Topshop Versus River Island, Essay Example

In the contemporary world of globalisation and severe completion, for a company to achieve success, it is not enough to simply provide the best quality at the most affordable price. A successful company needs to evolve its brands according to the on-going and potential future trends in the market development. Thus, the role of marketing strategies is crucial. The aim of this paper is to analyse marketing strategies of two originally British fashion companies Topshop and River Island. In this regard, marketing approaches and techniques of each company will be viewed in terms of the existing theories and concepts of marketing.

The two companies are natural rivals in fashion market, since they both target the same segment of customer – young man and women in the age group of 18-25, with Topshop creating recently lowering its target age group to 15-16 year-olds. Both companies added collections for children; however, the primary segment remains the aforementioned age group (Varley, 2005). Both companies sell clothes with stylish and high-fashion at affordable prices. This is mainly conditioned by the young target buyers’ audience of the middle class. Consequently, in order to preserve their leading position on the High Street, have to approach their marketing strategies creatively and always look back at one another (Boone and Kurtz, 2011).

In terms of marketing strategies, both companies apply a mixture of various approaches and techniques of marketing (Wolfe, 2013). Since both companies print at a specific market segment, they tend to concentrate on the diversification of products and their styling according to the new fashion trends or the excepted ones. In this regard, both companies follow differentiation and segmentation marketing strategy developed by Smith (Shaw and Koumbis, 2013). In this regard, both companies use such marketing techniques as authoritative advertising, diversification of fashion trends, branding of the key fashion lines, development of word of mouth reputation for the most recent cutting edge designs and styles, innovation of their flagship stores on Oxford Street London (Boone and Kurtz, 2011). In terms of innovation marketing strategies, each company can be characterised in a dual manner. They both are pioneers in terms of the creation of new brands and new styles; however, they both can be viewed as close followers of the fashion trends in the fashion industry, in general, not to mention that constant mutual analysis is conducted in order to compete with one another (Easey, 2009).

According to Carl Hovland Persuasion theory, companies are aimed at providing as much information in their ads as possible in order to convince the potential customer to buy the advertised product. In the course of this theory, it would be expected that advertisements of both companies would demonstrate the detailed explanation of how certain lines are fashionable or how they could benefit one look (McCormick and Livett, 2012). However, the target customers are young and contemporary; they have a little interest in why, rather in how it is related to them. Consequently, following the recent trend in advertising campaigns, both companies concentrate their ads on individualisation of one’s experience. Topshop March 2013 advert concentrated on how their clothes could individualise a female body out of the shades of mundane dark colours, which appealed to one’s desire to be unique  and different (Shaw and Koumbis, 2013).

On the other hand, River Island was not very keen on TV advertising campaign until recently. Its first ad for autumn/winter 2014 collection became a boom, since it appealed to the universal trend of sexiness. The corner stone of the ad was the flirting between male and female models that were stripping in front of each other (Hastings, 2007). In this regard, the ad appealed to the universal human desire, which is particularly strong for the target customer group – the desire of being sexy and desirable, which the ad argues can be achieved by wearing River Island clothes (Wolfe, 2013). Thus, both advertising campaigns were aimed at appealing to customers’ psychological and emotional perceptions; however, they appealed to different ones. In terms of persuasion theory, although both ads did not concentrate on telling everything about the product to convince the target audience, they still used persuasion means on emotional and cognitive levels, which suggests the new age of persuasion techniques in advertising and implementation of persuasion theory.

Another crucial aspect of a market strategy of both companies is product branding. In this regard, they both follow the three rules of brand creation: brand image, brand identity and brand position. In the case of the Topshop, the company is characterised by the large number of brands and their particular specification on various groups and style preferences within the target customer segment (Rowley, 2009). For instance, some of the brands include Band of Gypsies, Goldie, Tee and Cake, Selected Femme, The Ragged Priest and many others. Each brand is created in order to be associated with different female preferences and styles. PR campaign for each brand is attributed to a unique female character and is identified with a certain personality trait (Wolfe, 2013). This approach of the diversity of identities does not only make brands recognisable for various sub-groups of the target customers but also creates the image of the company as diverse and able to satisfy any specific preferences of the demand (Rowley, 2009). On the other hand, the company also developed two specialised brands oriented on customers proficient in design and fashion trends. They are UNIQUE and BOUTIQUE.  These brands are oriented at celebrities and insiders of the fashion industry.

