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By Peggy & Arthur Winters, August 30, 2012 10:47 am

Drawing by Arthur Winters

For today’s fashion marketing, original visual content is vital.  The marketing communications strategy is how to make it effective. We’re still seeing some fashion brands using old-style fashion model poses in their visualizations of their new styles or products. But, we appreciate and recommend fashion brands that are creating better visual stories, which provide customers with answers and suggestions. These brands tell a visual story of what they can do for the customer, not just what items they make that only create awareness by projecting their brand image.

Visual Content — yes …

Visual — but NO story …

Fashion marketing needs better communications that connect with the customer’s branding of self. Marketers could now look at their products for visual content and the story that generates its facility for self-styling. And in this multi-media, social media world, visualization in all its forms is pre-eminent.

“Power to the She” –self-styling visual and verbal story

A significant brand mark for fashion marketers is to see visual content that covers all aspects of customer/consumer experience. For example, a fashion firm might even introduce their customers to a fly-on-the-wall look at their design team at work. There is no doubt that fashion may be a most visual product that offers ever-flowing fountains of ideas for visual content – and desire, especially with the use of social media and web sites.

Fashion brand positioning can be more inspiring by showing the customer real life style and life-stage happenings instead of static, mannequin-posed model photos with their logo.

Starbucks visualizes it is the customer’s lifestyle…

Those brand managers who have a sense of the visual in communications may be the new Rembrands of fashion marketing!

What’s your story?

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Arthur & Peggy Winters co-teach SXB 200 Brand Marketing Communications for Image & Meaning and SXR 050 Intro to Branding: The Art of Customer Bonding.

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By Peggy & Arthur Winters, June 28, 2012 3:35 pm

Segmented Marketing has been rapidly replacing, or at least collaborating as part of,what we have known as Mass Marketing. So why would any brand, U.S. or “other world,” not customize their communications about their product, service or experience? With a rising local diversity in our domestic market, and an increasing mix of different global cultures throughout the world, a brand needs to continue to create strategies and communications for glocal brand marketing.

Some brands are trying multicultural marketing that attempts to create communications for more than one market segment. The brands that seem to do the job best do forms of Integrated Marketing that go beyond running traditional ads, doing outdoor advertising or going on-line. They are developing innovative Consumer-Centric Promotions (CCP) and Customer Experiences (CX). And they are considering cross-over life-style psychographics to identify “cross-across” target markets.

Today’s Brand Management has to recognize that cross-over segmented markets require more glocal strategies and multicultural communications than ever before.

One to watch is what a retail giant like The GAP is doing. GAP Inc. has products available to customers in over 90 countries worldwide. Their global expansion formula is to enter a country with brand-building flagship stores, after which outlets and smaller franchise stores can be added beyond the main cities, in addition to building an online web presence for each country/region/language and offering international shipping.  This plan goes on even with the news that they will be closing a number of stores in NYC, the USA and Canada.

In the Gap Inc.’s case, they are promoting their image of Americana and it’s fun, family, fashion and value appeals across the globe. They integrate or “glocalize” their promotions with the local customers as seen on their international web pages:
www.gap.cn   www.gap.eu

https://m.gap.co.jp

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The Gap is approaching each segmented market with its brand story and brand image, while welcoming each target market in their own language and giving them the opportunity to adapt this American brand in their own “glocal” way.  In today’s global economy world, we need to develop our own global perspectives as we choose which ideas or products to include in our company brands and our personal customer lifestyles.

Arthur & Peggy Winters co-teach SXB 200 Brand Marketing Communications for Image & Meaning and SXR 050 Intro to Branding: The Art of Customer Bonding.

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By Dalia Strum, June 14, 2012 12:39 pm

WHAT’S TRENDING

Louis Vuitton has recently collaborated with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama on a handbag collection and is raising awareness with a mobile application that uses augmented reality and photo sharing.

The Louis Vuitton Kusama Studio iPhone app allows users take photos of images around them and apply an effect called visions to transform them into Ms. Kusama’s artwork.  Users can share them on a public gallery as well as social media platforms.

Yayoi Kusama began as an avant-garde painter in Tokyo in the 1950s. She became a figure in New York’s contemporary art scene in the 1960s. Her style is a cross between pop art, surrealism and minimalism.

