Zara Campaign

Imagine this: you are a 20-something fashion addict studying marketing & being told the following:

“For your final project, you need to pick a well-known brand you like and design a marketing campaign targeting a different market segment than its current one”.. what is your natural choice? After a brief brainstorming session with my team (Andreea Dicu & Raquel Gonzales Martin) discussing cosmetics for men, Red Bull for kids (evil, I know), and green fast food, we came up with the perfect idea: what if we designed a new Zara clothing line for curvy women?

And perfect it was. Zara stands for fashionable clothes, trendy colors, and feminine cuts, promising to deliver fashion for a moderate price, adapting runway trends for the streets, while maintaining a customer-focused business. We started by looking at the current Zara values, at everything that makes it unique: their customer philosophy, design and production approach, the logistics that drive Zara, its store design and employee values. With a total brand value of $8,609 M, 1,530 stores in 2008, it is one of the strongest retail brands out there.

The truth is that the fashion industry is changing, with luxury becoming more accessible to us commoners (think of McQueen and PUMA, Stella and Adidas, or the countless H&M designer collaborations). Street trends are starting to dictate the fashion out there, with the Sartorialist, lookbook.nu, or Stil in Berlin influencing the runways. Plus size models are becoming more accepted in the world of fashion, especially after America’s Next Top Model (+size) edition, Mark Fast’s SS 10 show or V-magazine’s current ‘SIZE’ issue. Like always, if you want to stay hip and fresh in this industry, you need to recognize current trends and adapt them to your own style as soon as possible. Zara is usually great at this, but it seems to lag behind in embracing fuller body shapes. After all, UK studies proved that 1 in 3 women are unhappy with the way clothes fit them, and size 14 women were shown to be a lot more confident than any size 6 woman.

The psychology of the fashion consumer is rather basic: in order to influence a consumer’s behavior, you first need to generate interest in the product, by giving the consumer pleasure and enjoyment; fashion becomes a means of self-expression, saying more about you than you think. Your next step is to get the consumer involved by allowing them to attach meaning to clothes, by expressing and communicating the value of the fashion statement. Before influencing a consumer’s behavior, you need to appeal to his emotions: positive emotions towards a brand lead to shorter decision times, increased impulse shopping and even a desire to reward oneself, which can be easily achieved by simply using the stores to your advantage: comfortable colors, friendly personnel, uplifting music or anything else you can think of. Last but not least, in the retail world, you want consumers to shop a lot, and usually to shop for things they do not really need. I mean, an extra purse is good and all, but there is no real NEED for it, and the purchase of that bag is usually impulsive.

As we were researching what the plus size fashion consumer would like to see in a clothing line for them, we realized that they will probably just want the same as everyone else: clothes that fit them and emphasize their best features. So, normally, the clothes would need a cut fitting the curvier body shape, which in turn would make the women wearing them feel more attractive and thus increase their self-esteem.

Although it all sounded good in theory, we also wanted to have some rough data to support the belief that there is a need for such a line in the market, so we looked at some statistics and discovered that the plus size market is expected to grow to $100 M in the US alone by 2012, and Zara, although new in this segment, would probably enjoy success due to its high brand awareness, and customer loyalty. So, we set out to develop a consumer focused product line and marketing strategy.

When defining our strategic marketing objectives we decided we would not want to change much about Zara’s strategy, but simply focus more on the plus size consumer and increase their satisfaction with the brand, which in turn would lead to more frequent purchases, and thus more revenues for the brand.

We named the new line “Zara for every woman” and started segmenting our consumer group: our main segment would of course be the plus size, full shape woman, probably aged between 18 and 24, working in large cities around the world or pursuing a higher education. She would have a mid-range income and would be very interested in the latest fashion trends. She is conscious about her look, enjoys shopping and socializing but has a hectic, busy lifestyle. What is she looking for? Clothes that fit her body shape and makes her feel more beautiful in her own skin. For such a woman, Zara would no longer stand just for “high fashion at affordable prices”, but it would become “the only true fashion brand that thinks about her body shape, respects it and designs especially for it”.

Our product strategy revolved around 4 basic principles:

1. going back to the drawing board in order to be able to better design for a full body shape and to incorporate consumer feedback into the cuts
2. focus on product symbolism: Zara should make the consumer believe that it knows the consumer’s bodyshape and designs clothes that make her feel beautiful.
3. in terms of colors and materials, we all know that these contribute a lot to the perceived quality of the products, so we wanted to maintain the same high quality approach
4. moreover, the Zara label would by itself be a source of customer equity.

The most fun to design part was of course the promotion campaign. The goal was to inform consumers about the new line, to create positive emotions in connection to it and of course, to generate consumer interest and purchase intentions of the new products.

Although not a popular Zara practice, we decided to incorporate print advertising in our above-the-line campaign, while our below-the-line strategy would focus on brand communication, public relations, an elaborate Internet campaign, local events and media cooperations.

We then tried to incorporate the entire concept into a nice ad, which you can see in the attached presentation. I will not ruin it for you by revealing it too early.

Our ad message?

“Curvy is the new black.”

A bit cheesy, but hopefully effective.

For brand communication, we wanted to start with a corporate social responsibility initiative, inviting fashion students from Central Saint Martin to participate in a competition aimed at designing for the curvy body shape. The winner (decided via an Internet poll) would then get the chance to design part of the new line in collaboration with Zara designers. We also considered a possible media cooperations with Project Runway in order to get our message to a more general audience with the goal of promoting inclusiveness and individualism.

In terms of public relations, we wanted to start with product placement and designing a nice lookbook that would make its way to the tables of every fashion editor out there. We wanted to focus on PR in order to be able to make a sincere proposition to the real women out there, by using fashion editors as expert sources, which in turn would help us build brand trust.

And because the Internet is taking a life of its own, we wanted to use Zara’s website as the main communication channel; the website would also feature the CSR innitiative, as well as viral videos of the campaign and tips on “how to dress for your body shape”. Last but not least, we wanted to build an online community of hip, young, tech savvy women that would exchange fashion advice and act as a source of feedback for the new line, helping us improve our offering in the future.

For the main launch, we wanted to organize 3 events in main stores in Europe: Madrid, Milan & London, all renowned for their fashion attitudes. The event theme would be celebrating diverse body shapes, and we would like to get our invitees the chance to experience the brand and what it stands for. We would also offer the media pre-launch access to the collection, so that they can get a direct feel of the new line.

You can see our presentation on slideshare.net. We really had fun working on this marketing strategy and hopefully, Zara will at some point in the near future develop such a line. Let us know if you like it or if you would do anything different.

PS: I cannot take full credit for this work, as it was the result of countless working hours put in by myself, my best friend and luxury fashion addict, Andreea Dicu, and Raquel Gonzales Martin, a true Zara fan. The slide design was a collaborative effort between Andreea and me, and like everything we work on together, it turned out to be quite lovely. We hope you enjoy it!!

Zara Campaign by Carmen Neghina, Andreea Dicu, Raquel Gonzalez Martin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License.
Based on a work at carmenneghina.com.