Who is Zara?
Zara is a Spanish fashion retailer founded in 1975, offering smart/casual clothing at, what many shoppers would usually refer to as, reasonable prices. Zara’s aim to offer cutting edge fashion at affordable prices by following fashion and identifying which styles are “hot”, and quickly getting the latest styles into stores, as a result becoming the ‘go-to fashion brand for all’. Zara’s target market is young, price-conscious, and highly sensitive to the latest fashion trends. They do not define their target by segmenting ages and lifestyles therefore giving them a much broader market and an advantage over traditional retailers.
Competitors
Two of Zara’s largest competitors are H&M and Urban Outfitters who are both high street brands like Zara also offering an online service. All three of these brands’ websites offer a completely diverse image with different strategies.
Focusing on the Zara website alone, when you first have a glance, it has a simplistic layout and uses neutral colours which gives it that elegant and smart look. However, navigation on the website is not easy and in some what way frustrating. Within Artem Kulitski’s blog ‘Sorry Zara, but your web page is not ok’, he concluded that the website causes hesitation or slight irritation as well as occasional task failure and delays. I couldn’t agree more. The irritation arises from the aesthetics of the web page. For instance, when you want to view an item, the image is not shown in full forcing you have to scroll down in order to access the rest of the image as evident in the image below.
In comparison, both H&M and Urban Outfitters have a rather simplistic look to their website however, the navigation is most definitely easier and more understandable unlike Zara’s. All three webpages are targeted to similar target audiences. As mentioned previously, Zara’s target market is young, price-conscious, and highly sensitive to the latest fashion trends which is most definitely conveyed through the web page with its sophisticated look. Likewise, H&M’s and Urban Outfitters’ target audience is also young and fashionable people who want to follow trends without investing a lot of money.
Both Urban outfitters and H&M’s webpage is most definitely more appealing and eye catching. Looking at the images, both webpages have more colour and more appealing images on the homepage unlike Zara’s. For instance, H&M has an image of what seems to be a family, which not only highlights that they target a large audience ranging from men, woman, children etc, but that they do not just focus on fashion alone. Whereas, Zara tend to focus on images primarily related to fashion, targeting users who are fashion conscious, not necessarily related to the wider audience and users who are less fashion conscious.
Personas
Person 1 Person 2
Looking at these personas, both will have two different journey routes as a result of their ages and shopping habits. Sarah will primarily use her mobile phone to do online shopping via the Zara App as in today’s society the younger generation tend to communicate with all most everything via their mobile phones. Unlike Charlie who is much older and is less likely to use his phone to shop. He therefore is more likely to go into the stores to do his shopping or potentially use a desktop to use the Zara website. Furthermore, it is likely for Sarah to be influenced by social media when it comes to buying habits whereas, with Charlie, it’s more likely that he would look around stores to find what he is looking for unlike Sarah who would have an outfit in mind which she is wanting to buy that she has previously seen.
References
Digital CIO. (2018). Analysing Zara’s business model – Digital CIO. [online] Available at: https://harbott.com/analysing-zaras-business-model-6ee755699a70 [Accessed 14 Dec. 2018].
Zara.com. (2018). Press-+ Info | ZARA United Kingdom. [online] Available at: https://www.zara.com/uk/en/z-press-l1401.html?v1=11111 [Accessed 14 Dec. 2018].
En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Zara (retailer). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zara_(retailer) [Accessed 14 Dec. 2018].
Forbes. (2018). Zara on the Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands List. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/companies/zara/#3cd9ea097487 [Accessed 14 Dec. 2018].
Successstory.com. (2018). Zara Story – Profile, History, Founder, Products, Stores, Locations, Founded, CEO | Clothing Companies | SuccessStory. [online] Available at: https://successstory.com/companies/zara [Accessed 14 Dec. 2018].