TOPSHOP GRACE STONIER B5018448
The Business Of Fashion
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Grace Stonier
The Business Of Fashion
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CONTENTS 7 executive summary 10 about the brand 12 brand positioning 13 brand identity 14 consumer 16 communications mix
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The Business Of Fashion
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EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY In this project, I was able to research about the popular chain store Topshop, using primary and secondary sources. Through the spread, I talk about the history of the company, how the store brands itself to their target audience, their advertising techniques and campaigns and how their tagline and logos are effective for the brand. When gathering primary sources, I visited the largest flagship Topshop store in the United Kingdom, which is located on Oxford Street in London, England. This was incredibly helpful especially when learning about their brand consumers. The reason for this is because that particular store alone can get up to 28,000 customers in one given day. Due to this, it was relatively easy to gather a lot of information about the different shopper with there being a large quantity of people there at any given time. When looking for secondary research, Topshop’s blog and their main website was the best place to gather the information that I needed.
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TOPSHOP My chosen brand is the global fashion retailer, Topshop. As a whole it has around five hundred stores operating across thirty-seven countries, as well as via online services, with three hundred of those locating in the United Kingdom. In the 1960s, Topshop started off as a brand expansion from the British department store ‘Peter Robinson’, and later in 1964 it was formally founded and known as ‘Peter Robinson’s Top Shop’. During this period, it only sold garments that were created by young British fashion designers such as Mary Quant and Stirling Cooper. In 1973, a company called Burton launched a large expansion of their womenswear line, which lead Top Shop and Peter Robinson to split and become two separate chain stores. This lead Peter Robinson to target the over 25s, whilst Top Shop targeted the age range from 13 to 24. Within two years, Top Shop had fifty-five stand-alone flagship stores across the United Kingdom making a profit of £1million in the first year. During the decline of sales for men’s tailoring in 1978, Topshop branched out and launched their now popular brother brand, Top Man. By the start of the 1980s, the brand was now being referred to as ‘Topshop’ instead of ‘Top Shop’. To present day, Topshop is still targeting a very similar age group as it was back in the 1970s when it first branched out as its own. However, with the collections and collaborations that they do with different celebrities and designers, the target market can differ and range between all ages due to the prices and styles of each collection. When Topshop was first initiated all the brand sold was clothing and shoes, in comparison to now, Topshop
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BRAND
POSITIONING
Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. It can also be referred to as a positioning strategy, brand strategy, or a brand positioning statement. Topshop is a high street store that offers affordable clothing to their target consumers, however depending on their ranges and collections their prices can differ. Topshop can often stand out from their competitors such as Zara, Urban Outfitters and H&M, in a way that they produce high end quality clothing as well as basic quality clothing. The two brands within Topshop, ‘Topshop Unique’ and ‘Topshop Boutique’ are the more exclusive brands in the store, and Topshop Unique was in fact the first and only high street brand to have a show at London Fashion Week in 2005. When this was happening Topshop did consider their regular customers who probably wouldn’t be able to afford a ticket to London Fashion Week, so they streamed it on their website where
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BRAND
IDENTITY
Due to Topshop being one of the biggest fashion retailers in the United Kingdom, it’s brand identity and image has obviously helped them gain that title throughout the past years, whether its been their logo, advertisements or their celebrity collaborations. Their name, logo, tone, tagline and typeface all help to create their brand identity and they also all help to attract their target consumers in helping them sell their products. Topshop’s logo is simply just their brand name, ‘Topshop’, in black capital letters in the font ‘Ecotype’, which is what they famously use for most of their text, and it is set on a white background. With having a simple logo and typeface, it allows the store to appeal to a wide range of people and not just their specific target market as it is not restricting. Due to Topshop’s target market ranging between 15-30 year-olds and today’s generation being very technological savvy, it pushes companies like Topshop to up up their game in the online world. By doing this it also connects them directly to their customers helping with their customer services. Brand image has to be developed over time with a consistent theme through the way a company advertise their products and through their promotional campaigns. Throughout the years, Topshop has kept with the monochrome colour and simple font for the logo in order to build up their brand image to what it has become today. Something that has helped Topshop create the brand image that they wanted was their simple logo, their advertisement campaigns and the celebrities who they have collaborated with such as, Kate Moss, Cara Delevingne, Gigi Hadid and Kendall and Kylie Jenner.
