Surely there's a connection to be made between the fast pace of the Fashion Industry, it's tradition of working collaboratively and the rapid uptake of new media marketing strategies. There have been numerous examples which have captured my attention in the past few years. Fashion - with it's seething with a precious sort of creativity and uncurbed desire for the new, the edge, that hidden factor - is exactly makes it such a fertile ground for pushing ahead in new media, and new ways of promoting itself via real time, social and mobile media. This is a fact should be encouraging for all of us working in the creative industries at large - as well as those of us practising and playing around with new marketing strategies. I think there's a lot we can learn creatively, and commercially as marketers - which we all are to some extent these days - from the new strategies that come about.
What has drawn my attention to this recently is the strategy that unleashed Burberry's S/S 12 Collection at London Fashion week - a strategy that clearly stole everyone's thunder thanks to a killer game of digital show and tell.
A combination of tweets, live streaming and instagram easily led to Burberry the most talked about label at the show. They made it to the top often brands in terms of online buzz and Sentiment according to fashion data specialists EDITD, who analysed 300,000+ daily tweets from LFW and took statistical updates to produce the graph below, which featured in their Special Report on London Fashion Week which I encourage you to look at - because it shows just how much buzz they've grown.
How did they do this? What was behind the strategy that propelled them to become the most talked about show - on and offline? Burberry partnered with Twitter to initiate the #Tweetwalk - Making full use of the recently released photo gallery feature, a first for the brand bringing it to the largest possible Audience - the partnership also helped support The entire S/S 2012 collection was live tweeted to 532,716 odd followers via their twitter stream here. In effect giving the labels fans and supporters a first glimpse before the models hit the runway. That is - before the likes of Anna Wintour, Sienna Miller, Kanye West and all the rest. Their strategy didn't twitter and facebook, either. Burberry also hired the most-followed Instagram user in the UK, photographer Mike Kus, to take live pictures using their Instagram account, for the duration of the show, as in conjunction with a live stream both hosted on burberry.com and published to over 8 million fans on facebook and The show started at 4 pm, and according to The Guardian UK by 4:15 pm Burberry became the third most buzzed about topic on twitter, globally It's worth noting that even Christopher Baily himself shies from being called a designer - instead priding himself on being a 'practitioner in multimedia. Something which - considering the role a designer today has in influencing everything from materials, shows and creative direction of marketing strategies - is perhaps more relevant than ever before. Fashion industry leaders like Baily stand out because of their media nous as designers. But innovating and bending the boundaries of the industry you are practising in shouldn't necessarily be restricted to fashion. In my mind - as I've said - the fashion landscape is a catalyst for this kind of movement - but the fact that collaboration is necessary to survival, that working as a team to produce something amazing, and borrowing ideas and not being afraid to copy and reinvent is part of pushing forward - is remarkably similar to what marketers and advertisers are having to embrace in order to succeed in their strategies today. It mightn't be breakthrough stuff - but the combination and strategy used to shake up a standard industry formula is something I think other creative industries and marketers should be taking note of. What is so fascinating to me about the Fashion industry and it's uptake of integrated media strategies is that it readily transgresses all the boundaries of which the industry has been formed. For the uninitiated outsiders at least, the industry rituals have always been a sort of high-cultural snob fest. Until now. Because that's all starting to change. via mashable, guardian.co.uk, PSFK & EDITD
