Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

198 Fashion Marketing
category and simple demographics of the target consumer (such as age, sex,
income level and geographic location). In today’s intensely competitive environment,
products have become increasingly specialized and complex, multiplying
the number of definable market segments and blurring the borders
between them. To deal with the increasing complexity of market segmentation,
marketing has evolved into a new field called ‘micro-marketing’, which focuses
on pinpointing narrow local markets to target customers more efficiently.
Based on multi-variable segmentation, micro-marketing requires collecting a
wide variety of data incorporating detailed demographic data, as well as consumer
information on psychographics, lifestyles and family life cycles, activities,
interests, opinions, purchasing and consumption profiles, media used,
etc. (Brown, 1997; Pitt, 1997). The information may be based on individual consumers
or on households (Carr and Pomeroy, 1992).
This detailed micro-data collected will be used to segment and locate target
groups, plan relevant marketing mix, map product potential usage and help
customize assortments. As a matter of fact, management focus is shifting from
product to category (McCann, 1997), also known as ‘consumption constellation’
(Solomon and Englis, 1998), taking into account interaction between,
rather than within, product categories to offer creative buying incentives and
promotional products on a store-to-store basis. This knowledge is particularly
relevant to develop different lines of apparel and accessories that may lead to
bundled purchases.
Electronic commerce via the Internet will enable manufacturers to directly
communicate with and supply consumers, while monitoring and analysing
the information each customer is individually pulling down from the World
Wide Web. Micro-marketing will become possible on a one-on-one basis. This
next stage is already being called ‘relationship marketing’ (Brown, 1997). The
Internet will thus greatly contribute to collecting data on the consumers in
addition to that collected through current and past POS and marketing tools
such as frequent user programmes.
Response to market demand
Once market needs have been identified and interpreted, response can be
given to these defined consumer demands through a mix of marketing elements.
The traditional marketing mix factors known as the ‘4 P’ (Kotler and
Armstrong, 1994) are product, price, promotion and place. As shown in Figure
10.6, this mix is centred around the target consumer and helps articulate the
whole marketing strategy cycle from analysis and planning to implementation
and control stages. Product refers to the items and services offered by a company
to its target market. Price refers to what will be charged for the purchase
of the product. Place refers to where the product will be sold. ‘Promotion
includes all the efforts of a company to establish the identity and enhance the
demand for specific brands and designer name products or to encourage buying
from certain retailers’ (Jarnow and Dickerson, 1996).
Several authors have given different definitions of the marketing mix, which
always include the notions of product, price, place and promotion, while