The Fashion Industry and Its Use of Public Relations Tools

Hausarbeit (Hauptseminar) , 2014 , 9 Seiten , Note: 1,7

Medien / Kommunikation - Public Relations, Werbung, Marketing, Social Media

The main focus of this paper is the fashion industry, and its use of public relations tools, such as fashion blogs and applications like Instagram. Fashion blogs are frequently linked to Instagram pages to reach and attract more customers as well as increase customers' satisfaction.

The modern business world in the 21st century could not be as prevailing and profound as it is without the use of new technologies; it is a major advantage for every business including the Fashion market. Information technologies enable business owners and their employees to stay in touch with customers, business partners and intermediate bearing while out of the office. Cell phones allow individuals easy access to e-mails, open software applications (apps) and social network platforms. Companies are able to save costs when it comes to promotion, improve services, and attract new customers easily.

By analyzing the needs of customers, understanding shortfalls in business which need to be corrected, and by listening to millions of bloggers worldwide; it becomes easier to create exactly what customer XY wants today. More than 100 million bloggers are communicating, sharing their experiences of products, services, and other topics. These bloggers have the power to influence ordinary people's decisions. The use of blogs creates a new branch of public relations, a new strategy to attract customers, and to influence buying decisions. This feedback from bloggers worldwide is the best, honest, fastest, and easiest public relation tool an industry may get.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Greatest Change in Media

The Influence of the Internet

Blogging – A profitable influential media tool

Different Fashion Blogs

Social media platforms

The invention of Instagram

Instagram: Subject of addiction?

What makes Instagram so popular?

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

The main focus of this paper is the fashion industry, and its use of public relations tools, such as fashion blogs and applications like Instagram. Fashion blogs are frequently linked to Instagram pages to reach and attract more customers as well as increase customers’ satisfaction.

The Greatest Change in Media

The modern business world in the 21st century could not be as prevailing and profound as it is without the use of new technologies; it is a major advantage for every business including the Fashion market. Information technologies enable business owners and their employees to stay in touch with customers, business partners and intermediate bearing while out of the office. Cell phones allow individuals easy access to e-mails, open software applications (apps) and social network platforms. Companies are able to save costs when it comes to promotion, improve services, and attract new customers easily (Lawrence, 2014).

By analyzing the needs of customers, understanding shortfalls in business which need to be corrected, and by listening to millions of bloggers worldwide; it becomes easier to create exactly what customer XY wants today (Fuller,2014). More than 100 million bloggers are communicating, sharing their experiences of products, services, and other topics. These bloggers have the power to influence ordinary people’s decisions (Bubble, 7). The use of blogs creates a new branch of public relations, a new strategy to attract customers, and to influence buying decisions. This feedback from bloggers worldwide is the best, honest, fastest, and easiest public relation tool an industry may get.

The Influence of the Internet

By using the benefits the internet enables consumers have been empowered more than ever before and elevated their product and brand expectations. The internet can provide online consumers with instant up to date information and lower switching costs in terms of time, product comparison and purchase. As a result, the task of retaining the attention and loyalty of consumers has become increasingly challenging clearified Okonkwo. Through the web all possibilities of the latest fashion trends and brands are revealed and create desires for particular goods. The web exploits aplenty ways to attract potential customers’ attention, and subscribe and retain them. This is the easiest way to stay update with each single step in the fashion industry, and to understand the entire process of fashion art and all its participants.

Blogging – A profitable influential media tool

The Fashion industry has a value of mulit-billion dollars and is making decisions about ordinary people and their wearing apparel worldwide. The success of Fashion brands is based on several points, particular communication characteristics such as the use of fashion shows, editorial placement, PR activities and other media tools, which enable it to compete within the industry. The term ‘other media’ tools include the increasingly popular blogging.

Blogging about Style has rapidly developed from different unrelated series of fanzines and notebooks to become a crucial part of the fashion business. Today people take their impact for granted but, in the beginning, bloggers were not always welcomed by every industry insiders knows the Blogger Susie Bubble.

The first blog was developed by two journalists in 1998. They wrote about Hurricane Bonnie a major hurricane that made landfall in North Carolina (Beven, 1998). On the web are millions of different blogs dedicated to millions of subjects. Blogs primarily intended for Fashion did not appear in the blogosphere until 2002 (Sinclair, 2014). The Fashion industry found blogging difficult to understand in the beginning. Well founded by truly personal views on style and different perspectives on fashion written by mystery voices. Finally, companies started to use Blogs in 2005 according to Holtz and Demopoulous and made use of their power as a crucial element of their communication with customers.

Large concerns realized how Bloggers can highlight the excitement feel by real people who actually wear, and want to wear, the clothes featured. This collaboration became valued by brands and designers who started to work regularly with bloggers in a variety of ways. Some made collaborations on bags, jeweler, shoes and clothes and used Bloggers as models and ambassadors. Since then, fashion blogs have become highly profitable and influential. Blogging that used to be an enjoyable hobby became the future of new media business (Buble, 2012). Today high-profile blogs reach an audience of 25,000 people a day. It is a vast number of people one blogger can reach and the emphasis on the commercial effect they might achieve, often working from home. It is important, however, to remember that fashion blogging at its root, is born out of a passion for clothing, design and their possible combinations. (Oliver, 15)

Different Fashion Blogs

At the first glimpse some blogs appeal to look alike but not all blogs are created equal and the multitude of differences that can be found make them exciting. Every single blog is unique. They are written from the person of authority and their own perspective but using the same general idea - fashion. Highly represented are personal style bloggers like The Blonde Salad by Chiara Ferragni who constantly share photos documenting her own clothing and, in part, lifestyle. This way of blogging has led some of these authors to a kind of celebrity status, and consequently opportunities to collaborate with high-end fashion brands as models, spokespeople and, in some cases, designers (Bubble, 2012).