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CONSUMER Due to Topshop’s different collections that they often bring out every season, their target audience differs depending on the prices, styles and fabrics. However, Jane Shepherdson, the previous brand manager for Topshop, said that their official target market is 15-30 year-old women. With that being said, she also says that they target everyone who loves fashion, regardless of their age and income. When I visited the Topshop store on Oxford Street in London, I noticed that there were elder teenagers and young adults shopping and purchasing items more than any other age group. From gathering my own research when visiting the Oxford Street Topshop, I would personally say that the profile of a typical Topshop consumer would be someone who is a fashion savvy female in their late teen years or early twenties that likes to keep up-to-date with the latest styles and trends whether that is by reading online blogs, following fashion bloggers/accounts on social media platforms or someone who reads fashion magazines. I would also consider a typical Topshop consumer to have their own individual style in which they create using Topshop pieces. Topshop’s target audience can be noticed through their 10% discount offer that they give to students who provide a valid NUS or university/college card at the checkout. Within certain stores, depending on how large of a scale they are, Topshop sells different brands with their own brand. With the Topshop on Oxford Street in London having five separate floors, this allows them to have extra space for other brands. The brands that they had in store when I visited were The Ragged Priest, Tee and Cake, Brandy Melville, Oh My Love and Rare. This not only helps the smaller brands gain more popularity, but it also helps Topshop consumers branch out and look at smaller companies rather than just shopping at Topshop. With these particular brands, I noticed that they had a very similar style as Topshop and that their target market also seemed very similar to Topshop’s too. The Topshop on Oxford Street also have stores such as the shoe shop, Offspring within it as it’s stand alone shop. Along with this it has a hair-
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COMMUNICATIONS
MIX
Considering that Topshop’s brand consumers are roughly under the age of 30, they are most likely going to be using forms of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. Due to social media playing a large role in a lot young people’s lives, it is often the best form of advertisement that a company can do. With this in mind, Topshop directs a lot of their advertisement campaigns towards these applications in attempt to reach their specific target market. Saying this, Topshop often approaches users with a large following asking them to do paid product placements. To do this, Topshop would send a couple of their items that they want promoting to a particular user and then the user would take it upon themselves to talk about it in a video or a picture and caption, depending on what platform they are using. This helps the company reach out to a wider audience whilst also gaining unbiased and most of the time, positive feedback on the products. Along with paid product placements and their own social media pages, Topshop often have advertisement banners running across websites like Facebook, YouTube and Google to help advertise their products and reach a further market other than their target market. Often when you want to purchase something from the Topshop website, it will ask you to either login to your account using your email address and if you do not have one, it will prompt you to create one. This is one-way Topshop are able to gain access to your email address in order to use direct marketing as a strategy of advertising, and they will send emails displaying offers and sales that they have in stores and online. In my past experiences of visiting different Topshops in cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and London, I have noticed another way that you can sign up to receive newsletters via emails is by filling out a form at the checkout tills with your email and home address. This also allows them to send you discounts and offers through the post as well as email. This was reoccurring in all three of the Topshops that I visited. Topshop are a part of the retail outlet ‘Outfit’ which forms part of the Arcadia Group that began in the 1990s. Outfit consists of nine main stores, which are BHS, Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop and Wallis. Outfit offer ‘The Outfit MasterCard’ to their customers which offers loyalty schemes to cardholders and it covers all nine of the stores, including Topshop, in the retail outlet. Topshop do a lot of celebrity endorsements and gifting whether it is with Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Gigi and Bella Hadid or Emily Ratajkowski at the Met Ball this past year in May. In June 2015, Kendall and Kylie Jenner launched a summer range in selective Topshop stores in America and in the United Kingdom. This widens the range of Topshop customers as it intrigues Kendall and Kylie fans and it helps to reach out to a bigger market. Another strategy that Topshop have used to help communicate to consumers is by using celebrities to help advertise some of their ranges or the brand in general. An example of this would be at this years Met Gala where the Topshop design team created gowns for the likes of Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin and Maryna Linchuk. Presenting gowns on celebrities at the Met Gala adds a luxury aspect to the brand and allows different audiences to see designs that Topshop is capable of producing in comparison to usual high street garments.
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BIBLIO-
GRAPHY Anon (2015) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topshop [Accessed on 25 November]
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Jonquil Lawrence (2014) Initial Brand Research: Topshop Target Market jonqull.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2014/02/20/brand-research-topshop/ [Accessed on 20 February 2014]
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