The Secret Of Successful Small And Medium-Sized Brands Becoming Popular Has Been Found

Fashion PR is not like before. Think about the experience of Amy Smilovic, the designer of the popular brand Tibi. In 1997, she founded her own brand in New York, just three years earlier than the founding of Lucky magazine by Conde Nast Group. Lucky is different from the previous high-end fashion magazines. The latter, through carefully planned fashion blockbusters and lengthy interviews with designers, largely skirted the fact of selling clothes. But Lucky only cares about one thing: buy buy. It is not elegant enough, but its smart copy provides readers with reliable advice on where to buy things.

For Smilovic, Lucky has become an important means of public relations. A single product photo in a magazine can help her sell a product. She said, "We occasionally advertise on magazines like Vogue, but we never really believed in it, because you could not connect these points at that time. Lucky was the paper version of Instagram at that time, once a month. It really looks ordinary, but it really drives sales. "

Nowadays, Lucky is no longer published, and advertising positions on other magazines are not helpful to Smilovic. In 2011, she successfully transformed Tibi from a mid tier brand that was over commercialized and invested heavily in paper media to a more advanced, design oriented brand that reflected her own personality. Her sales continued to double all the way and finally achieved profitability.

At the initial stage of transformation, Smilovic heavily relied on like-minded online celebrities to help promote, but recently she has also begun to take Instagram seriously, mixing her favorite brands (such as Loewe and Balenciaga) with her own designs almost every day to provide styling and business advice to entrepreneurs. On Sunday morning, she will call on everyone to actively ask questions, and she will answer them later.

"No one asked me how to cut avocado," she said: "No one wrote to ask, 'What is your constellation?' But they asked me how to calculate gross profit margin." Her followers on Instagram are still very few, but they have doubled since April, with 18000 fans. Smilovic also relaunched her "unstitched" series of speeches, which focused on the internal operation of the industry, at Tibi's flagship store in Manhattan and on a podcast. In store activities often attract more than 200 fans.

She said, "The more honest you are, the more communication you have, the more resonance you will have."

This is far from the days when Lucky was still alive. Now, popularity can be measured, just like sales transformation, in terms of public relations, the transparency of what works and what doesn't work is getting higher and higher. Smilovic is still doing many things she has done before. She pays attention to maintaining the relationship with the editor; She showed at fashion week, but the way she did these things has also changed.

Not every brand or PR company can adapt to the current environment. A designer's personal interview can rarely attract people's attention as before, unless the designer is already a celebrity and has said some outrageous words. Instead, designers should be able to create their own online personas and interact directly with customers. More importantly, embedded advertising in print magazines rarely drives sales. (In the United States, except for important newspapers, whose readers are older.) Nowadays, the goal of the brand is to get praise on a specific shopping website, a popular online account or social media. Elaine Chang, President of Tibi, describes Instagram Shopping as a "powerful" tool.

Even if you believe that traditional media can still bring glory to the brand, it is more difficult than ever to obtain those exquisite embedded advertisements. Old fashion magazines pay more and more attention to online and offline advertisers. The rest of their resources are focused on stories that can spread and attract attention. In the past, magazines often published some small news reports, which would not be useful, just for good intentions, or just for enthusiasm, or just for business feedback. Now, with less personnel input and more measurable results, such stories are more difficult to prove to be the right public relations means.

Here, when the traditional public relations do not work, you should master and try the method.

Promote stories, not products

In the past, brands would bring the products they need to promote (maybe new designs or new series) to PR publicists, who would then entrust them to write a promotional script and get fashion editors to list the product as news and hand it to journalists. Today, consumers are exposed to new things several times a day. In order to make the product lasting, brand and publicity personnel need to work together to find reasonable reasons to attract consumers' attention.

Lisa Frank, a partner of Derris, said, "You must have a persuasive narrative and a strong story." Reformation, Warby Parker and other consumer facing brands. "If you need to promote a product, it may be useful in your own channel. But for the media, you need to find those moments when you need to tell stories. The introduction of a new color is not news. Nobody cares."

The brand Everlane, headquartered in San Francisco, focuses on basic models, but there are several waves of public relations every year. For example, the company plans to eliminate pure plastic products from the supply chain by 2021, and launch the sports shoe brand Tread - its product promotion is only focused on its e-mail marketing.

In the high fashion industry, successful storytellers include Kerby Jean Raymond, the designer of Pyer Moss. His contribution to cultural dialogue has attracted many media and consumers, and also brought him a long-term contract with Reebok. Simon Porte Jacquemus attracted attention through innovation: the oversized hat and mini bag he designed may not be the profit driver of the brand, but they are the material of the perfect expression bag.

　 Find different stars and online celebrities to cooperate

Just a few years ago, online celebrities like Olivia Palermo or new supermodels like Jenner and Hadid passed through your products and were almost sure to bring goods with them, almost guaranteeing that your products sold out. But now in the world, stars and online celebrities are more diligent in changing clothes than anyone else, and your products are hard to see.

Brian Phillips, the founder and president of the communication company Black Frame, said that a more effective approach is to adopt a broader implantation strategy, not only focusing on celebrities and online celebrities with a large number of fans and traffic, but also focusing on a series of names that help to establish brand image in the eyes of consumers. Black Frame cooperates with Eckhaus Latta, Nike and other brands as well as creative agency Framework.

