Company Background:
Hollister.co is an American fashion brand that revolves around the “South-California style”. The company, a subsidiary of Abercrombie & Fitch, manufactures apparel, accessories and fragrances, and performs sales to its consumers through their franchising stores and online website with a constant aim of easy accessibility.
Hollister’s target market is mainly constituted by teens, which requires the company to employ a youth marketing strategy. The sector the company operates in requires a particular attention to the generation Z trends and habits;
Forbes (2016) describes this generation as the population born after 1995, ethnically diverse, digital natives with strong and constant use of smart phones, highly interactive through social media platforms and have an attention span of an average 8 seconds, the lowest in the most recent generations.
An important factor for retail companies in maximizing their sales in the youth market, is to render their products “cool” and accessible. O’Donnell and Wardlow (2000) define cool as ‘‘the use of external props to shore up the faltering sense of self’’, which means teenagers find an item cool if it identifies and expresses their individuality.
Hollister’s mission is to associate the term “cool” to the Brand, this is constantly being achieved during their marketing campaigns, where they constantly show pictures of laughing young adults “hanging out” and having a good time in summer location sets.
This strong Image the company portraits itself as, has a powerful impact on the generation Z population as it identifies with youth’s preferences.
Social Marketing and Competition
According to CNBC (2015), Hollister is the 5th most appealing average-income Brand to teens, this is a result of the marketing strategies Hollister has employed since its creation and their focus on this specific segmentation of the market.
Applying Chaffey’s six channels to Hollister, it is possible to further investigate on the company’s marketing strategy and compare it with the competitive companies.
Hollister’s main digital marketing communication is through social media, such as platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter and Opt-in e-mails. Good use of these platforms are a necessity, since they are continuously frequented by the youth market on a daily basis. Although Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat have particular attention to customer feedback and give good communication to the public on ongoing discounts, Facebook seems to have been abandoned completely with no feedback to customer’s negative comments and reviews; this may be a strategy implemented by the company since Facebook is becoming less popular (Lang, 2015).
Competitor Brands like American Eagle, Forever21 and Abercrombie & Fitch have a very similar layout and settings of their social media platforms with the exception of keeping high interactivity on Facebook.
Hollister’s opt-in e-mails in contrast with its competitors, does not display items of clothing, however it publicizes the eventual sales, discounts opportunities with links to the website and their social media.
However different, Hollister employs a different visual impact to Forever21 with the use of a GIF image of different jean colors and styles in order to capture the reader’s attention.
Although interactive ads are not a strategy Hollister employs, the company has recently reached the public through an anti-bullying campaign in the US. PR Newswire depicts how the company went on in reaching out to more than 1 milion students during the “all equal” campaign.
It is not unusual for companies to create such campaigns to reach different sectors of the market, American Eagle with the “we all can” campaign for example encourages young people to express their individuality.
In relation to google search, hollister does not employ any paid search ads, which is a big miss in the market since it would create a great competitive advantage in respect to the other firms.
Competitive Brands, like Nike, Adidas and other teen apparel brands, benefit from google search paid ads for key words such as “shoes”; this creates an advantage in the market to show and sell the company’s products and merchandize.
Key words like american clothes, californian clothes, cool clothes, cool apparel, abercrombie and so on would create higher visibility and reach to the public.
Finally, Hollister’s only partnership with other companies is Gilly Hicks, a co-branded company subsidiary of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Most videos and blogs around the web relative to Hollister give information and influence on how to apply and get a job in the shops. This is very popular around YouTube since many students apply for sales assistant in the shops and the role is seen as “cool”.
Additional Data
References
Arthur, R. (2016) Generation Z: 10 stats from SXSW you need to know. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelarthur/2016/03/16/generation-z/#4244c9ba4ba4 (Accessed: 12 December 2016).
Klaptoman, Images, G., Spade, K., Ehlers, S., Lerouge, F. and Gustafson, K. (2016) What teens want: These brands top the list. Available at: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/15/what-teens-want-these-brands-top-the-list.html (Accessed: 12 December 2016).
Lang, N. (2015) Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s ‘meaningless’. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-Meaningless/?utm_term=.bfd14518b7c1 (Accessed: 12 December 2016).
O’DONNELL, K. A., and D. L. WARDLOW. 2000. “A theory of the origins of coolness”. Advances in Consumer Research 27: 13–18