Photo: Michaela Bigjee
As you probably know, today’s customers respond better to video. Its use increases tremendously and is bound to go up even more: Cisco reports that by 2018, 69% of total internet traffic will be video. Besides it’s an excellent way to promote a brand : according to an Animoto Survey performed on over 1,000 consumers in 2015, 84% had liked a company video in their Facebook newsfeed and nearly half (48%) had shared a company video on their profile.
Video is vital for a business today, not to mention in the fashion and luxury sector. However beautiful videos are numerous. So how can a brand best build a video that makes a difference in the eye of the customer?
To answer this question, we interviewed a team of video makers: Lalie Rabeharison of Tanzania Fixer and Maxwell Gougoueï of Jam Prod international.
Can you describe what you do?
Besides we also select and promote exclusive locations in Paris on one hand and in Africa on the other hand. Through Tanzania Fixer, we promote cinema tourism and initiate related territorial marketing strategies.
We wanted to associate with the extraordinary quality of these territories a key value: establishing a communication offer for luxury brands became a foregone conclusion.
Our offer contains two elements:
– the video support. The brand becomes the hero of a story told from an exclusive conceptual angle, coupled with a dense and sophisticated film-making. Far from advertising, each video produced is more of the encounter, the injection of the DNA of the brand, than a mechanically executed brief…
– The second element is the video. In an era of repetitions inevitably shared through social media, we want to render the image its unique character. Luxury today is not a material possession but a rarity. As such, the territory is luxurious as soon as it deploys the access to great spaces, untouched nature: they are invaluable in the swarming of a now overpopulated and polluted ground.
Jam, you won awards for some fashion movies. What is the recipe for an outstanding fashion and luxury video?
We share similar views, especially the analytical and emotional reading of the identity of a brand as we wanted its creators, the legend to be built around a product, the enhancement of a personality and the focus on what forges its distinctive qualities…
There are so many film makers on the market. What would you say is your specificity then?
Content. It is a fact: the enthusiasm for reading evaporates dangerously and it is tradition to say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Our particularity is therefore not to be one more image among thousands, but to transcend the video beyond the object of contemplation, to use it as a sesame that decomposes the access to some confidential happiness…
The video must surpass the aesthetic bet and the technological prowess to recover the emotion in the raw state. It is my definition of luxury, but also a current trend that advocates a return to the original, in what one eats as much as in what one wears, as well as what we give our time to, which is the height of luxury. To find the essence of the essential is where our offer stands out…because luxury is very essential, isn’t it?
How is Africa a relevant setting for luxury brands?
Like luxury products, the African continent is unique. It is all the more so today because it is one of the last bastions which escaped wild industrialization hence preserving unspoiled landscapes.
On the other hand, luxury brands have long given the continent the cold shoulder, while many of them have the continent to thank for the prestige of their products (fabrics, precious stones, wood, spices, luxury products such as vanilla, grand cru coffees or exceptional chocolates, etc.): the origin of the products is not systematically promoted…
Because they have never been filmed, many visual treasures are still exclusive: these places held incidentally secret are therefore a conception of the treasure, of the primacy that completely fits with the values of luxury. Secrecy is a form of refinement; the elite that get access to it follow the codes and are approved by a circle of happy fews. Africa, by the distinction that characterizes it, is to this day the jewel of this closed circle…Africa, continent of creators where we manufacture what is most unexpected and amazing with the what we have to hand, will give a definition of luxury, a new impulse in an era that marks the fall of the elites and, consequently, must reinvent the notion of exclusivity that is its own …
Finally, in our video creations, the diversity of Africa will have something surprising as we have long relegated it to a uniform space … Colors, textures, atmospheres, architectures have the power to sublimate the Luxury, to revisit high-end.. Eminent African filmmakers, either emerging or confirmed, set the tone to reveal this beauty… We are the fortunate inheritors of a rich image tradition that established itself orally… and visually.
Africa is a refined mosaic, a bewitching song… It is the cradle of humanity and therefore it carries all the symbols of the sacred that abound in the luxury world.
What message would you like to send to these brands?
We want to invite them to an enchanting and exclusive journey that shapes a new language, at a time when luxury itself is renewed to meet the expectations of new consumers. We are able to record a strong identity in posterity. We create the language of security, of sure value, in an era punctuated by a perpetual movement, driven by uncertainty.
Lalie Rabeharison, founder of Tanzania Fixer and the AFRICAN FIXER GUILD
Maxwell Gougouweï aka Jam, founder of Jamprod International
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