Phillips cites Rodarte, its customer, as an example. Although the Los Angeles based brand is known for its handmade clothes rather than commercial ones, its revenue has been stable since its launch in 2008. Friends of designers such as Kirsten Dunst, Dakota Fanning, Jay Z, Rihanna and comedian Will Ferrell have been wearing Rodarte's clothes in public. "It was an unexpected surprise," he said

From designer interviews to designer social media accounts

For brands, big name designers are often not worth taking the risk of receiving exclusive interviews. Just like actors, designers skip magazines and can communicate with fans directly through social media, so that they can better control narration and interaction. Although some top magazines still have some designers who provide the recognition they want, it is extremely limited to help the brand.

"The more personalized your brand is, the more successful your brand will be," said Tibi's Chang. "Amy's Instagram is very powerful because direct communication is really important."

From Rihanna to Marc Jacobs, designers insist on using their own platforms to show their personal world. This does not always lead to direct sales conversion, but it does keep designers and consumers in continuous dialogue. The Cut, a popular fashion and cultural media, did not report Gucci's recent advertising blockbuster, but published an Instagram post from creative director Alessandro Michele, with the protagonist being his friend and frequent star Jared Leto.

Don't worry about the exposure of brand labels

If you visit any of the offices of the brand's chief marketing officer, you will see magazines with labels, marking the exposure of the brand in this issue. These revelations once showed a magazine's commitment to its partnership - a usually self-evident but effective "unspoken rule of using money to speak". Unfortunately, this is no longer as meaningful as before. If you are not an advertiser, it is unlikely that you will publish your high profit margin blockbuster products - such as T-shirts, jeans, classic handbags, etc. - in magazines.

This means that brands must come up with new ways to market their truly profitable products, which is usually not achieved through traditional editorial implantation. What works? Provide links through shopping websites or influential social media (such as Instagram or WeChat applet), as well as online celebrities who can prove that they really like what they are promoting.

Create your own community

"For smaller brands seeking to develop their own tonality, the first thing we discuss is community," Phillips said. "Must be authentic and unique."

From Supreme to Glossier, community is an important part of consumer oriented narrative. For many niche fashion brands, "club sense" has always been a part of their attraction. However, it may be a challenge to cultivate such a group from the bottom up. Telfar Clemens founded his own brand in 2004. He used the mission of making fashion more inclusive to make the brand commercially feasible and brought a group of enthusiastic supporters. He often uses such lines: "Not for you, but for everyone."

Clemens did not win the annual accessory designer award of the American Fashion Designers Association for his popular "shopping" bag, but he did get strong support from the media and the community. In August 2019, long after the CFDA award ceremony ended, and even longer after the first release of this blockbuster package, Emma Hope Allwood of Dazed Digital wrote an ode to this product: "Why is Telfar shopping bag the most important accessory in this decade?"

Create an endless media channel

Creating content is nothing new, but it is more challenging now than in the past to make it work. To build your own media, you need not only a budget, but also good ideas. There are many ways to do this. In March 2018, Scott Sternberg, founder of Band of Outsiders, founded the basic brand Overall World, which is headquartered in Los Angeles. He has only a small budget. However, the odd Instagram video ads inspired and created by him and his team in the 1980s were extremely popular. He regularly invited online celebrities, including Busy Phillips, Jason Schwartzman and Amanda Steinberg. At this stage of growth, brands can hardly afford paid marketing, but through personal relationships and mutual recognition of creativity, it is possible to create content and brand perspectives.

Now, using social media as a public relations tool is critical. For the first time, Entireworld cooperated with a major women's fashion publication for celebrity oriented video promotion. The media has "exclusive" copyright, and embedded the video on the brand's YouTube page in an article on its website. A few days later, the number of views of each video was only about 100. On Entireworld's own Instagram, the click rate of these videos ranged from 1500 to 15000. At that time, the number of fans of this account was less than 10000 (nearly 45000 at present).

Sternberg said: "Facts have proved that the social media algorithm that labels friends with enthusiastic comments is a more effective public relations machine than the exclusive news for the media. In the past, exclusive news seemed to be a necessary condition for cooperation with the media, but now, the concept of exclusivity runs counter to the concept of social communication and digital media. "From our past experience, the media is always the most powerful, because it can create collective effects around a particular moment of a brand... But these collective effects are less and less in these days."

Think about real life

Brands should also take physical space as a form of media. The Los Angeles based brand Co seldom adopts traditional public relations methods. Founders Stephanie Danan and Justin Kern have never held a runway show or any formal exhibition, nor have they done anything to attract media, online celebrities or celebrities. "Human motivation doesn't work," says Danan. "I have never seen our sales increase because stars wear or appear in magazine articles."

On the contrary, this profitable company, which is expected to create an income of nearly 20 million dollars in 2019, rented a Fitzpatrick Leland house designed by the famous architect R.M. Schindler in 1936. There, they host orders with buyers, private meetings with customers, and informal gatherings and dinners throughout the year, all of which replace traditional stores and press conferences. They are still shooting their catalogue there.

"Several times a month, I will be introduced to someone who will say, 'Ah, this is the brand of that house,'" Kern said. "This person may not know this brand very well. They may not have bought our products, but they know us."

Stakeholders: Lauren Sherman, the author of this article, worked for Lucky magazine from 2011 to 2012