Feeding a passion for fashion

With London Fashion Week in full swing, I thought it was the perfect time to look at how word of mouth is being harnessed to drive passion – and revenue – for fashion brands big and small.

via Swamibu@Flickr

For our part, a few of the better-dressed 1000heads crew are heading down to the Jasper Garvida show this evening along with some top social media fashionistas on behalf of Miele. It’s the third time we’ve helped the brand collaborate with the community and our success is very real proof that WOM and style go together like black and navy (seriously, it’s the hot A/W 2010 colourway).

In fact, Reuters recently reported on the increasing influence of online trendsetters at the couture shows; apparently 40% of the 3,600 presshounds at New York Fashion Week were involved in online media.

Some brands are getting involved in the conversational personally. Oscar de la Renta’s director of communications Erika Bearman, aka @OscarPRGirl, is a great example of a label that has put time and effort into getting its social voice just right. But most eyes are on the consumer champions seated alongside the professionals, such as 14-year-old Tavi Gevinson and Londonder Susanna Lau, who are being increasingly courted by designers who know that it’s their opinion that counts. For the first time this year, bloggers were among the judges of the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) awards.

However, brands are also getting creative outside the runway. Earlier this year Jimmy Choo’s Foursquare giveaway was the talk of the town, but initiatives are increasingly focusing combining word of mouth directly with retail and sales.

A while ago we wrote about how Hugo Boss was using AR on store windows, and last week’s post on social commerce highlighted the efforts of Levi’s and Diesel to combine social networking at the point of sale. In the UK, Uniqlo has taken a Groupon-like approach to encourage word of mouth, reducing the price of items the more they are tweeted about.

And behind the scenes, it’s interesting to see that designers are starting to use consumer feedback to determine what they do – Marc Jacobs CEO Robert Duffy recently responded to a torrent of tweets by agreeing that “we gotta do bigger sizes”, promising over 26,000 followers “I’m with you. As soon as I get back to NY I’m on it”.

Fashion has always been an industry that works from the street up; have a look at Henrik Vejlgaard’s Anatomy of a Trend for an examination of how popular trends evolve long before the retailers get wind of the zeitgeist. It’s why word of mouth is such a perfect fit. But it also shows that with fashion, marketers need to go far beyond the wooing-bloggers model.

Brands should be looking at observational learning, multisensory influences and visually-optimised mingling, mixing offline and online to harness the way style actually spreads. It’s something I’ve been talking about a lot recently.

Interested? Give us a call.

Brought into the world on Monday, September 20th, 2010 and filed under Case Studies, Offline/Online.