Social media in the Fashion industry
Welcome to Teacup – a blog celebrating and discussing marketing within the fashion, beauty and luxury industries. To launch this blog, in today’s post, I will be discussing the effects of social media itself such as blogs, facebook and twitter on the fashion industry. I hope you enjoy it and look forward to many posts to come 
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Despite the many benefits we’ve seen in marketing through social media, do the same rules apply to the fashion, beauty and luxury industries? With our ever increasing need to maintain our exclusivity, making our brands widely available through sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can sometimes be detrimental according to Online Fashion Marketing strategists Macala Wright and Yuli Ziv.
You can’t be a control freak with social media
Why is this? Social media limits the amount of control you have with things that are associated with your brand. For example, your readers or followers may publicly comment or critic your label – this can sometimes good feedback from your customers but you also run the risk of negative feedback or attack from ‘brand bashers’. As a label trying to uphold a certain upmarket standard, you loose the ability filter content and control your message.
Power shift to the consumer
Social media also gives more power to the consumer. Traditionally fashion trends were dictated by the fashion houses and trickled down to the mass markets. With the rise of fashion bloggers, fashion websites, review sites, DIY fashion, this power is shifting towards the end consumer to decide what styles he/she prefers, whether they make their purchase directly from the designer or from a distributor, how much they’re willing to pay, and when things go wrong, whether they will take matters into their own hands and (a marketer’s worst nightmare) publicly humiliate the company online.
SME’s and Mass markets can tweet away
However, it is not all bad. Social media is fantastic for small to medium brands who need low cost promotional mediums and mass market brands who are not as concerned with creating an excessive feel. It allows these companies to turn customers into fans and create an interactive community to engage their clients. However, Macala and Yuli claim that most brands are simply using social media as an online outlet store offering sales, discounts and promotions. The fashion industry having a reputation for being a one way communicator, the brands that do take on twitter and facebook, it’s important to understand that they are social media and as the name implies, need to use it to create content that would hold a conversation with your customer.
View Video (fast forward to about 2 minutes to skip the intros)
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 2:45 PM and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.