Fashion Brands and Social Media ROI: Are the traditional measures really relevant?

When it comes to measuring activity on the web, only one thing is certain: traditional analytic measures will never give you the full picture.

Take for instance fashion retail brands—particularly fast fashion retailers such as Zara, H&M, Top Shop, and Century XXI (US), which compete on their ability to stay on top, or ahead of fashion. The brands create excitement by delivering style at an extraordinary pace.

For these brands that are trying constantly to stay ahead, typical brand tracking becomes relatively difficult to apply to marketing and retail activities. Imagine trying to understand how to improve traffic with three to six months of consumer data, when you’re already aiming to launch a new line and completely redress the retail experience around a new season. How can brand marketers be more forward looking, versus retrospective, without getting lost in the ‘future trends’?

Because of this struggle, ROI should be measured by the brand’s ability to understand and apply real-time trends that are coming to life online.  This is the power of real time analytics. Brand marketers in these organizations should ultimately be held accountable for how quickly they can capture trends from social media, and more importantly, how effectively they can feed those into their business to impact brand activities.

So, what are some examples of fashion retail brands that are effectively learning from social media buzz and applying this to brand management?

A good example is Banana Republic. While Banana Republic is not a fast fashion retailer, it still faces pressure to stay on-trend. It is has innovated around this by developing online communities of fashionistas, using the conversation and forums to keep a closer pulse on where the market is going. Through its Insider Panel, Banana Republic is creating conversations with savvier consumers to develop hypotheses and validate initiatives already in progress.

Another brand that has embarked on a similar initiative is American Apparel. It has partnered with Lookbook.nu to allow customers to submit pictures of themselves wearing the brand. American Apparel then use the images for advertising. However, American Apparel's had an even more genius strategy here. It also analysed the submitted pictures to identify trends. By studying customer outfits, American Apparel could find out how consumers were pairing the American Apparel brand with other brands.  It was an incredible fusion of social media activity and analytics to develop recommendations for merchandising.

Integrating insights from the fashion crowd into brand tracking is another way to create a relevant and dynamic dashboard for management. Companies like Style Signal are able to monitor the web, filtering specific consumer targets, and ultimately collecting buzz around what colors, designers, and cuts are going to be the next hit.

As these retail brands demonstrate, when it comes to social media, traditional analytic measures are not as effective as the ability to translate online buzz into immediate brand building activities. Brand marketers instead need to prove that they have the right processes, tools, and activities (listed above) in place to positively impact the ongoing brand management process. Ultimately, marketers in this sector will be measured on how quickly they can translate the buzz into insights, and then how effectively those insights are interpreted into operations meetings, merchandising sessions, buying decisions, and communications briefs.

This post is the second in a series called That’s Debatable: Social Media Edition – posts designed around oft-debated topics in our community, meant to spark conversation and gather different perspectives. Learn more about That’s Debatable, and take our social media survey.

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