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Home » Why the PR Office is the Most Important Asset for Your Fashion Brand
CEO and Founder,
440 Industries
Fashion companies can be very complex organisations they can employ hundreds if not thousands of individuals spread across very large supply chains that start with acquiring raw materials and end with returns and customer service. Undoubtedly, every part of the company contributes to the value the brand is creating and to the long-term success of the organisation, but if we were to ask which division of the business holds the most responsibility in keeping a fashion brand current, relevant and up-to-speed with the market, we’d have to answer very simply with the PR Office.
The PR Office is not only the most important asset for your fashion brand but in our opinion is also the first team a fashion startup should have, as, in the current business environment, no one can deny that every company is a media company.
Goodwill is the keyword here, as it relates to the loyalty of your customers and the size of your audience. A company with strong goodwill is worth a lot of money because building an audience for your firm is one of the most challenging, and time-consuming activities you can do, but on the other hand, once you do have an audience, you have a business.
Each of these activities contributes to your brand, as a brand is the gut feeling that you are able to summon in your customers. This feeling is connected to the different types of associations connected to your brand and we can see clearly how these intangibles are closely related to the way we acquire information about a company.
In this post, we’re going to explore the ways a PR office impacts your brand’s performance more than one can imagine. To help you navigate this article and go straight to the part which may be more relevant to you.
Starting a fashion business is not as cheap as starting the next big app, or the next social media. The latter can be easily started with not much more than a laptop and an internet connection, whereas a fashion business actually creates physical products which are much more expensive to make.
Not only they can be very expensive, but the actual process of setting up a supply chain can take months. Building the pipeline is pretty much 50% of building the actual business, without considering the time necessary to actually develop a collection for the 2 basic seasons. In this sense, we can quickly realise that an entrepreneur simply can’t wait for the business to be completely set up before starting to reach out to potential customers or business partners. On the contrary, a business will start as soon as it has developed that minimal digital presence that can allow starting a conversation with a brand. As the Cluetrain manifesto states, “all markets are conversions” and unless a conversation can be started, the brand has no market.
So let’s see what are some of the functions that the PR office can serve for your business:
We can now see how in reality there is a very clear alignment between PR and Marketing. In this sense, in the next paragraph, we’re going to explore how PR can be a form of fully-integrated marketing, designed not only to engage with your audience but to lead them towards purchase.
As we start discussing this topic it’s very important to clarify why PR is an effective form of Marketing.
In this sense, the impact of an effective PR office cannot be downplayed, and in the long-run, the reach of these more institutional communications will outlive the much short news cycle of sales-oriented advertising. But that’s not all, exactly because of the opportunity for the PR office to engage with a much broader audience. In this sense, the wonders of this office are not limited to the brand but involve the company image too, in the context of serving multiple HR activities.
It is safe to say that one of the primary goals of a business is to generate profits, so this is why we tend to think about outbound communications first, especially towards customers, who seem to be the most important stakeholders for a fashion brand.
As a result, we can see that HR offices greatly benefit from PR activities as PR already pre-selects the candidates that will apply for a job, by attracting those that are overall better aligned with the position, for the mutual benefit of the company and the candidate. So, as we’ve seen PR offices are very versatile divisions, that can really help your business in a variety of situations, and especially at different stages of development. Let’s now move towards the conclusions paragraph to draw some final reflections on the topic.
As we’ve seen in this post, PR offices are really an essential asset to your firm. In order to summarise the content and conduct a short summary, we could see how the PR division can help out, by setting different priorities at different stages of development for your fashion brand.
So that’s it. These are all of the values which are connected to developing a strong and efficient PR office. As you can see the work of the office is to build a strong brand that connects to the audience and creates that loyalty and attachment which is key to your brand’s long term success.
I am an Anglo-Italian business lecturer and consultant based in Florence, Italy. In 2017 I started 440 Industries, an education and training company focused on fashion, music, and technology. Our mission is to help students, entrepreneurs and managers in overcoming the challenges of starting, developing and scaling their business in the creative industries. When there's a will, there's a way!
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