The Challenge of Gaining Consumer Attention. This is the first challenge for any brand, big or small, new or old. Let’s see how this issue can be tackled.

Undeniably, developing a brand is a big effort for any organisation, and it’s a primary goal of any business wishing to compete in the fashion industry. The primary ingredient to achieving this goal is your audience’s attention. That might sound obvious, but gaining attention is everyone’s business at the moment as all businesses are adopting strategies designed to attract customers to their platform through TOFU (top of the funnel marketing) much before they might actually have anything to sell them. 

• The inbound marketing approach. This approach is based on inbound marketing or an approach to marketing which essentially allows companies to create and seed content online (and offline) with the intent of developing brand awareness. This strategy is the “great equaliser” as the web allows any organisation, big or small, to build a strong digital presence and attract visitors, and because of how inexpensive these strategies can be (sometimes all it takes is to build a blog) everyone is doing it.
  
  
• The old ‘outbound’ marketing strategy. If inbound marketing poses challenges connected to market saturation, we need to remind ourselves that outbound marketing was still much worse. The approach of outbound marketing consisted of a simple strategy “He Who Shouts Loudest Wins”. In this context, it’s clear how this is another way to say “He Who Has the Largets Budget Reaches the Largest Audience”. So even if the idea of developing online content can be daunting, we should take into consideration that the alternative might be so much worse especially for small, startup companies who do not necessarily have access to a rich marketing budget.
  
  
• The Challenge of Selling Value and Not Simply a Product. The second issue we need to explore is the idea that a brand cannot limit itself to selling simply a product. A product is extremely hard to sell because for any product category there are countless alternatives. A brand needs to be able to infuse into its products something unique that customers can resonate to.

In other words, a product cannot be the end of marketing communication. A product should instead be a gateway to developing a long-term relationship with a brand. This relationship should be based on the celebration of the values that a brand stands by.

We always need to remember that customers buy value, and in order to attract them we need to have a very clear understanding of the type of job our customers need to get done, and how our products are helping them. In this sense, as marketers, we need to start leaving the personas framework at the door and start working with the Jobs to Be Done Framework. If you’re interested in reading more about this marketing strategy, here’s a link to another resource from our blog entitled “Why Jobs to Be Done Theory Matters for Your Business”.

Remember also, that value cannot be simply sold, but co-created. The biggest value contribution you can give your audience is if your brand builds value with the participation of your customers. Think about Patagonia, for instance, and how this brand was able to pursue a very strong stance on fashion sustainability and developed a customer-oriented service devoted to extending the lifespan of Patagonia garments through repairs. By doing this, not only Patagonia is approaching an environmentally-conscious approach to business but is taking the journey together with its customers. This can be surely seen as a great example of value co-creation.

• Not masses, but individuals, the increasing relevance of personalised experiences.

We tend to often misinterpret what a brand actually is as if a brand is something objective and set in stone. The reality is that for your fashion business organisation there are hundreds or thousands of brands, one per each of your customers. 

A brand can be defined as the “gut feeling” that you are able to ignite in your customer when your company is mentioned. Each person will have a particular reaction, as each person will process the brand according to a different set of values, criteria etc. If you’re interested in reading about the theoretical frameworks that marketers apply to brand management, in this article we address the topic in greater depth.

As a result, brands need to understand how to leverage their customer relationships on the grounds of personalised experiences. To this end, mobile technologies can really help us interact with our customer as if the brand was speaking to each one individually. This is why the keyword for branding in 2021 is still the same: engagement. This term can mean different things, let’s see how can a brand actually become engaging. We’ll address this topic in the following section of our article.