Hi Guys,
We know how being a small brand competing can feel challenging sometimes. You have the impression to compete against giants who have all the means to launch the campaign you can’t have to sell the clothes in the boutiques you don’t have. So you end up focusing on all the things you can’t or don’t have.
And what if you focused on what you actually have?
Because as an independant small brand, you have a voice and unlike many large brands that will be tied by policies and money at stake, you have the entire freedom to express it and translate it into something different and exclusive.
To help you think about your marketing strategy, here is an extract of an interview of Karan Khurana from The Fashion Business Plan by Bako Rambini.
What makes you unique?
In spite of the ever increasing share of fast fashion in the pyramid of segmentation I believe that there will always be space for small fashion brands which have very strong reason to sell. In the last decade we saw that brands with sustainability as a tagline got substantial share in the fashion market. The consumer began to buy more sustainable brands instead of fast fashion ones. This is an example which highlights a very old marketing strategy of developing a Unique Selling Preposition (USP) in terms of the 4P`s (Product, price, place, Promotion). For a small brand this could be a very competitive advantage as when the marketplace gets crowded with repetitive product there’s always a niche consumer market looking for variety, novelty and most essentially a meaning attached to a product. A USP immediately helps a brand to develop differentiating features then other and hence a brand identity. In many cases it’s observed that consumer gets attached to a small brand and even pays a premium price. To elaborate a little more here the luxury brands of today were the small ethnic brands of yesterday such as Hermes, France or Bvlgari, Italy started off with very small but products of very intricate design detailing which became their USP and are bestsellers as they have maintained it over generations.
Get inspiration from other consumer brands
In order to develop a winning market strategy small fashion brands should keep a very close watch at other consumer brands such as electronics or may be any range of fast moving consumer goods companies such as Unilever or P&G. These companies keep on trying and testing on various USP`s and you shall be surprised to know that many of such experiments fail miserably but at the end it keeps the brands moving in the market place and secures a place in the mind of the consumer which is also a big challenge in the huge market sphere for a small brand.
Source/Photo credit: Anja Rubik & Iselin Steiro, Hermes FW 2006 fervent-adepte-de-la-mode – Creative Commons
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How to define a proper marketing strategy to raise capital for your fashion brand?
Find more tools to help you through your fashion business plan, with the number one FXF guide. “The Fashion Business Plan” by Bako Rambini is available on Amazon.
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