How branding can affect people and their shopping habits?

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Abstract

It has been proposed within the branding literature that the theory of the brand be extended within a kind of industries. The purpose of this paper is to offer a deeper understanding of the centrality of the own brand to fashion designer brand strategy. The methodology of this research involved six in-depth interviews with large-scale fashion designers from a sample of the 20 largest and major successful fashion designers in the UK. The findings of this research identified the motivations, dimensions, success factors and problems associated with the creation, development and management of the own brand. The development of brand strategy inside the fashion designing sector reveals a paucity of empirical and theoretical studies. This exploratory paper seeks to address this scarcity. Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1

Research Aims and Objectives2

Chapter 2: Literature Review3

The development of brand strategy8

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY13

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION17

Implications24

Future research25

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION27

REFERENCES30

APPENDIX35

Chapter 1: Introduction

Over the past decade, the UK clothing market has suffered from powerful deflationary pressures with the influx of, and strong competition from, worth designers for example Primark, New Look and Peacocks who are driving down prices within the market while showing consistently strong growth. Many clothing designers cite this deflation as a key challenge in the present design weather, in the face of a more requiring, progressively perceptive, and less loyal customer.

Additionally the past two decades have glimpsed a expansion of foreign designers going into, and expanding competition within, the UK fashion design market, with the emergence of companies for example Kookai from France, H&M from Sweden, Zara and Mango from Spain, Benetton from Italy, and from America, Gap. Zara in particular has had a important impact on UK clothing designers who have, according to Verdict (2007), been compelled to respond to their superior store environments and fast fashion format. In view of increasingly dynamic, complex, and competitive market conditions, McGoldrick (2002) proposes that marketing has taken on a pivotal role within the designing organization, as the basis for differentiation and positioning, in the establishment of competitive advantage. Recent literature proposes that, critical to this design marketing activity, is the designer brand and the fashion designer brand in assisting as a short-hand device for consumer decision making in a decidedly homogenous market. This literature, although, is underdeveloped and calls have been made for farther empirical explorations of designer brand strategies and the application of traditional branding principles within the design sector, especially those of business branding and the role of private labels or ...