ANALYSIS OF MULTIVECTOR ACTIVITY OF DESIGNERS’ BRENDS IN FASHION INDUSTRY

Abstract

The research presents comparative analysis of forming designers’ brands of different categories based on their target audience needs. The article proves that combined or diffuse lines of fashion clothes, which unite project and marketing advantages within unique brand portfolio, develop at the intersection of brands’ various categories influences. The research demonstrates that globalization of the modern fashion industry makes combined designers’ brands a priority for Fashion Houses since last attract wider audience of consumers and increase brand success. The work results show that the fashion industry structure can be shown like a hierarchy, the top of which occupies the activity of High Fashion Houses directed to formation of modern standards and tendencies (project and advertising components). In the frames of contemporary fashion industry globalization, business activity of many fashion houses is carried out in a form of interaction with separate small design companies or agencies that in addition have their own structure, project technology and potential sale markets. At this stage, a leading role belongs to mass media which is involved in work with Fashion Houses information and marketing departments closely and productively. Design firms and agencies that deal with only one line product segment, are situated one level lower in a Fashion Houses gradation.

The article focuses on typical properties of a designer brand in a modern fashion business which determines the designer brand as a complex of identifying elements facilitating characteristics of one or another fashion industry subject as well as a fashion product it produces on a fashion market. At that, the author admits that the leading Fashion Houses create their own attribution version of a designer brand for each market segment, adjusted for fashion product price category and target consumers.

Analysis of the formation of designer brands of the most active subjects of fashion industry, conducted in the present study, shows that it is the usage of designer’s name in the title of designer fashion brand that singles out a designer brand in the mind of the potential or permanent customer, as well as on the fashion clothes market.

As the research results show, the worldwide designer brands in the fashion industry can be compared to global industrial and consumer brands. At the same time, there are currently no definite recommendations related to what one needs to take into consideration while managing a complex designer brand, what principles should be basis for further successful designer brands, in the fashion industry in particular.

On the other hand, new basic components and aspects of value added price formation for fashion clothes as a fashion product created by designer brand have been determined in the thesis. One should add a brand name and a brand mark which form material and immaterial aspects of designer brand functioning to attribute designer brand components that provide possibility of value added price formation for a fashion product. The fashion product itself produced by a Fashion House and functional, aesthetic, construction, operational and its other characteristics relate to material aspects. One should refer reliability, consumer trust, a psychological impact on a customer, mass media’s loyalty or disposition in particular, to immaterial aspects. In its turn the value added price of a brand facilitates a conversion of a brand name to brand equity, this way it contributes to an increase of a market value for the whole Fashion House.

Correspondingly, it is habitually to call fashion products created under the aegis of one brand, despite their qualities, a brand portfolio. Ideally, it includes all brands in the frames of which fashion clothes of different categories have been produced. It is grounded in our thesis that a tendency to diversification of designer brands at the beginning of XXI century contributed to the leading Fashion Houses organizations structuring in the context of major development of several fashion clothes lines, including highly specialized ones.

The author came to the conclusion that project and marketing objectives of the diffuse designer brands are firstly directed to profit increase due to the attraction of a new customer with lower price ambitions, but a higher mobility as to the perception of fashion innovations; information spread on designer brand among potential consumers and creation of a method for step by step attraction of consumers of the lowest products segment to a category of consumers of prêt-a-porte clothes ( on the basis of a change of potential consumers’ social status or their customer ambitions); security protection of designer brands from merging by mass clothes market, combining in itself the advantages of opposite segments of fashion market.

On the basis of the analysis results for the designer brands of different categories functioning on a contemporary fashion market, in the thesis the main criteria for basic difference of fashion lines forming one brand portfolio have been formulated: objectives of creation and support of certain design or corporate lines in fashion industry; the specifics of development and production of a fashion product in a definite consumer’s segment; Fashion Houses price policy relating to each of the created lines; a degree of participation of a leading fashion house art designer or art director in fashion product creation; the principles of use of certain marketing communication types etc.

The article stresses that, despite all differences, in modern conditions of fashion industry globalization, two basically different branding segments – luxury industry and mass market look not only for ways of interaction , but also for merging to expand their influence on new consumer target groups and to conquer new sales markets for their products. This tendency of such collaboration development boots so actively and in a diverse way that in the near future it can become a basis for a new concept of fashion innovations spread in a society.