This strategy is a combination of simplicity meets innovation, which augments and transform photos into Kusama’s lens.

The app lets users imagine a person or object covered with dots or reinterpreted as abstract waves, as inspired through Ms. Kasama’s artwork. It is available for free in Apple’s App Store.

Dalia Strum teaches SXF 120: Blogging Smarts for Business and SXF 130: The Social Media-Social Commerce Revolution: What You Need to Know to Keep Up.

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By Peggy & Arthur Winters, May 31, 2012 10:14 am

Brandishing is becoming a brand-building strategy for designers and products.  So what is it? Brandishing is a strategy of customer-centric “weapons” for competitively positioning brand values. These values must be innovatively brandished:

1. Identity – Self-Brandualization is the customer brandishing pride…

2. Experience – Brandishing of special experiences and engagements – such as Macy’s “find your magic” special events

3. Relevance – enabling a customer to fit a brand’s style to their own lifestyle… e.g., NIKE’s “just do it”

4. Battle Plan – Empower customers to be fearless, to feel that the brand they choose is a “one-and-only” to help them in their personal wars by having their own “secret”

In this fast-paced century, Brandishing requires a sharper brand sword that can cut through some of the current customer skepticism and disbelief.

The “ultimate driving machine” has to keep moving to higher customer standards and “its amazing what soup can do,” will need to do it even better. If modesty is just a memory, then now “there’s nothing between me and my whatevers!” How long will we believe that “a diamond is forever”? How long will we still “care enough to send the very best”? Thus we must ask: Will we continue to hear the battle cry: “because I’m worth it!” We think yes, if brands understand that customers believe in — Brandishing of the customer — by the customer – for the customer!

The power thrust of a brand is in its brandishing of superiority over and difference within its industry category.

Which brands do you choose to Brandish?

Arthur & Peggy Winters co-teach SXB 200 Brand Marketing Communications for Image & Meaning and SXR 050 Intro to Branding: The Art of Customer Bonding.

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By Dalia Strum, May 24, 2012 11:14 am

WHAT’S TRENDING

Luxury Brand Christian Dior has created a two-part video marketing strategy for its new jewelry collection on mydior.com.  In doing so, they have humanized the jewelry collection by featuring model Raquel Zimmermann in a candid conversation truly opening up across the gamut from fashion, beauty, emotions and dating. She concludes both videos with “My Dior is My Dior. Imagine talking to your jewelry.”

There’s truly an emphasis on the product because she speaks about various experiences, and in in a sense, it’s like her Dior jewelry has become her security blanket.  No matter what, she can count on that to be beautiful and consistent part of her life while Zimmerman proclaims her feelings and flaws.

In this micro-video, she is continuously re-styled with red lipstick and black eyeliner, to nude lip gloss and messy hair, truly exemplifying that Dior Jewelry can be universal in the various occasions or even everyday wear-age.

This is not only a much more engaging opportunity for Dior to get their brand messaging across, it’s an interesting opportunity in regards to their brand positioning and how deep their future approaches will be in terms of brand messaging.

Dalia Strum teaches SXF 120: Blogging Smarts for Business and SXF 130: The Social Media-Social Commerce Revolution: What You Need to Know to Keep Up

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By Dalia Strum, May 15, 2012 1:13 pm

WHAT’S TRENDING

Louis Vuitton is going back to its roots and what they’re originally known for; their luggage and trunks by creating an iPad application.  The 100 Legendary Trunks iPad application provides exclusive brand information through unpublished texts and documents, videos, sound clips and images. The Louis Vuitton app price seems to be a luxury item in and of itself, with a price point of $18.99 in Apple’s App Store.

The application’s vivid representation of the history of Louis Vuitton’s design’s and usage is truly representative of the company’s evolution throughout the years.

The history of the Trunks, also include the globe-trotters (celebrities) whom have owned them and have been carrying their possessions for some time. While they’re more nostalgia pieces nowadays, they still draw attention for their classic lines and sticker friendly surfaces.

Louis Vuitton’s luxury experience backstory was translated into an application, similarly like the details and quality of their products. Their clientele understands the value behind the brand, and LV has established a sense of trust with their customer base, so they shouldn’t have an issue with the price point of the app.

