The impact of social networks in fashion: new strategies and success stories
RELIVE the event “The impact of social networks in fashion: new strategies and success stories”
Discover the article made my the team, following the last event in June of la Chaire Lectra — ESCP Europe :
The Chaire Lectra — ESCP Europe, as part of its latest Fashion & Technology course, offered its Masters in Management students the opportunity to analyze the Instagram strategies of various fashion and luxury brands, in collaboration with visual content creator Ooshot.
Céline Abecassis-Moedas, scientific co-director of the Chair, and Thierry Maillet, CEO of Ooshot, opened the round table and presented the results of the project.
As a follow-up to the students’ work, Valérie Moatti and Céline Abecassis-Moedas, the Chair’s scientific co-directors, organized a round table at ESCP Europe in June, with Adrien Boyer, Regional General Manager, Pinterest France + Southern Europe + Benelux / Fabien Le Roux, Director of Strategy and Digital Strategy, BETC Luxe / Philippe Ribera, Innovation Director, Lectra / Nicolas Santi-Weil, CEO, AMI / Charline Goutal, Founder and President, Ma P’tite Culotte and Elisabeth Teixeira, Influencer, @unemorueaparis
📍Instagram: the primary marketing and inspirational channel
Instagram has triggered a major revolution: it is the benchmark media of beauty, accessible to everyone. For young brands that do not necessarily have the means to run a press and PR campaign, it is the ideal medium to give their communications greater impact and build an international community.
Elisabeth Teixeira: “Instagram is a way to create a real identity and convey a very personal lifestyle, on a daily basis, almost instantly. I use it as a business card and, incidentally, it was thanks to my first street style photos that brands started to contact me to create original content.”
📍The need to strike the right tone
It is important to think about the strategy to adopt when creating a brand identity on Instagram, the challenge being to connect with and captivate the community with a good conversion rate and commitment rate:
> From the fashion designer’s perspective: what is their level of ownership, how do they tell their story and what limits should be set between the brand and the person? The brand’s strength of conviction will depend mainly on its consistency and authenticity.
> From the user’s perspective: it is essential to be aware of their power, to understand their expectations and their research topics. To adopt the brand’s message, users must understand it and relate to its values.
📍Social media: a gold mine in terms of data
Phillippe Ribera: “For highly segmented uses (analysis of a consumer category, a product type, etc.), we can use social media to conduct real predictive analysis to improve the design of a collection plan, for example. Controlling your e-reputation is also made easier thanks to very active communities.”
User Generated Content can be filtered and used to determine the most attractive topics and formats. As such, the hashtag is a two-way medium, to convey and share true and authentic stories.
Adrien Boyer: “Personalization is essential to ensure a quality experience. Each action sends a signal to capture tastes and, ultimately, pre-empt searches.”
📍Take a critical step back, in the name of creativity
Nicolas Santi-Weil: “You must always be careful not too smooth or normalize your Instagram account too much. Staying true to your brand means talking about what is true and meaningful to us. This is the proviso for adopting it and following it (…) You can quickly be overwhelmed by or get lost in advice already given. It’s better to think about the future and not try to chase the latest digital trend; this is key.”
Dark social makes tracking very difficult. It is estimated that 70% of sharing takes place in private discussions on social media or WhatsApp, multi-niches with almost immediate sources of sales.
Fabien Le Roux: “Be careful not to fracture the brand by overloading with data. The data should not make you forget the interest of the fashion brand and its creativity, whatever the predictive trends say.”
📍Brand power/influencer power balance
While brands contact influencers to benefit from quality content and create enthusiasm for new communities, they bemoan the extent of their demands (benefits and remuneration), which call into question the balance between brand originality and the business side of Instagram.
The Ma P’tite Culotte start-up immediately challenged conventional thinking about lingerie and its branding. Created in 2013, it is one of the first “pure player” brands in lingerie. Its core values — honesty and authenticity — are not reflected in collaborations with overly commercial influencers who have lost their freshness, spontaneity and ultimately, their role as advisors.
Social networks have always been part of Elisabeth Teixera’s career, and she has never worked with a brand whose values she did not share. She regrets the loss of creativity among some influencers who become a storefront window of total looks and turn Instagram into an advertising board.
However, there is one very effective safeguard: teenagers. They look at a huge number of feeds and, if an influencer gets lost in brands, his or her audience drops automatically because, when teenagers say that something isn’t authentic, it’s very powerful. The BETC TEENS think tank has conducted studies on this subject.
Fabien Le Roux: “Brands should not use influencers as media. You have to be thinking co-branding and not ego-branding. Because an influencer is a brand.”
📍Social network sustainability vs. Brand flexibility
Is a social network linked to a generation, a way of life, a state of mind? It is clear that Millennials are using Facebook less and less as a sales channel, and Instagram more and more. Furthermore, brands devise winning strategies on social networks that are not necessarily reusable.
Charline Goutal: “The strength of a start-up is its ability to be flexible and to be the core of the reactor, its adaptability to make users react in the right way.”
📍Pinterest: a more personal medium
Pinterest is characterized by several B2B uses:inspiration and trends + active consideration + reputation and discovery + selling with Shop the Look
Adrien Boyer: “Pinterest aspires to be a visual discovery engine that supports people in their everyday lives, feeding them with ideas and helping develop a personal project, from inspiration to action. Sharing between friends is not its intended purpose. It is a medium with a different time perspective: active consideration about the future.”
📍Other uses? Why not!
Fashion brands create an imaginary world, and their alternative approaches can become powerful brand statements, such as Lacoste and its refusal to sell online, or Vêtements, which gambles on its number of followers by following no one.
Fabien Le Roux: “You could imagine a single, black photo on your Instagram account. Get rid of social networks completely? Impossible.”
Trust, proximity and personalization are the inseparable trio for a successful strategy on social media. “And eventually, won’t brands create their own social media?” Charline Goutal wonders. An internal network in constant interaction with customers would allow you to get as close as possible to their needs, spontaneously restore your trendsetting ability and move in the right direction with better growth strategies.
Article by Celine Abecassis Moedas originally published here!
