People
‘People’ is one of the four pillars in fashion business, and is crucial to a brands success or failure. Gen Z is one of the leading consumers of the market making them the target audience for most brands. Gen Z are described as ages 12-26 years, as of now, and are different from other generations of shoppers due to being the first generation to grow up as digital natives, meaning they’ve been surrounded by technology their entire lives (Morgan, G. 2022). This means that brands marketing strategies need to differ in order to appeal to this generation as traditional marketing is less effective than to prior generations. Gen Z are far bigger users of video app ‘TikTok’, 50.3% of Gen Z use it as opposed to 25.7% of Millennials (Morgan, G. 2022). The popularity of this app has led to an increase in marketing through social media in order to target Gen Z, one brand who utilised this was Hugo Boss with the ‘#HowDoYouHUGO’ Ad campaign. Hugo Boss effectively ‘split into two brands’ in order to target both
Gen Z and Millennials through different marketing techniques. ‘Hugo’ targeted Gen Z and created a dance trend using influencers such as Maddie Ziegler, Diversity and Chloe Cherry who appeal to Gen Z as consumers. The use of celebrity culture has shifted for Gen Z and they relate more to influencers who they form a trust of rather than the ‘traditional’ celebrities, such as movie stars, who don’t connect with their audience as much. This shift has seen the rise in influencers working with brands in order to help build a brands reputation for being trustworthy amongst Gen Z.
Diversity within the fashion industry is a recurring issue, due to the lack of diversity and inclusivity within marketing. With the rise of Gen Z there’s been a demand for diversity within brands due to Gen Z’s need for consumption of ethical products (Francis & Hoefel 2018) and this has resulted in increased representation. In 2018 Teen Vogue created ‘the new faces of fashion’ campaign featuring disabled models in order to increase representation and diversity to appeal to Gen Z consumers. However, brands are capitalising off of their use of diversity so could arguably be increasing their representation in order to profit from sales which questions how ethical these ‘ethical’ brands are.
The average size in the UK for a woman is size 16, whereas most models are a size UK 4-6. There has been an increased demand for representation of different body types that reflect most women in the UK. However, there’s been a debate that this won’t appeal to consumers as it doesn’t reflect the ideology their clothings trying to represent. (Diedrichs, P.C, Lee, C., & Kelly, M. 2011) conducted a study concluding that participants do want more diversity within the industry, supporting the idea that more representation would appeal to consumers and these values would align with the targeted consumers.
Reference List
Braun, D. (2022) Maddie Ziegler – Hugo Boss 2022 Available at: https://celebmafia.com/maddie-ziegler-hugo-boss-2022-3067627/ (Accessed: 21/10/2022)
Falquez, C. (2018) What It’s Like to Be a Disabled Model in the Fashion Industry Available at: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/cover-story-representation-fashion-industry-jillian-mercado-mama-cax-chelsea-warner (Accessed: 21/10/2022)