Keywords

1 Introduction

As Noris, Nobile, Kalbaska, and Cantoni highlight, citing Guercini et al. (2018), “the increasing societal impact of fashion as a field has also been made possible due to the changes that occurred in technology and to the interactions that the fashion sector has been able to develop within the digital framework [1].

Fashion, in its communicative dimension, has aroused great interest in recent years thanks to the new opportunities offered by digital technologies and the social tools with which it is expressed. Fashion brands are a reference from the creative and strategic point of view in a world immersed in a cultural revolution that is transforming our way of communicating.

From an economic or commercial perspective, fashion is an industry and a business whose mission is to generate wealth through the creation, manufacture, and marketing of products and services. Most of the industrial sectors resort to marketing and advertising, but only fashion is based on it in a decisive way. Although, as a rule, advertising is an expensive mode of promotion, for large global brands with a considerable budget, it represents a high visibility promotional facet and one of the primary methods to convey and communicate the identity and message of the brand. Fashion “contributes to the development of commercial activities, relationships among people, fields such as art, music, literature, culture, beauty, and many more” [1, p. 33].

In the following study, how the fashion sector behaves in an eminently technological environment when it comes to establishing communication strategies with its audiences will be analyzed.

First, a literature review will be carried out to show how the use of advertising and communication formats has evolved over the years. Secondly, the communication campaigns of fashion brands will be analyzed through the selection made in the prestigious magazine Contagious during the period from 2010 to 2020. In this way, we will be able to analyze how the number and type of formats used have changed over these 11 years.

2 Literature Review

More than fifty years ago, products were just products. Advertising was a monologue of rational arguments, and power was in the hands of the manufacturers [2, 3]. The products were just products, and the strategies followed by the agencies when writing the monologue script had a name: Unique Selling Proposition (USP). When brands emerged—a way of distinguishing products that ran the risk of being as difficult to differentiate as two drops of water [4]—strategies based on rational elements began to lose prominence. The consumer already took for granted that the products were good, with a quality guarantee. Emotional aspects conquered a space in decision-making. However, the consumer still did not have the opportunity to talk with his brands. The monologue prevailed, and advertising agencies sought more emotional communication strategies, with emotional language for their one-sided communications. This new current brought new strategic formulations. For example, the multinational Havas Worldwide designed the Star Strategy, a philosophy that considered products as people not only because of an attribute—as opposed to the method of positioning or unique benefit—but because of their global personality. Another example is the Emotional Selling Proposition (ESP), which sought to find an emotional or appealing argument to the consumer that was associated with the product and became an incentive to buy [5, 6].

Today technology and interactivity have enriched conversations between the brand and the consumer and made them enormously complex [7, 8]. The consumer experience has shifted toward media consumption across multiple screens and devices [9, 10], with increasingly blurred boundaries between the online and offline worlds. Social networks have brought fundamental changes to “the way we communicate, collaborate, consume and create” [11, p. 4] and especially in how consumers interact with brands [12, 13]. Before, the brand spoke, and the consumer listened. The receiver could not respond and was isolated. Now, our way of communicating has changed: the consumer is the boss. Rather than being a passive subject, he becomes an active subject and seeks communication: he participates in it, lives it, expands it, and even feeds it with various marketing environments in a mobile-oriented world [14].

This territory has required a new approach when developing strategic solutions for brands. Smart strategies that require more knowledge, understanding, and respect for the consumer are needed. Exchange strategies where both parties have to benefit and where in many cases emotion must prevail in the communication carried out by brands are used.

Thus, Kevin Roberts, when he led the Saatchi & Saatchi agency worldwide, created a vision on how brands should face and build their relationship with the active recipient: Lovemarks. Lovemarks transcend brands: they go beyond brands and consumer expectations. Lovemarks reach not only the mind of the consumer but also the heart of him, creating an intimate and emotional connection, without which he simply cannot live. Another example of this trend can be seen in the global agency Leo Burnett, which began to work on the communication of its clients under a strategic prism baptized as HumanKind; the fundamental pillar on which it rests is the knowledge of the human being in all its aspects.

