Digital Transformation for Fashion and Luxury Brands: Theory and Practice

ISBN-13: 9783031355882 / Angielski

Wilson Ozuem; Silvia Ranfagni; Michelle Willis

Spis treści

1)      Dessy Ohanian, University of Law Business School, UK

Deepening consumer brand engagement through conversational agents

 

Fashion brands were pioneers in utilising e-commerce tools. As an industry that sets and follows trends, fashion has embraced new artificial intelligence tools, such as augmented reality, recommendation engines and chatbots. Chatbots, or as they are known in marketing “conversational agents”, have provided a new communication channel between brands and customers for customers who are looking for personalised interaction, speed of response and 24/7 availability. Chatbots provide benefits for the customer in the form of instant access to the brand; chatbots benefit a brand by handling a large volume of customers quickly, relying on a large volume of data, and at a reduced cost.

 

2)      Annette Kallevig, Norway

Creative brand image distributed: Maintaining consistent marketing communication in an omnichannel world

In the age of integrated marketing communication, the brand message is not only managed by a multitude of specialist agencies necessary for complex omnichannel presence, but also by new independent content creators who have unprecedented power through digital distribution. This power shift has moved influencer marketing to the core of fashion and luxury brand management. Content creators have become autonomous channels of communication; they require freedom of expression to ensure authenticity while maintaining their own personal brand identity. The fluency and dynamics of these complex and interactive marketing relationships require agile management to ensure a consistent creative brand image.

 

3)      Leveraging Artificial Intelligence

Michelle Willis  and Wilson Ozuem, UK

Fashion and luxury customers expect seamless and personalised shopping experiences, Millennials and Generation Z consumers, who begin their journey with a brand online, even more so. Yet traditional e-commerce business models no longer satisfy or excite these consumers and fail to retain customers’ long-term attention or attachment to a brand following a purchase transaction. As industries that have shifted social trends, identities and lifestyles and encouraged experimental experiences through fashion and luxury, artificial intelligence has raised the standards on customer service and experience delivery from big data management to virtual try-on applications.

 

 

4)      Short video adverts

Wilson Ozuem and Michelle Willis, UK

Video viewing is one of the most common online activities and has successfully attracted viewers to online platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Consumers and marketing managers have experimented with the creative and interactive features of short video adverts. In these short adverts, brands have made use of push notifications and have connected with active users who generate content; this has increased engagement between consumers and various marketing campaigns in the fashion and luxury industries. The crucial elements of short video adverts can influence consumers’ perceptions of advertisements and can lead to favourable outcomes of online advertisements.

 

5)      Aster Mekonnen & Liz Larner

Augmented Reality (AR) in Retailing: Customer experience in luxury fashion 

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging trend with the potential to affect consumers’ online shopping experiences. The question to pose is: To what extent can AR heighten the luxury experience with its enhanced interactive features as it is still in the early stages of consumers' adoption? Immersive excitement in the shopping experience is expected to increase sales and improve consumers’ engagement. Engaging consumers with AR may provide luxury brands with a tool to help them lead in the luxury retail sector, which is becoming increasingly competitive.

 

 

6)      Strategies for greening the fashion supply chain

Gordon Bowen & Deidre Bowen

 

The disruption of supply chains by political, economic and black swan (unpredicted) events has put environmental issues into focus. One of the first industries to experience severe pressure is the fashion industry, which could be perceived as a want industry and not a need industry. The want for too many clothing items brings into question the size of the industry; the industry might be required to shrink, which has implications for jobs in the global fashion economy. The industry needs to consider the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and understand how they can be more effectively applied to fashion. Furthermore, the industry should look at their implementation of the SDGs so they can move beyond a marketing concept.

 

 

 

7)      Enterprise social media and distributed creativity

Xiaohui (Alice)  Zeng China

The perfect combination of social media and business models has completely reshaped people’s traditional shopping experience for fashion and luxury brands; social commerce has become a major driver for the digital transformation of brand marketing. To create a virtual reality (VR), immersive and life-oriented social shopping experience for the increasingly dominant young consumers, Generation Z, brands often make use of various social media communication platforms to create virtual exhibition halls with VR and augmented reality technologies; they also continually release live short videos for product introduction and reviews online. In addition, brands use social media accounts to communicate their brand culture and corporate value, and even the vivid and characterised brand intellectual property are incorporated through avatar technology to build close relationships with consumers.

 

8)    Heritage communication on social media in the luxury brand market

Fabrizio Mosca, Italy

 

While developments in digital luxury brand communication have led to several studies about the motivation of digital users to engage with luxury brands and the effect of online communication on consumer behaviour and perceptions, few researchers have addressed the role of heritage within the digital environment. Thus, this chapter responds to the call for research concerning the study of how unique characteristics of luxury brands are communicated in social media by analyzing how luxury brands communicate about their heritage online

 

 

 

9)      Globalisation versus de-globalisation in the fashion industry

                                    Richard Bowen, USA

 

The phenomenon of globalisation is an enhanced driver of fashion sales globally. Nevertheless, the continual growth in sales will slow due to geo-political factors. Globalisation has contributed to many successes in the fashion industry, but political opinion will slow this process down. The question is will globalisation become de-globalisation and how will this affect the fashion industry from supply chain, operations and marketing to logistics. The impact of de-globalisation on the value chain in the fashion industry will require the fashion industry to view value co-creation from a new perspective if it is to continue to flourish.

