MARKETING

The Role of Marketing in Developing Strong Fashion Brands in the 21st Century

The Role of Marketing in Developing Strong Fashion Brands in the 21st Century

Introduction

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, greater emphasis is being placed on brand image development as the basis for consumer discrimination. Advertising has a central role to play in developing brand image, whether at the corporate, retail or product level. It informs consumers of the functional capabilities of the brand while simultaneously imbuing the brand with symbolic values and meanings relevant to the consumer. These two functions of advertising closely parallel the informational and transformational schools of advertising effects and theories on the central and peripheral routes to consumer persuasion. Such dichotomous approaches to explanation are unlikely to represent the reality of consumer choice in that brand image is likely to be formed by the simultaneous absorption of advertising messages based on both the functional and expressive capabilities of brands.

The notion that there is no objective reality and that people trade in the realms of perception and image represents one of the most important tenets of human understanding. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of human relationships with business organizations, i.e. the domain of marketing. Indeed images at all levels of marketing have taken on an increased importance in recent times. Corporations have become obsessive about public perceptions of their activities while at the level of the product/brand there has been a “shift in attention away from the physical aspects and functional benefits of products to their symbolic associations, expressiveness” (Poiesz, 1989, p. 461). A variety of reasons for this increased emphasis on image in marketing can be suggested:

marketing's increasing cognizance of the behavioral aspects of consumer decision making;

affluent society's predilection with symbolic rather than purely functional aspects of products;

an increasing variety of relatively homogeneous products often involving high product complexity and confusing messages which increase consumer reliance on the image aspects of products;

the fact that technological innovation, increasingly susceptible to rapid imitation, may no longer offer previous levels of sustainable competitive advantage (King, 1991; Parker, 1991; Wells, 1989).

Developing brand image

The purpose of this study is to examine the role which marketing plays in developing brand image in the 20th Century. It commences by examining the various levels of marketing imagery and focuses on those elements which the company controls in the image formation process. The concept of branding is reviewed as is the relationship which the brand forms with the consumer. The two main schools of thought with regard to advertising effects are examined in terms of their effects on brand imagery.

Levels of marketing imagery

Businesses conjure up a multitude of images with their many publics, with much attention focussing on the corporate/product relationship. That is the approach a company follows in communicating to its publics the relationship of its products to one another and to the overall corporate entity (Olins, 1989). While this and similar classifications (Gray and Smeltzer, 1985) focus on the producer's corporate/brand relationship, three key levels of imagery pursued by business ...