recommended brands and also their reviews and comments on different products. It opens a new era of peer recommendation on the internet. Many consumers started to take notice of these newfound opportunities, and developed a whole new category of must-visit web destinations. From the traditional “point of purchase” concept, marketers are now familiar with the new concept of “point of recommendation”.
Nowadays, to catch up with the trend, powerful fashion bloggers have been cooperating with brands to “recommend” their products to readers. They have been attending fashion events frequently and even becoming brand designers. Jane Alridge, author of the fashion blog SeaOfShoes, who was invited to design a new shoe collection for the Urban Outfitters, is one of many examples for this.
To sum up, social media can dramatically increase return on investment and allow brands to generate a global following of loyal customers with relatively low investment. Marketers in fashion and beauty industry seeking to leverage these exciting new trends should pay attention to social media as they represent the best opportunities to take full advantage of the Internet for your brands.