 

10)  Celebrities, social media influencers and reference groups

Peng Chen Economics School, Jiujiang University, China

 

Celebrity endorsement is one of the most commonly used marketing strategies in the fashion and luxury industries. In the process of digital transformation, brands are exploring more effective ways to reach consumers. Social platforms have attracted more and more web traffic over the past decade. Brands should not ignore the tremendous influence of social media on our daily lives. Non-traditional celebrities or social media influencers have become the most active group of people on social media apps and increasingly play the role of the reference group.

 

11)  Responsible brand know-how. Insights from the sportswear sector

Giovanna Pegan, Italy

The international crisis has speeded the processes of responsibilisation of choices by companies and consumers, pushing both to act more ethically to achieve a better and more sustainable society. The perspective of this chapter is that it is the effective communication of those choices, exploiting digital opportunities, that represents the strategic key and the main challenge for sustainable industrial value creation in the fashion industry. Indeed, companies and brands constitute the leading issuers and they should communicate to consumers through appropriate content their sustainability know-how (economic, environmental and corporate social responsibility; CSR) to foster more ethical consumption choices. To support this perspective, the chapter, in addition to outlining the theoretical framework, will present some empirical evidence from a particular fashion industry segment.

 

12)  Smartphones and Consumers’ Journey

 

Dominic Appiah, Royal Holloway, University of London

Alison Watson, Arden University, UK

 

In comparison to a conventional consumer’s journey, the digital consumer’s journey is characterised by many more ‘touchpoints’ (digital triggers and influences), for example, websites, social media content and blogs, which help shape the shopper’s journey and inform their ultimate purchase decision. With the increasingly widespread use of digital technology, digital touchpoints extend beyond digital channels and can influence the purchase decision before, during and after the shopping encounter.

 

13)  Sustainable coffee and digital communication: a comparative analysis of leading coffee brands

                                  Patrizia de Luca and Marco Bellotto, Italy

 

Coffee, one of the most globally commercialised and consumed products, enters the daily lives of many people, who can also express their consumption values through high brand loyalty.

In the world of coffee, companies and their brands face evolving competitive spaces, where sustainability and digitalisation have now become critical success factors.

Sustainability is a crucial perspective for creating corporate value and reputation. However, it is not enough to implement sustainability choices because it is necessary for stakeholders to perceive them as such. Therefore, the role of communication, mainly digital communication, becomes essential because it offers the company the opportunity to transform its sustainability choices into a relevant source of differentiation and reputation.

In this context, our research aims to analyse how major coffee brands, such as Nestlé, Costa, Lavazza, Illycaffè and some others, communicate sustainability online. By analysing the content offered by different brands on websites and social media, which are the primary tools for today's communication and co-creation of value, we intend to develop a comparative framework among different coffee brands in order to understand the similarities and differences in sustainability communication choices

 

 

 

14)  The right tool for the right job: identifying synergetic touchpoints to achieve seamlessness in fashion

 

Salvietti G. and Ieva, M., University of Parma, Italy

 

Fashion brands have invested in developing offline and online touchpoints to create an omnichannel experience for their customers. However, the availability of a variety of services and technologies is not enough without integration between them. Customers, in fact, require distinguishable stimuli as well as synergies, especially across channels, in order to receive the best experience across the purchase process. The chapter will discuss offline-to-online and online-to-offline channel integration strategies, and will identify successful combinations of touchpoints creating major value for fashion consumers.

 

15)  The customer experience with fashion sale robots: a psycho-interpretative framework

Raffaella Montera – University of Florence (Italy)

Maria Vincenza Ciasullo – University of Salerno (Italy)

Fashion retailers, like Zara, H&M and Gap, are adopting emerging robot technologies to provide exciting high-tech shopping experiences and trigger engagement in fashion retail stores (Song & Kim, 2021). The chapter aims to provide a new psycho-interpretative framework to holistically re-read the customer experience with a fashion sale robot (FSR). The Variety Information Model (Barile, 2009) was selected from the managerial and marketing literature to understand the interaction dynamics in robot encounters. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, the cognitive-affective-conative model (Bagozzi, 1992) was selected to understand different components of customer experience with FSR. So, a conceptual advance in research on FSRs and customer–robot interactions is provided.

 

16)  FASHION BLOCKCHAIN: TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION IN THE APPAREL INDUSTRY

Elena Cedrola, Italy

The use of digital technology in the apparel industry has changed massively in recent years and, given the growing social consciousness of the public, many digital technologies are applied to support sustainability practices. In this chapter, we analyse the challenges faced by the fashion industry and how it can be supported by the application of blockchain technology: to prove the environmental quality of the fashion product to consumers, protect the brand image and secure digital identities. Blockchain can also solve problems related to data protection, reduce information asymmetry and avoid fraud, even in payments. We present the case of Aura, the consortium launched by LVMH, through which some luxury brands have overcome individualism to develop a blockchain-based platform.