The rise of these new advertising strategies is within the digital ecosystem. If once advertising sent persuasive single-channel, one-way, brand-initiated hits in the traditional advertising ecosystem, it has now become an omnichannel set of actions, with two-way (or multiple) messages and with interactions generated (or generated by multiple actors) throughout the consumer journey [15]. In this way, the traditional notion of media planning, driven by the exposure that the user has, has evolved into a planning of interaction with consumers to foster a relationship of commitment. It is about cross-channel or multichannel marketing, which coordinates multiple channels to complement and reinforce the impact of each. The aim is more efficient and effective marketing. The combination has a stronger impact than if channels are used individually. Cross-channel or multichannel marketing is also known as “integrated marketing” or 360° campaigns. With smartphones and other portable media devices, the consumer is exposed to advertising everywhere, “as opposed to only while watching television or sitting in front of a computer” [9, p. 417]. Cross-media campaigns are proving to be the solution to fragmented attention. Specifically, “using digital media in tandem with traditional media can maximize reach and significantly improve campaign effectiveness” [16]. On the other hand, a multichannel campaign creates “consumption synergies, enabling advertisers to capture consumer attention at different points in their purchase journey” [17]. It maximizes reach, which helps to reinforce the message from different angles with different advertising tactics: “Including offline channels in the mix is crucial as they can deliver significantly more reach than most digital vehicles” [18].

In this new digitalized scenario, brands should take into account some trends when planning their interaction experiences with users [19]:

  1. 1.

    The convergence of media, where the limits between the different media channels and between the advertising, technology, and media production sectors begin to blur [10], is important.

  2. 2.

    The rise of social networks has given access not only to more knowledge about consumer preferences [11], but also to new forms of interaction between consumers and brands, and between consumers about the brands [12, 13, 20]. It also allows the emergence of new actors as influencers [21, pp. 120–122].

  3. 3.

    Datafication—in other words, “the transformation of human life into data through quantification processes and the generation of different types of value from the data” [22, p. 3]. Activities that were previously non-digital (e.g., looking at a map, talking to a friend, or even turning on the lights) have been converted into digital data that can be (re) used for advertising purposes and brand interactions.

  4. 4.

    Tracking everywhere enables customers to be tracked on various websites and mobile devices and gives brands a more complete view of consumers’ lives [23].

  5. 5.

    With increased tracking and datafication, more opportunities for personalization arise. Consumers can be approached individually based on their (digital) behavior through online behavioral advertising [7].

  6. 6.

    The growing relevance of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies in this field provide great opportunities for advertisers [12]. Even computational advertising (CA) has changed the way brands generate and disseminate their content. Now, many brand messages are often generated by computers with minimal or no human participation [24].

Specifically, regarding fashion marketing, following Guercini, Mir, and Prentice [25, p. 4], emerging models cover various thematic areas, including the following: the impact of new technologies on consumer behavior, the integration of online fashion marketing and offline fashion marketing, the impact of new IT technologies and new marketing tools (such as search engine marketing and social media marketing), and the role of new emerging players in the digital environment (e.g., fashion bloggers), with particular reference to online opinion leaders and their influence and managerial implications for fashion marketers. The fashion industry, according to Ian Rogers, LVMH’s chief digital officer, started “very early on, on communication transformation,” and the fashion brands are leaders in “using social media” [26].

In particular, the behavior of sports fashion brands is relevant. In the last “2021 Outlook for the US Sports Industry” report from Deloitte, there are three critical issues for the sports industry to consider in 2021. Among them is redefining relationships with fans, in which “it is important for sports organizations to invest in multichannel digital solutions” [27, p. 3].

Furthermore, the revolution in digital technology and the advent of big data has caused advertising and its ecosystem to be transformed in a radical way [28]. The most notable changes in the new definitions of advertising are the elimination of the elements of “payment” and “mass media” and that the roles of consumers have been expanded [14, 29]. In recent years, advertising has become a communication initiated and created by the brand to impact people [29, p. 343], and all kinds of brand communication actions, paid and unpaid, are initiated by the brand and the consumer [30]. While the first definition apparently implies who initiates the communication, including the intention of the communicator and the specific effects, the second does not contain either the element “intention” or the “effect.” Currently, advertising includes all types of communication in the media, whether paid, earned, or owned, through “different mechanisms and practices initiated by both businesses and consumers, and call for revolutionary changes in our thinking of the advertising ecosystem and key actors in it” [31, p. 378].

