Fashion Branding and Communication

The importance of brand in the fashion business cannot be overemphasized. This chapter reviews the essence of fashion brand management, discussing the concepts of brand and brand equity, fashion brand development and management, and communication. The fashion brand communication section introduces the use of emergent social media and fashion blogs along with traditional media in the luxury and premium fashion industry. Challenges and trends in branding and communication in the fashion industry are also discussed. The challenges around luxury brands, such as counterfeit goods, commoditization, brand dilution, and brand avoidance are explained with prominent examples. In the subsequent section, trends in branding and communication are detailed: luxury brands’ offering online selling, limited edition, guerrilla marketing, pop-up stores, reinforcing brand equity by offering experiential spaces. Major concepts are explained using examples to help readers understand the larger scope of the topic, which will be instrumental in understanding branding strategies of five European luxury and premium brands cases in this volume.

As with many other family businesses that collectively comprise Italy’s economic fabric, Salvatore Ferragamo began as a workshop that soon grew into a global player within its industry, all while maintaining a core spirit of familial entrepreneurship in the form of its organizational structure and identity. Today, the company operates in over 90 countries via its own 33 subsidiaries. The Salvatore Ferragamo Group has pursued a coherent corporate branding strategy over time. Its brand heritage serves as an intrinsic feature of its value proposition and brand positioning, having been cohesively maintained even amid brand extensions and internationalization. Leveraging this heritage, the company has evolved during its 88-year-long history from a single-product company to a multi-category company; from a product-oriented brand to a retail-oriented brand; and from a family business to a publicly owned global business.

As with many other Italian companies, the Tod’s Group began as a family business and has since evolved into a global fashion player boasting a portfolio of four brands (Tod’s, Hogan, Fay, and Roger Vivier). The group operates in 37 countries and yields a total sales revenue of €965.5 million as of 2014, approximately 70 % of which has been generated from exports. The Tod’s Group adopts a double management approach: (i) a vertical strategic decision-making process in the upstream to ensure the entire group achieves cost and operation efficiency and (ii) a horizontal operating process in the downstream to guarantee a diversified identity of brands in terms of design, marketing, and retail management. The group employs a hybrid branding strategy, wherein the core brand Tod’s utilizes a corporate dominant strategy while the other brands (Fay, Hogan, and Roger Vivier) prefer brand dominant strategies. Tod’s, the group’s core brand, currently leads the group’s global markets, representing approximately 60 % of overall sales in 2014 and 70 % of its stores worldwide. This chapter explains the group’s unique approach to brand communication and commitment to corporate social responsibility, particularly in terms of local communities, the environment, and the welfare of its stakeholders and employees.

Prada is one of the most successful Italian fashion businesses with unique design aesthetics and provocative counter-mainstream spirit. It is also one of a few companies in the global luxury industry that have chosen to remain independent from mergers with multinational conglomerates, establishing and following its own strategy based on distinction and management coherence. The Prada case is an exemplary depiction of how global recognition of a luxury brand stems from a combination of a constant search for differentiation and shrewd business decisions ensuring efficiency, functionality, and resistance through time. Direct control over retail, well-delineated and uniform brand portfolio with quest for aesthetic and cultural relevance, transcendence of pure commerce to the world of art, technology, architecture, and focus on consumer dialogue through retail experience—all these elements help Prada become one of the most ambitious and trendsetting global luxury brands of modern days.

The recent global luxury industry has transformed from a constellation of small and medium-sized enterprises to a few large luxury conglomerates. This new structure, along with growing foreign markets such as Asia, has caused an increase in sales volumes, resulting in production that is more industrial than handcrafted. These changes decrease exclusiveness for luxury brands, which may lead to commoditization of the luxury brands in consumers’ eyes.