Event Summary
Last Thursday, Caroline Fletcher, VP and Practice Lead for The Sound’s Beauty, Fashion & Apparel work, spent the day at the Glossy Modern Marketing Forum. It was a brilliant gathering of brand executives across fashion and beauty to discuss how they’re evolving their marketing strategies for the digital age.
It was a full day of presentations, panel discussions and workshops, each flush with insights.
Caroline has highlighted the stickiest thoughts and ideas that have stayed with her since. As always, we’d love your thoughts and ah-has from the below. And if you happened to be there, we’d love to know what’s been sticking with you too!
In 2019, disruptive retail can mean doubling down on a brand’s return to real.
Permanent brick & mortar strategies (not just pop-ups), OOH advertising and even print catalogues are how fashion & apparel brands are meaningfully getting in front of key customers and clients.
Cross-channel marketing should sound like a symphony, not getting blasted by trumpets.
When creating and orchestrating (ahem) a brand’s communication strategy, messaging must be carefully developed to each say and sound different, but ultimately work beautifully together.
To fully, and meaningfully, embody the term ‘community’, a brand needs to first understand, and then constantly reflect, what IT gives back to their community.
- Jewelry brand Kendra Scott sees each of their retail doors as their ‘home’, and actively embodies a ‘make yourself at home’ mentality.
- Across all their doors, women within that local community are welcome to use the store as an extension of their own home, hosting book clubs, showers etc.
- In addition, each Kendra Scott store will frequently use the space to host launch parties and ‘welcome to the neighborhood events’ to support other female-lead businesses in the local area.
- Overall, due to their approach to local events and hosting, EACH Kendra Scott location – and there are 75 of them! – run up to 4 events PER week!
Modern customer service is not about anticipating category needs, or responding to issues, but rather staff who understand the full picture of their customers’ lives well outside of where the brand may live in it.
- Winkylux staff are not only thoroughly trained on product knowledge (that’s obvious, right?), but they also know how to take the perfect Instagram photo!
- A key part of the very immersive WinkyLux in-store experience is sales staff not only encouraging all customers to take pictures, but actively offering up their trained skills to ensure each customer leaves with images ready to post with gusto!
Brands must continue to be ready to communicate and resolve issues in the channels where their customers are.
The Veronica Beard customer service team carefully monitors the brand’s Instagram DMs as this is where their younger customers will frequently highlight needs and challenges AND expect a very quick response.
If you think about quantitative research as ‘listening’ rather than ‘testing’, you’re approaching data with more profound sense of human respect.
TechStyle puts out hundreds of ads and messages into quant every year with the mentality that it is their opportunity to hear and learn from customers what is most meaningful and impactful.
‘Straight-sized’ or limited-range fashion brands are rapidly realizing the need to expand their offering to a far more inclusive set of customers. But they need help to do this respectfully and meaningfully.
- Launching a collection that a greater number of women takes expertise, often well outside of even highly-established brands’ skill sets.
- Brands like Eloquii, Gwynnie Bee, and 10 Honore are doing the hard work like pattern making and accurate sizing to set up ‘straight-sized’ brands for success.
Caroline would love to hear your thoughts, questions or builds on this if you have any!