3 Analysis

3.1 Methodology

As described in the previous sections, sociocultural changes, technology innovation, interactivity, brand strength, and the active role and power of consumers have transformed how brands are applying their communication strategies. Creativity strives to achieve the creation of meeting spaces, the cultivation of relationships, and the development of communication products with a strong capacity to attract. Communication strategies develop ideas for long-term, authentic, and emotional relationships between brands and the people who use them.

The objective of the research is to detect, analyze, and highlight the evolution of the advertising formats of fashion brands during the analysis period from 2010 to 2020. For this, the chosen sample came from the international magazine Contagious Magazine, which four times a year selects and shows the brightest and most effective marketing and branding ideas worldwide.

The years prior to 2010 were a period of uncertainty following the emergence of major digital technologies such as the iPhone (2007) and the birth of Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006): “The past five years have witnessed a period in which the diffusion of digital technologies created significant uncertainty about the pervasiveness of the digital revolution. But that stage is over, and the strategic options available to established firms and new entrants are now much clearer. The digital revolution is, and will remain, pervasive” [32, p. 77]. Between 2010 and 2020, social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest (2010) or TikTok (2016) arose and consolidated. As a result, “consumers can speak so freely with each other and businesses have increasingly less control over the information available about them in cyberspace” [33, p. 197].

Forty-four issues of Contagious magazine have been reviewed over 11 years, from 2010 to 2020. 1089 news items were published in these 11 years in the “News” section, of which only 10.65% (116) were communication campaigns for fashion brands. Those 116 campaigns correspond to 55 different fashion brands.

As we explained previously, the objective of the research was to analyze the evolution of the communication formats used by fashion brands over the years. To do this, we rely on the specification made about Nielsen formats in The Nielsen Global Survey of Trust in Advertising (2015) [34], and we analyzed each communication campaign of fashion brands from the perspective of which formats they had used. This is the list of the analyzed formats:

  • On the one hand, the more traditional and general formats were included: point of sale; outdoor and ambient; TV; press; event/sponsorship; cinema; radio; and Internet.

  • On the other hand, we wanted to specify other modalities of more specific formats. They are as follows: editorial content; emails signed up for; radio ads; newspaper ads; outdoor ads; ads before movies; TV ads; consumer opinions online; websites; magazine ads; brand sponsorships; TV show product placement; search engine ad results; personal recommendations; online banner ads; ads on social networks; ads on mobiles; apps; webfilm; music videos; gaming; social media; tech; VR and AR; artificial intelligence; and geolocation.

First, a correlation was performed to analyze the evolution of the formats during the study period. Second, the brands and the use of the formats were analyzed in depth through a correspondence analysis. A strong and positive correlation between the two types of formats (traditional and modern) suggests that we need to include both of them jointly in the second analysis, which consists of implementing a correspondence analysis between the different brands and the use of the formats (a component analysis with qualitative variables). This technique permits us to analyze in depth the preferences of each brand for one type of format over the others.

3.2 Results

3.2.1 Evolution of Formats in Brands During the Period 2010 to 2020

With a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.89, we can observe a directly proportional relationship in the evolution of publications in both formats (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Evolution of the types of formats (2010 to 2020)

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It is observed that the second type of format is present in more communication campaigns of fashion brands.

In the following graph, both formats can be disaggregated, showing the most used formats during the analyzed period, where the Internet, social networks, and websites are the most frequent formats used repeatedly throughout the period, followed by point of purchase (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Most used formats from 2010 to 2020

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3.2.2 Correspondence Analysis

This analysis was conceived to analyze contingency or double-entry tables, relating to double information: on the one hand, the brands (row), and on the other hand, the types of formats (column). This study analyzed 55 brands with 36 different types of formats from the quarterly publications of Contagious between 2010 and 2020. The different types of formats are classified as row profiles and the different types of brands as column profiles. The graphical representation of both together will allow us to see the positioning and preferences of brands for certain types of formats compared to others.

