Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

Developing a research agenda for the internationalization of fashion retailing 91
These research questions readily apply to a consideration of the international
expansion of fashion retailers, and these will be addressed here and
will serve as a structure for the remainder of this chapter.
What is the internationalization of fashion retailing?
The internationalization of fashion retailing is apparent in three ways. The first
to be considered, and ostensibly the most prevalent, is the sourcing of products
from foreign markets. Sourcing raw materials and finished and unfinished
product from abroad has been a long-established feature of the British
and European clothing sectors. Buying from foreign markets is largely motivated
by economic and competitive considerations, as retailers seek to take
advantage of low labour costs within underdeveloped economies. A further
motivation for foreign market sourcing relates to the power of country of origin
as a factor, which influences consumers’ perception of the style, reliability
and quality standards of a garment. For example, the Italian fashion industry
has recognized that consumers worldwide perceive products originating from
Italy as superior in style and quality, and has therefore adopted the ‘Made in
Italy’ mark as a means of further exploiting these positive perceptions.
Furthermore, as a result of the advent of the global fashion brand, many
fashion retail buyers are forced, as a response to consumer demand, to stock
the world’s most successful brands, such as those created by Ralph Lauren,
Calvin Klein, DKNY, Lacoste and Diesel. The ‘pulling power’ of these brands
is such that the fashion buyer has little choice but to stock these brands, often
at the expense of lesser known brands from their home market.
Within the context of the British fashion market, it has to be recognized
that the disintegration of the country’s textile manufacturing sector has also
made it increasingly difficult for British fashion retailers to source products of
an acceptable quality standard and at an acceptable competitive price within
the UK. Furthermore, because the British textile industry has suffered from a
chronic lack of investment over the past 30 years, buyers who seek to offer a
differentiated product range must source from abroad because of the lack of
sufficient technical expertise within the domestic market.
The second dimension of fashion retailer internationalization relates to the
internationalization of ‘management know-how’. This ‘know-how’ may be in
the form of expertise in particular trading methods, marketing techniques or
technological competence. With the international flow of management personnel
from one company to another, improvements in management intelligence
gathering and the advent of multi-market participation by fashion retailers,
it is increasingly the case that ideas, techniques and policies adopted in one
country are soon replicated by another retailer in another country. One has
only to consider the speed by which fashion retailers copied the just-in-time
design to manufacturing processes of Benetton in the 1980s and the ‘brand as
communicator’ advertising of The Gap in the 1990s to appreciate the extent of
inter-company influence within the fashion sector.