Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

118 Fashion Marketing
emphasis switching from the product to the customer (Figure 6.3). In this
author’s view, this analysis leaves unanswered the question of whether customer
management can be carried out by the marketing function an issue
which will be explored in the conclusions of this chapter.
Proposition
‘Proposition’ describes the actual ‘offer’ of goods and services put forward
by the retailer. Here too, there have been radical changes both at a conceptual
level and in practical terms. Retailers are beginning to appreciate that markets
are now better defined in terms of situations and needs (within budgets) than
they are by demographic or psychographic descriptors. Thus, food shopping
can be utilitarian (for basic needs), convenient (for emergencies and impulse) or
stimulating (for entertainment or new ideas). Clothes shopping can also be segmented
in a similar way according to intended use. Companies are starting to
create and market their products and services as solutions to common lifestyle
problems, rather than around product categories. In continental Europe, when
the leading French company, Carrefour, remodelled 15 of its largest hypermarkets
as ‘Universe’ stores organized around solutions to needs sales increases of
10–70 per cent (by product group) were achieved and conversion of the remaining
117 stores quickly followed. Albert Heijn’s new stores in Holland and
Delhaize ‘le Lion’s’ millennium outlet in Brussels (Belgium) are similarly laid
out. In the UK IKEA, Urban Outfitters, The Link and Tesco (yet again) are all
examples. Even in Germany, ‘Lust for Life’ (Karstadt) offers a lifestyle concept.
This trend has major implications both for the methods of delivery of the proposition,
and its branding and communications, which will be discussed below.
As Field (1997) has pointed out, stores are an expensive and inflexible
means of distributing goods. As basic retail needs have become increasingly
saturated, retailers have begun to extend their proposition into more and
more new areas, including catering, financial services, heath and education,
and leisure. At the same time, the power and potential profit of retail activities
has tempted many compelling non-traditional entrants into the sector
from museums and travel termini to sports venues and hospitals. What this
suggests is that traditional definitions of retailing were constrained more by
the methods of sourcing and distributing products than by a robust appreciation
of the evolution of lifestyle needs. Customers’ expectations of retailers
have changed, and in particular, their definition of ‘value’ is changing. In the
new millennium it is perhaps more helpful to conceptualize the market opportunity
not only in terms of the traditional retail content of goods and services,
but also in terms of leisure/entertainment and enrichment/self-actualization
things to make life fun and things to make life better.
Figure 6.5 illustrates the ‘Concept Cube’, which represents this picture.
Although they will have to acquire new core competencies, retailers are better
placed than many of the other organizations and institutions in the cube to
move into and dominate the vacant top far right segment of the cube, because
of their resources, commercial skills and closeness to the customer. There is