Dalia Strum teaches SXF 120: Blogging Smarts for Business and SXF 130: The Social Media-Social Commerce Revolution: What You Need to Know to Keep Up

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By Dalia Strum, May 3, 2012 1:18 pm

WHAT’S TRENDING

Retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Lord and Taylor as well as Elie Tahari are starting to utilize RFID technology for immediate access to inventory, especially in-stock product availability as well as speeding up annual product checks.

This provides a value-add, by working with the faster and more innovative technology; the RFID codes that communicate to a networked system to keep track of items and are therefore able to provide improved accuracy.

As the inventory levels should be more accurate, this allows an opportunity for these stores to appropriately stock the higher demand items in a shorter time-period, which should essentially provide increased sales by making the inventory readily available for sale.

Item accuracy and inventory management is essential to make sure that customers will continue frequenting the establishment.  The worst thing that you could do is disappoint the customer by not stocking the item that they are interested in and forcing them to find other outlets to fulfill their order.

Dalia Strum teaches SXF 120: Blogging Smarts for Business.

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By Peggy & Arthur Winters, April 26, 2012 8:58 am

As we have discussed “My-Style” in a previous blog, we see a development toward what we might call: the Solipsistic Customer. Having a sense that “one can only be aware of one’s own experiences and state of mind,” this customer can now do on-line and in-store self-styling like never before! So what’s happening to the changing shopping behavior? Just ask the emerging neuro-marketers and the fashion companies who see this as an opportunity to make stronger connections with their customers. Is self-styling fashion for one’s self a product of the varieties of brain enhancement that are now happening in the research labs? Can we ever know or better understand our customers?

The neuro-marketers may be creating brand strategies and neuro-experiences designed to depolarize the neural membranes in the part of the brain known for long-standing brand loyalties. This is calculated to make its cells more excitable and more responsive to “solipstylistic” branding. Some brand managers are consulting with neuroscientists to learn how to accelerate the formation of new neural pathways to brand acceptance. They believe that they need to change the need for design-help to solipstyling by one’s self.

For example, FashionizeYourself.co is a Toronto website which provides stimuli for How You Can be In Fashion. It features thinking straight from elite designers and fashion artists. It also offers answers to questions about current fashion websites and blogs.

There are now many ways for the Solipstylistic Customer to do it herself. With these developing concepts, the fashion designer-partner and the share-the-experience store may get back in the act!

This could be the ultimate in One-to-One marketing.

Drawing by Arthur Winters. Many young children demand to choose their clothing with the often heard line: “By Myself!” This desire continues on into adulthood when searching for personal styles and trends featured on fashion and media websites.

“A girl with the dragoon tattoo “– Film – fashion inspiration for H&M

Self-styler: Madonna in Givenchy Haute Couture at Super Bowl Halftime Show

Spring - Summer Ad Campaigns 2012 (Part II)

Spring - Summer 2012 Ad Campaigns (Part I)

Trend Forecast from the Menswear AW 2012-13

Arthur & Peggy Winters co-teach SXB 200 Brand Marketing Communications for Image & Meaning and SXR 050 Intro to Branding: The Art of Customer Bonding.

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By Dalia Strum, April 17, 2012 6:00 pm

WHAT’S TRENDING

Luxury Skincare Brand, Kiehl’s has done a major push towards implementing an environmental initiative for Earth Day!

They have implemented QR code advertising within their store windows as well as various marketing materials to create awareness of their eco-friendly approach.

When consumers scan the QR code, they are redirected to Kiehl’s mobile page http://www.kiehls.com/, which focuses on their environmentally oriented products as well as the recycling campaign.

The Kiehl’s Reycle across America campaign incorporates celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, Florence Welch and Spike Lee as an effort to connect with their Target Demographic.  They have also released a limited edition line with focus on these celebrities.  Each celebrity has their own limited-edition art label on the Kiehl’s rare Earth pore cleansing masque. All proceeds from this collection will go to Recycle Across America.

Included in this initiative is recycling of old containers from their past products.  Each empty container is equivalent to one stamp, three stamps qualifies for a free lip balm, five stamps qualifies for a travel-sized product, and 10 stamps qualifies for a full-sized product.

Kiehl’s strategy of implementing QR codes to create awareness of this campaign was extremely strategic, because they can track the interaction and learn from this engagement for future campaigns.

Dalia Strum teaches SXF 120: Blogging Smarts for Business.