To weight the study between brands and types of format, it was decided to create three groups based on the total number of campaigns in which each brand was mentioned. First, we have group 1, with brands that have a number equal to or less than 5 campaigns. Group 2 has brands with between 6 and 10 campaigns, and the third group contains brands with more than 10 campaigns.

Group 1

In the first group, 29 brands can be found: Alexander McQueen, American Eagle Outfitters, Asos, Beyond Retro, Bonds, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Carlings, Dior, Dockers, Dr. Martens, Faribault, Fes Jeans, Freitag, General Pants, Ida Klamborn, Ipanema, La Redoute, Le Slip Francais, L’Oreal, Louis Vuitton, Myer, Paisley, Patagonia, Reebok, Ripley, RYV, Saucany, Vans, Wrangler, Yoox, and Zalando (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Group 1

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It can be highlighted that the data appears very concentrated; therefore, we can conclude that the brands in this group, in a particular way, do not present an association with specific formats but rather choose varied formats. There is a high internal consistency, a direct relationship between all of the brands, except one, and the associated formats. The case of Dockers remains dispersed; it is separated from the rest of the brands since it is associated only with one format, which is TV. In the left section of the plot, we also highlight various behaviors. On the one hand, Ida Klamborn and General Pants, who separate themselves from the others by using brand sponsorship and search engines, are relevant.

We understand how these brands, which have had little representation in the selected campaigns, behave in a very similar way and adopt most of the analyzed formats in a homogeneous way.

Group 2

The second group is made up of the following 15 brands: Amaro, Benetton, Bjon Borg, Jigsaw, H&M, Joe Boxer, Everlane, Max Factor, North Face, Kenzo, Lacoste, New Balance, Asics, Under Armour, and Tesco Clothing (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Group 2

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H&M, Kenzo, Benetton, and Asics choose the VR/AR, tech, and outdoor ad formats. The preferred formats of New Balance and Joe Boxer are webfilm and geolocation; Everlane, Max Factor, and North Face prefer websites, emails, or social networks. Tesco Clothing uses search engines and results and events/sponsorships or ambient media. Jigsaw has a differentiated behavior from the rest of the brands in this group. Its behavior is directly related to the use of the following formats: TV, editorial content, newspaper ads, and magazine ads.

Group 3

The third group is made up of the following seven brands: Puma, Nike, Diesel, Adidas, Converse, Uniqlo, and Levis (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Group 3

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The similarity of the brands that fall into this group is striking. There are seven brands that collect the largest number of examples, and within them, four are sports brands.

Regarding their behavior, it can be highlighted how the TV, TV ads, and cinema formats behave separately from the rest of the brands; they are only associated with Levis. Adidas, Nike, and Puma behave more similarly, using formats such as geolocation, apps, artificial intelligence, or technology. Furthermore, Diesel and Uniqlo are also closely related to the use of events and sponsorships and the point of sale. Converse separates itself from the other brands and stands out for its use of music video campaigns, online banners, and sponsorship.

4 Conclusions

The article analyzes a decade of innovation in the types of formats used by brands. In particular, several of the social networks most associated with fashion brands have seen the light between 2010 and 2020. It can be observed that brands made a strategic decision to adapt their communication to the new digital ecosystem, which allows a closer relationship with consumers.

As we have highlighted in the literature review, in recent years, the communication brand trends have been focused on, among other things, working on media convergence and the rise of social networks. In the analyzed period, the number of formats used has evolved toward the digital ecosystem. Generally, of the 36 formats analyzed, the Internet, websites, and social networks are the most used in the period analyzed. Sports brands stand out in the number of campaigns analyzed and present a more innovative behavior.

In terms of the limitations of this study, it is necessary to express that, in this article, we have limited ourselves to taking into account the formats used, but it would also be relevant to analyze the campaigns qualitatively in order to understand the different narratives used.

Besides, the use of digital media increases the opportunity for fashion brands to communicate with consumers. This poses a new challenge for researchers seeking to understand not only how ad formats work, but how they influence consumers.