How Social Media is Changing the Fashion Industry
A study conducted from four different universities by Shih-Hui Hsiao, Yen-Yao Wang, Tawei Wang, Taa-Wei Kao, combined their findings, which led them to find that small private labels and national brands are being marketed together leading to more success within the businesses.
Smaller and newer fashion designers today are joining the popular new trend of creating their own clothing business and marketing using social media like Instagram and lookbook.nu.
lookbook.nu is a social media site for fashion influencers to share their outfits and promote different brands they wear. The above picture is an example from this site.
A designer wanting to market their small business, should look towards social media to expand their brand. According to the article, “private label owners use popular content creators to promote their brands and products”.
This is the new successful method of marketing, allowing popular social media influencers to post pictures with both small private label brands and bigger known brands, consumer’s know and trust. This allows followers and consumers to trust the smaller brands the influencer is promoting.
The study compared different influencers and found that the popularity of the influencers chosen to market the product is associated with the post’s popularity and more success in profit. The more popular influencers receive more awareness on social media, leading to a greater success of small businesses. Also, it was found that influencer’s posts with the combination of national and small brands led to an even greater success than if they were separate.
This strategy increases the reputation of the brand while also increasing the consumer confidence. This is causing the ‘spillover effect’, which “occurs when customers transfer their quality perceptions across brands from an existing brand to form the prior perception of the quality of a new brand”.
Another plus of this new marketing strategy is the cost-efficiency of using a social media platform to promote a brand. There is no cost in using a personal social media account for the brand. However, the only cost is the cost of making the garments to send to the influencers.
Also, “social media changes the global marketing environment from company-centric to individual- and community-centric, that is, global marketing becomes personal, and therefore increases the connectivity between brands and consumers”. Fashion brands are now able to connect on a deeper level with the consumers to improve their success.
Before this marketing strategy started being used, consumers thought of private-label clothing to cost less and to have lower quality products; rather than national brands in popular, well-known retail stores. Today, however, this is not true. This has changed the fashion industry because smaller brands have improved with greater-quality products.
Consumers admire small businesses for the uniqueness the brand offers; allowing the consumer to be willing to purchase more expensive products.
Also, consumers are becoming loyal to smaller brands because of brand competition and noticing the competition of prices.
National well-known brands are not being imitated, however, this is not the case for smaller brands. This study found that a confusion between brands leads the consumer to a more well-known brand.
This study has found great research showing the new popularity of private labels emerging on social media platforms.
Above is one of my personal favorite Instagram fashion influencers, Margot Lee. She is showing a good example of using a national brand, Anthropologie, and a private label brand, Pistola Denim, in her instagram post.