Another kind of bloggers calls themselves street style bloggers. They experience blogging as a possibility to show their photography and their ability to capture a particular zeitgeist on the streets, vacations and, more recently, outside numerous international Fashion Week shows. Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil and Phil Oh of Street Pepper, are some examples. Both have become official street style photographers for Style.com and American Vogue’s website respectively. This Job enabled through their blogging is a notable act of official sanction by the fashion media establishment and has placed these street style bloggers into a class of their own (Bubble, 2012).

Finally, there is a string of undeterminable but although recognizable voices who comment on fashion and other topics in a yet not mentioned specific ways. There are photographs of innovative DIY projects and delicate food creations seen by Luxirare’s. The food section labeled ‘Culinary‘ contains 20 sub-categories with many pictures and little tips. This Blog written by different people contains posts about style and clothing, food, DIY’s, cars, music, comedy, and everything else in-between. Blogs like Luxirare occur frequently and livhambrett.com, galmeetsglam.com and infinitesatori.org also fit into this category. Another kind of Bloggers are ttraditional print editors, such as Anna Dello Russo, editor-at-large of Vogue Nippon. Russo charted a new blogging form by writing about her personal expression and extension of her own brands (Bubble, 2012).

Each style of blogging is different and addresses different people, but they have one thing in common, Bloggers reveal their identity and great many of them discover the simultaneous power and at the same time vulnerability of putting themselves out there.

Social media platforms

The entire spectrum of the World Wide Web offers a few more platforms than Blogger websites. Today users can decide between quantities of social media platforms. Facebook is the most popular social media platform with 900,000,000 estimated unique monthly Visitors followed by Twitter with 310,000,000. Pinterest, GooglePlus+, and Tumblr count up to 250,000,000 estimated unique monthly visitors according to Ebizma. The latest platform to join this rank of popular platform has zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users in just 551 days; the photo-sharing mobile app Instagram (Eler, 2012).

The invention of Instagram

The social platform Instagram was founded in 2010 by two graduates from Stanford University namely Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Before creating this popular photo sharing site Systrom worked at several companies for instance Odea that later became Twitter and was working in the Corporate Development team at Gmail and Google Reader. His passion for social products resulted in the making of a currently highly coveted platform called Instagram. The words ‘It is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share photos directly from your phone’ decorate the front page of Systroms 1 Billion Dollar invention (Instagram, 2014). Instagram is now up to 150 Mil Users and it’s especially popular with teens like an omnipresent play says Eric Jackson, the Founder and Managing Partner of Ironfire Capital LLC (Forbes, 2013).

Instagram: Subject of addiction?

The global research and advisory firm ‘Forrester Research’ analyses relevant consumer and business data coordinated to agenda of many concerns. ‘Forrester Research’ studied more than 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts on seven social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and other. The study shows that top brands’ Instagram posts generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%. This means that Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter (Forrester, 2014). Many Bloggers have noticed this large activity growth too and started to combine their Blog with Instagram. By linking Instagram accounts to websites, Bloggers can use them together to build a network and interact with readers at various levels/ways.

What makes Instagram so popular?

To begin with, it is social. Since Facebook and Tumblr, it becomes clear that we like to share our experiences. Instagram has a great integration with social services (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr) and what we are eating, buying, seeing, wearing (…) day to day can be shared. Instagram makes this really easy and created some features that make it difficult to resist this new platform.

They introduced a method to add a little creativity into photos with special filters, borders and other effects. It is a nice toy and people can become creative if they want to. By using these effects, the corresponding picture will look visually appealing and everyday subjects can be transformed into something special. Every uploaded picture will be shared with every follower they accepted and there are no complicated advanced settings to share pictures with only an amount of people like there is on Facebook.

The international growth makes it possible to see pictures from around the world by typing the desired hash tag. Finally, a great advantage is the elimination of advertisement. When you hit the button to share with friends, there's a satisfying feeling of anticipation that others will be impressed by your little creation, Mark Hendrickson explained (Hendrickson, 2010). Our Instagram page is like a lens into our life that makes it look cooler than it probably was at that moment and other might become a little jealous, he continues. It is a picture book of your life and Instagram provides an application to document and share everything what you see, instead of what you think.

Conclusion

Blogs can and do now co-exist alongside Print and magazines. Often fashion publications feature bloggers and ask them to write columns or do guest styling, photographing clothes on non-models is a long-established method. Many Fashion PR agencies have begun to work with bloggers and combine their knowledge and experience with their own marketing strategies. Many Bloggers use platforms like Instagram to display a preview of their latest articles or photographs.

As a reader of those blogs, it is still about the new daily reads and each observer can decide by himself about quality and quantity. Still Fashion is built on desirability; on the creation of beautiful objects that people strive to obtain in order to enhance how they look, feel and present themselves to others. The good and bad thing about blogging is that everybody is invited (Bubble, 13). As unmoderated, independent voices, bloggers have the freedom to say whatever they want about the style, quality or relevance of any fashion ‘product’ they chose. They also have the ability to reach virtually anyone, anywhere (Guzelis, 19)

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• Hochschule: Universität Siegen
• Note: 1,7
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2014
• Seiten: 9
• Katalognummer: V911252
• ISBN (eBook): 9783346226624
• Sprache: Englisch
• Schlagworte: fashion, industry, public, relations, tools