Online PR (e-PR) : Maximising favorable mentions of a company, brand, product or website on third party websites which are likely to be visited by your target audience. It can also support viral or word-of-mouth marketing activities in other media. (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012)
Fashion is a multi-billion dollar industry where passion is the major aspiration to meet a broad spectrum of consumers in relation to their different age groups and culture (Aaker,D.A., 2012). Fashion mostly relies on adverts and the social media for communication. Understanding the public perceptions on the brands, and adaptation to avoid dilution of consumer preferences are some major dynamics that work handy in the fashion industry. Fashion business is more challenging because fashion is a hyper competitive industry. In the modern society, different trends drive the fashion industry (Aaker, D.A., 2012). The fashion industry include; fashion modeling, catwalk, and photographic.
Digital Marketing
Every business is bound to change to embrace the new trends and to enter the new digitisation which is characterized by social influences and the political narrations (Chaffey & Ellis, 2016). Recent digital marketing have affected the fashion industry with no exemption. For instance, Gucci bans fur go wild and the internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpKUmZcUKRA .
Social media being the most vocal to attract audience in the recent generation, therefore, customer reviews are easy to dispose because everybody has the power to opinions. After a release of real trim hair and real animal hair under a big designers name Gucci, PETA and a number of furious customers kept Gucci under fire and so Gucci thought of permanently burning the product made of fur from its fashion industry. Did this work? This worked because the reviews from the social media weren’t something recommendable and hence the fashion industry ought to be aware and relevant and thus listens to the customer’s preference and likability. Following another example, the Nasty Gal, an online retailer in the fashion industry, has a rich digital history. The reinvention of their product image constantly has raised their brand personality. The frequent term, Girl Boss, has an empowering notion to the women and is sustainably banded in the cyber world crushing outdated feminism gender pay gap. This term empowers women into the business world and has emerged a very powerful strategy carrying the Nasty Gal brand to a huge and more elusive market strategy. https://www.fifteendesign.co.uk/blog/digital-marketing-campaigns-in-the-fashion-industry/. Why was this success? The creation of an impressive slogan symbolizing the brand image forms the basis, and thus creating a forgery of its own identity. Through the Nasty Gal ideology, this brand has cemented a multi-million brand on the online digital market.
Online PR and the future of marketing in the fashion industry
Fashion emerges to be a superb and prestigious industry. Through fashion, individuals can wear what they prefer and hide behind fabrics that are currently on style (Easey,M. 2009). Social media has also played its part by intensifying access to blogging sites and reality TV shows. Nowadays bloggers can aid in designing in the fashion industry and on following different customer reviews on the social media, they can come up with the latest fashion trends right by their fingertips. https://perspectiveyes.wordpress.com/portfolio/the-future-of-marketing-and-pr-in-the-fashion-industry/. The internet has made fashion less secretive and a rapid growing industry due to the space its accumulating online. Following the inspiration from street fashions and traditional modes of dressing make the fashion industry a complicated sector with no main standardized company oriented to fashion. According to pr-squared.com, search engines and sites will re-orient themselves and match individual identity and therefore, fashion marketing will get affected generally. This is because the internet will care for each individual’s wants, needs, and desires. Internet has induced the privacy that was previously valid portraying privacy as less important (Easey,M. 2009). The reason for the boom in the social networks like face book and Google is because they have risen in the time where social networking seems to be a necessity and an integral part in an individual’s daily activities. Fashion designers take more time improving what people don’t like and producing what people wish to wear. Through the internet, fashion designers can pitch what their customers want through the ideas about their products hence promoting the fashion industry to be one of the fastest and ever growing industries. Lastly, designers have set up blogs to reach a wider audience and they themselves read blogs from other fashion designers creating more insights, perceptions, and inspiration compared to the older media forms (Crane,D. 2012).
Brand protection: Jovani Fashion, Ltd. V. Fiesta Fashions: Second Circuit Finds Dress Designers Copyright Claim Weak at the Seams
Following Jovani Fashion, Ltd v. Fiesta Fashions case in the United States Court of Appeal issued its opinion on second circuit copyright in fashion. Jovani a designer and manufacturer of evening dress obtained copyright for ten catalogs they had registered claiming that their artwork had been incorporated in manufacturing the dresses. In the year 2010, Jovani filed a case to sue the several manufacturing retailers and manufacturers in claim that they infringed the visual art registration rights. Fiesta later appeared to be one party that appealed dismissing the complainant that Jovanis copyright registration only accounted for the copyright protection of two dimensional images of the three rather than the three dress designs namely; gowns, evening dresses, and prom dresses. But despite the frustrations, the statutory copyright system attempts to indulge in complex and unique fashion realities and boost more motivation in fashion development on protected yet under-exploited designs (BRANDS, 2015). Therefore, fashion statutory copyright encourages motivation and creation of new fashions through designer’s protection in his creative art in creating fashion designs.
References
Aaker, D.A., 2012. Building strong brands. Simon and Schuster.
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F., 2016. Digital marketing. Pearson.
Easey, M. ed., 2009. Fashion marketing. John Wiley & Sons.
BRANDS, C., 2015. Ready for business.
Hemphill, C.S. and Suk, J., 2008. The law, culture, and economics of fashion. Stan. L. Rev., 61, p.1147.
Harley, N. (2018). Gucci pledges to go fur-free in 2018 as material is no longer ‘modern’. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/12/gucci-pledges-go-fur-free-2018-material-no-longer-modern/ [Accessed 19 Jan. 2018].
Craik, J., 2009. Fashion: the key concepts (Vol. 1). Bloomsbury Academic.
Salvadores, M., Szomszor, G.C.M., Gibbins, N., Glaser, H. and Shadbolt, N., Backlinks: Bridging the Navigational Gap in the Web of Data.
Crane, D., 2012. Fashion and its social agendas: Class, gender, and identity in clothing. University of Chicago Press.
