Secrets of Successful Fashion Brand Positioning

The modern market is full of competitive online fashion stores, so, to win clients’ hearts and increase sales, a company should work on its unicity and develop successful brand positioning. Sizolution will explain the importance of a positive image of a company and provide you with a strategy for its creation.

Fashion Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is a marketing strategy that represents the specialness of a company and emphasizes its advantages¹². For a fashion brand, this is an organized system of embedding its image ‘in vogue’ with the creation of solid associations with the garments it offers, and the persuasion of prospective customers to favor their style above other similar items¹³.

About 90% of fashion brand marketers regard engaging brand positioning as one of the crucial aspects of good fashion sales. Figures prove its significance: clothing platforms with intelligent strategies of brand positioning experience 33% more revenues. The secret is that successful positioning strategies lead to market differentiation from competitors, easy purchase decisions, strong brand value confirmation, and strong messaging⁴.

Researchers define at least nine approaches to brand positioning; however, for a fashion platform it all starts with a brand statement — the research-based description of the company based on its target customers’ and competitors’ portraits¹⁰. It should include an outlined statement of your offering, its promise of filling the fashion market gap for clients, and objective reasons to believe you: people are looking for security⁶ and want to pay for the original clothing that fits. So, the hack is to define your audience and figure out your special offering.

Audience

Before launching a product, its core target audience should be discovered according to the following factors: age, gender, location of residence, income, educational level, profession, hobbies, marital status, and interests. Notably, the benefits of the product should be manifested according to the needs of the exact audience⁷.

Such research shapes the image of potential competitors, develops the basics for the future-oriented marketing strategy, and enables business owners to save money on further advertising: $37 billion is annually wasted on ads with the wrong target audience.

Fashion Competitors

Differentiation

Positive brand positioning of a fashion platform requires a deep analysis of competitors. It will enable you to profit from their mistakes and to steal their best strategies to upgrade them. This process is divided into several steps.

First, competitors should be identified and separated into three groups: direct, indirect, and substitute. Direct are the ones who sell similar items for the same target audience using the same marketing methods³. For example, Farfetch and Outnet are the direct ones because they both sell lux clothing and offer huge discounts.

Secondary competitors trade services and products that are somehow different from your offer. To understand this better, compare Yoox and Adidas: both provide customers with trendy and youthful wear, but the first platform has a multi-brand offer, while the second sells only collections of its own.

Substitute competitors provide the audience with a completely different choice of clothing. For example, you focus on ready-to-wear outfits, and they sell customized handbags.

With the direct competitors identified as the key ones, you should conduct profound research on their businesses.

Evaluation

To begin with, their products should be evaluated and compared with yours in terms of style, prices, shipping costs, social media visibility, sales tactics, quality, branding, positioning, marketing, discount policy, market reputation, the level of audience engagement, and visual representation. At this point, their main peculiarities should be found out. Identify what makes them unique³. Do they focus on eco-friendly fashion? Are they selling gender-fluid or gender-neutral apparel? Do they provide clients with customized items? Check this out.

Further, competitors’ weaknesses and strengths are to be discovered. On the one hand, you can steal and upgrade their benefits; on the other hand, you can focus on their mistakes and emphasize that your brand is on the winning side. For example, if they lack catchy UX, you can remaster your own and advertise it as a significant advantage of your fashion platform. If they have no product descriptions, you can impress the audience with this vital information beautifully shaped.

With all the information about competitors gathered and analyzed, you will better understand how to shape a unique concept of a brand.

Concept

The concept of a fashion brand resides in the idea of its creators and is centered around the exact target audience. Next, the differentiation from the competitors drives it through. However, the profound representation of a positive brand concept roots in the brand’s promise to the audience and its fashionability. For this, the purpose of the same company, its relevance to the audience, and its benefits are to be pointed out.

Whenever your clothing platform aims at a huge number of potential clients, the promise should still be oriented to the significant audience and has something surprisingly new¹. For example, the purpose of an international fashion store is to provide young women (20–25) who make the most of the target audience with trendy and inexpensive items of different brands. The relevance to the audience is based on the visual aesthetic of the website and social networks content that appeals to these clients and contributes to their feeling of unity².

Apart from such essential benefits of the platform as fashionable selections of garments and well-organized promotion, it has something unique — AI technologies integrated for the personalized experience. And this is the core of this platform that attracts bigger audiences and works as the core reason to believe in the brand.

The next level of personalization is hyper-personalization that offers customers highly convenient service and emphasizes the client-orientedness of a brand. Considering only 9% of marketers apply this strategy, hyper-personalization is the right way to step ahead of competitors right now.

Trendy Emotions

Efficient brand positioning clicks with customer’s emotions and sets the company as an important one. The thing is that humans feel first and second next with positive emotions persuading them to share the content they like with their friends and to get absorbed in the further investigation of the brand that boosts their dopamine⁹. Brand communication and customization must be developed to reach this.

Hold a Dialogue

Communication with customers means you should be flexible and keep an eye on the viral market tendencies, such as inclusivity, environment-oriented packaging, and hyper-personalization. Next, you should not forget that the value of a brand depends mainly on the way potential buyers perceive it.

To preserve the positive impression of your fashion platform, you should stay in touch with your clients: send surveys, read reviews, hold opinion polls. For example, you can conduct a marketing campaign: a 5% discount for a catchy, artsy, and detailed review of your product.

Remember that communication forges a bond of trust with clients and enables them to experience more positive emotions. Consequently, they are ready to value a brand more: 70% of customers who had an emotional response to the service are more likely to buy the product5.

Fashion Hooks

Don’t hesitate to make the most of classy marketing hooks. Offer free garments that are highly appreciated by your customers or sell clothing assemblies like such giants as Asos do. This trick makes people feel grateful and persuades them into making impulse purchases.

Then, don’t be caged by your unicity. If your original fashion concept lost its topicality, there is no sense in aligning with the old strategy¹¹. The best way to transform it is to add popular trends that work. For example, think about hyper-personalization with AI technologies, such as Sizolution.

Personalization

The key feature of positive brand positioning is its client-orientedness and personalization: over 60% of contemporary buyers prefer companies with individual approaches to each client. Clothing stores can reach this level by specific customization of products, unique loyalty programs, unconventional ads, and via the cheapest and the most efficient way — a sizing system representing a brand as a client-friendly and innovative one.

The usage of personalization tools can increase revenue to 30% or more, decrease the number of returns and logistics problems, and shape a strong branding statement. Secondly, a personalized platform looks like a friendly space where customers can relax and find whatever they need painlessly. The process of choosing clothes into an intriguing game of fit checking without leaving home. Consequently, buyers get absorbed into the further observation of apparel and are eager to spend up to 25% more money on the items you offer8.

Next, personalization fits the idea of innovative brand positioning and distinguishes your platform as revolutionary: AI technologies are still rarely applied in reselling. Moreover, it saves your budget: the brand can invest more in ads with fewer returns made by customers thanks to the exclusively accurate individual sizing.

Hyper-personalization, being 86% more efficient than conventional personalization, offers customers more individual, convenient, and current service that shapes the feeling of recognition. As a result, they are not likely to get tired of your fashion brand and develop a high level of loyalty: 80% of buyers make further purchases on platforms with such tools of hyper-personalization as Sizolution.

Conclusion

Strong brand positioning is the critical element of increased revenues of a company. Its efficiency depends on the detailed research of the market, promotion strategies, and extra services a company offers to stay unique, innovative, and client-oriented. Sizolution is a practical and marketing tool of hyper-personalization that contributes to the successful representation of any clothing platform.

References

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