 

17)  Fashion and gamification

Elena Cedrola, Italy

In recent times, due in part to the advent of the pandemic, the already existing relationship between gamification and the world of fashion has intensified considerably, and the future of fashion seems to be moving further and further away from the big catwalks and closer to digital environments that are more used by certain targets.

 

18)   Online Reviews and Consumer Brand Engagement

Samuel Ayertey, Arden University, UK

Research using online reviews to assess customer satisfaction within fashion brands’ online platforms has been increasing recently. However, there is limited research using online customer reviews to conduct customer satisfaction research of fashion and luxury brands. The main purpose of this study is to explore the insights gained from fashion and luxury brand customers’ reviews of a firm’s response after a negative service experience, considering a range of recovery strategies that can be adopted.

 

19) The application of blockchain technologies in fashion businesses and brands

Claudio Becagli, University of Florence (Italy)

The impact of digital transformation on the fashion sector and related brands has been the subject of numerous studies which have highlighted the possible applications of new digital technologies. Many of these have been considered functional to the achievement of specific objectives such as, for example, better knowledge of the market and customer preferences, greater efficiency in the design or production of products, greater ease of communicating directly with market targets or improvement. of the customer journey through the integration of physical and digital commerce. The adoption of digital ledgers technologies (DLT), such as blockchain, in combination with all the others digital technologies already widely diffused, allows to pursue at the same time numerous objectives of a transversal nature. Blockchains are transaction records stored on a computer network in a permanent and substantially unalterable way without the consent of all or a qualified part of the nodes

 

20) Second-hand fashion platforms and ethical consumption

 

Silvia Ranfagni and Monica Faraoni, University of Florence (Italy)

 

The chapter investigates ethical consumption in its individual more than collective dimension. Ethical consumption can be interpreted as self-authentication acts revealing the true-self of individuals. Since an ethical business can also be seen as a business reflecting individual values, it becomes a field where individuals authenticate themselves. The aim is to investigates a) which are the acts of self-authentication expressing ethical consumption that become the basis of a collective-based authenticity the authors explore; and b) which are the self-authentication acts behind an ethical business contributing to enrich studies on ethical business. The intersecting self-authentication acts that emerge from the study are self-authentication acts expression of ethical consumption which act as catalysts to undertake performing business activities. The context of analysis is the second-hand luxury digital communites where the focus is concentrated on the analysis of Z-generation individuals who implement a sustainable behaviour acting as consumers and as sellers. The methodology is based on a combination of netnographical analysis and in-depth interviews.

O autorze

Wilson Ozuem teaches and supervises research projects in a number of UK universities, including Anglia Ruskin University, City University of London, Warwick University, University of Birmingham and the University of Cumbria. His specific research interest is understanding the impacts of emerging computer-mediated marketing environments (CMMEs) on the fashion industry. Professor Ozuem is acknowledged as one of the international leaders in the study of digital marketing and multichannel retailing. His research has been published in key journals, including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and many others. 

Silvia Ranfagni is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests include innovation, internationalization, and brand management with special reference to the fashion and cultural industry. She has participated in international marketing conferences and has published in national and international journals such as Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Management Decision, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Michelle Willis PhD is a lecturer of digital marketing at London Metropolitan University. Her doctorate is focused on customer loyalty and engagement within online brand communities. Her research lies in emerging technologies, particularly the interface between social networking sites and the development of marketing programmes. Several of her articles have been published in the journals Psychology & Marketing, Information Technology & People and Qualitative Market Research, and were presented at the American Marketing Association conference and the European Marketing Academy conference.

Blurb

This book re-evaluates the diffusion and positioning of fashion and luxury brands following the impact and disruption of digital transformations, particularly on existing omni-channel models and touchpoints and consumer behaviours. By exploring the importance of digital transformation and discussing the benefits and challenges it has created for the fashion industry, this book provides insights into the role of various digital technologies, systems and strategies in generating and maintaining brand value and equity, customer engagement and experiences and connecting the marketplace and marketspace. 

Wilson Ozuem teaches and supervises research projects in a number of UK universities, including Anglia Ruskin University, City University of London, Warwick University, University of Birmingham and the University of Cumbria. His specific research interest is understanding the impacts of emerging computer-mediated marketing environments (CMMEs) on the fashion industry. Professor Ozuem is acknowledged as one of the international leaders in the study of digital marketing and multichannel retailing. His research has been published in key journals, including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and many others. 

Silvia Ranfagni is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests include innovation, internationalization, and brand management with special reference to the fashion and cultural industry. She has participated in international marketing conferences and has published in national and international journals such as Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Management Decision, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Michelle Willis is a lecturer of digital marketing at London Metropolitan University. Her doctorate is focused on customer loyalty and engagement within online brand communities. Her research lies in emerging technologies, particularly the interface between social networking sites and the development of marketing programmes. Several of her articles have been published in the journals Psychology & Marketing, Information Technology & People and Qualitative Market Research, and were presented at the American Marketing Association conference and the European Marketing Academy conference.