On the other hand, River Island creates fewer brands and concentrates on their seasonal specifics instead of creating long-termed style commitments. Thus, this company uses seasonal brands instead of personification of brands like Topshop does. In this regard, the contemporary brands include four main styles according to the intended surrounding and set of tones: GLAMATHON, BLUE HUES, URBAN JUNGLE, and ICE COOL. The primary market strategy of this type of branding is in demonstrating the changeability of the River Island trade mark and its commitment to the new fashion trends.  Unlike Topshop, River Island concentrates its brand identity on fashion styles instead of the diversity of female personalities, which makes the company’s approach to marketing and branding more conservative(McCormick and Livett, 2012). Thus, brands are more oriented on company’s identity rather than the correspondence of various brands to different female personalities. Topshop’s approach to branding seems to be more functional since it appeals to one’ psychology and emotional self-identification based on diversity of ideas and mood changes (Baker, 2003).

In terms of persuasion and brand identity perspectives, both companies are applying the new means of influence and attraction of demand based on popular culture narratives (Ibeh, Luo and Dinnie, 2005). Since the target customers segment includes teenagers and young adults that are particularly influenced by the trends in the popular culture, both companies were using celebrity campaigns for promoting their brands and seasonal specials. For instance, Topshop’s the most successful celebrity campaign was the promotion of the Cat Walk Collection by Kate Moss. River Island’s the most successful celeb campaign was “Rihanna for River Island.” The success of both campaigns was not conditioned by simple identification of collections with the famous figures that stimulated purchases (McCormick and Livett, 2012). The success in both cases was conditioned by the application of the concept of the diffusion of innovations particularly in terms of marketing communications. Both companies invested significantly in the means of digitalisation of their celeb campaigns and stimulation of e-commerce.

In the case with Rihanna, River Island collaborated with Facebook in the promotion of her ‘Unapologetic’ album, allowing watching extra features of her videos if River Island page was liked. Also, Facebook LifeStream was used to demonstrate the preview of their London Fashion Week, February 2013. Twitter and Instagram were also involved. Another innovation in terms of marketing communication was the use of mobile marketing sending the potential customers promotions in the nearby stores (Magrath and McCormick, 2013). Another feature was the optimisation of the website according to the Rihanna style features and search results. Topshop also aims at staying competitive in the new digital world and also diversifies its marketing communications through the application of the mentioned above features as River Island and even more (Ha and Lennon, 2010).

The company also aims at making the top fashion experience more accessible and affordable to its customers. In this regard, Topshop used the digital runaway to launch part of its Spring/Summer 2015 Collection of UNIQUE brand using Facebook instead of the live London Fashion Week runaways (Bailey and Baker, 2014).  Thus, each company tries to use pioneer innovative strategies in terms of e-commerce and digitalisation of the fashion industry. Both companies demonstrate to be successful in diffusing innovations in marketing. However, Topshop seems to take a more serious approach, since it makes the experience more personalised both in the diversity of brands and their distinctiveness (Chang and Wang, 2011).

In terms of social identity theory of marketing, Topshop approach appeals the social category of young people who are constantly in touch with their friends via new technologies and want to post, publish and share every experience they have (Ibeh, Luo and Dinnie, 2005). Though the introduction of the personified elements into marketing strategy and digitalisation of shopping experience, the company appeals to the customers’ self-identification as modern and socially active people, and since Topshop makes their social digitalised activity more dynamic and vibrant, young people get more attracted to the company and its brands (Bailey and Baker, 2014).  Topshop overrules River Island in marketing approach.

Overall, from all mentioned above, it can be concluded that both companies’ marketing strategies are oriented at the application of the innovative means of marketing communications, celebrities advertising campaigns in terms of popular culture, diversification of brands and fashion styles aimed at the target customers segment. However, Topshop demonstrated to be more innovative in its marketing strategy, making the shopping experience seem like an entertainment and another element to be added to popular culture socialising.

References

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