One of the most common issues I see in my consulting work–for all brands, not just fashion brands–is a lack of focus in marketing strategy.
Brands have a list of core marketing activities and new initiatives to test. The list is too long for the brand’s lean team. And as a result, none of the marketing is executed particularly well, and no one understands what is actually contributing to growth.
I’m going to outline a framework I use to help brands pick the right marketing priorities that actually help the brand grow.
First, I want to thank this week's sponsor: Inventory Planner by Sage. If you're still doing planning in a spreadsheet, you're leaving money on the table. Inventory Planner's software is informed by decades of retail expertise to help you maximize the ROI of your product assortment.
This framework makes the most sense within the context of the three stages of growth, so you might want to read that post first if you haven’t already.
To start, I break marketing tactics into one of three buckets:
Direct Response
Direct response marketing captures “in market” demand for specific products. Meta and Google are the best channels for digital direct response marketing, and illustrate the “in market” concept well.
On Google, someone searching for “red patent leather Mary Jane flats” obviously has a really clear idea of what they want to purchase. They’re probably motivated by a specific use case.
On Meta, once you start shopping for a specific item online, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with ads for similar items.
“In market” means the shopper knows what they want and has a high probability of converting within one to seven days. This means that, when managed correctly, direct response advertising can produce predictable cash flow.
Direct response (usually Meta and Google for fashion brands) is the cash flow engine of a bootstrapped business. Brands who fail to build out this engine will have a hard time surviving without outside capital.
You can’t sell any product with direct response. You need to produce something that overlaps with a meaningful segment of in-market demand. I wrote more about “merchandising for Meta ads” here.
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Product Marketing
Product marketing goes slightly up the funnel. You’re doing one of two things: creating mental availability or manufacturing demand for a specific product or product family from scratch.
Creating mental availability is positioning your brand as a destination for a specific product category, occasion or aesthetic. If you’re looking for coastal grandma cashmere sweaters, you go to Jenni Kayne. If you’re looking for vintage-inspired dresses that look good on postpartum bodies, you go to Dôen. If you’re looking for IG thirst trap apparel, you go to Fashion Nova.
Manufacturing demand for a specific product from scratch is essentially “making fetch happen”. You’re trying to make a product “go viral” through your own volition. The most successful efforts here develop a product into a consumer trend or talking point. The Coach Brooklyn bag is a good example.
Channels and activities that fall into this bucket are product-focused influencer and gifting campaigns, full price affiliate marketing, product-focused PR, “viral” moments that are product-focused, and category-focused paid media run with a concrete measurement framework (“impressions” doesn’t count).
The returns on product marketing are semi-predictable. You need to give a well-executed campaign at least three to four weeks to build momentum and “see it working”. That makes it inherently riskier; you have to invest more in a specific ad creative or strategy to find out if it’s effective.
If you strategy is good, you should see downstream impacts on your direct response channels within three to four weeks, sometimes sooner. This means that direct response will become more efficient at its current spend level, or you’ll be able to increase budget at your target ROAS.
Brand Marketing
Brand marketing is true “top of funnel”. The objective is to build brand awareness, desirability and credibility. This is the riskiest marketing. The payback period is almost entirely unpredictable, and sometimes it’s impossible to measure.
Fashion shows, campaign shoots, lending out clothing to magazine photoshoots, and gifting/lending clothing with no criteria on the pieces selected are all brand marketing. “Vibey” paid media that isn’t product- or category-focused, and has no framework for measuring the lift in sales, is also brand marketing.
Brand Marketing is playing the long game. In fashion specifically, it’s more about signaling industry credibility or associations with the “right” people than it is about making money.
Marketing Priorities In The Three Stages
Stage 1: Finding White Space
In this stage, direct marketing is the base of your pyramid. In fact, you should do nothing but direct marketing until you are predictably generating enough cash to cover your overhead. That’s how you build a sustainable business.
Exposing your product to in-market demand will validate your whitespace hypothesis. If there isn’t scalable demand for your product, there probably isn’t any whitespace. You’re producing something that no one (or very few people) want.
When you have a scalable, predictable direct response flywheel, you can start layering on product marketing and brand marketing. But be careful not to let these activities dominate your attention and resources or dilute the impact of your DR flywheel.
Stage 2: From Whitespace To “Lifestyle”
At this stage, you keep your DR flywheel running, but you scale back some of the more aggressive aspects of the strategy. Maybe you stop running your most raw and platform-native ad creative formats.
At this stage, tactics that slightly dilute your Meta efficiency don’t matter because you’ve built up brand awareness and a base of repeat customers. Your cash flow engine is somewhat self-perpetuating.
My personal perspective: brands need to exist in Stage 1 for a minimum of five years to make the transition into Stage 2. There are exceptions–brands that meet a cultural moment or do an exceptional job of building their own demand.
In this stage, marketing becomes propaganda. You want to romanticize what you stand for and win more converts to the cause. You want your product being seen on the right people–not just celebrities, but the proverbial “Joneses” in every relevant ZIP code. This is where distribution strategy becomes important.
Stage 3: From Brand To Platform
Real talk: at this stage, it’s hard to prevent effective marketing from being completely subsumed by careerism and bureaucracy. Measuring the true incremental impact of marketing becomes incredibly important. Stage 3 brands have so much awareness that it becomes challenging to do something truly incremental.
To reach Stage 3, brands need national awareness and a sizable national footprint. Gap, Old Navy, Coach, Victoria’s Secret, Lululemon and Abercrombie and Fitch are all Stage 3 brands. You need to be around for at least a decade to reach this stage.
Defending and capturing market share is the name of the game. Merchandising and distribution become more important than marketing. The core business evolves from a single product to a category, categories or product family. Lululemon = leggings, Victoria’s Secret = bras, Gap = jeans, intimates and lounge, etc.
Market share is captured through the launch of new, superior products in the hero category or successful category launches. VS PINK was a successful market share capture strategy when it launched.
Marketing supports these merchandising initiatives, and can amplify it. But these brands are too big to “put lipstick on a pig”. A viral campaign can give these brands a one day sales bump, but the business itself is too large for those contributions to be meaningful.
Example: I was working at Gap in 2017 when they released the viral Naomi Campbell campaign for the 90s reissue collection. That drove a week of strong eCom selling and good customer acquisition. But few of those customers came back, and the brand is still in trouble.