Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

Fashion retailer desired and perceived identity 231
of our everyday language identifiers for particular lifestyles. We are always
searching consciously and/or unconsciously for differences and similarities
between individuals and groups of people. Our point of reference is often
ourselves or groups to which we belong and identify with. We like to categorize
and label what we think we see through judgements we make. It is the
empiricist in us all that allows us to do this without necessarily being trained
to do so although some of us may be trained tacitly or explicitly through our
own life-being. Many of us continually people watch and from observed interactions
make judgements relating to human characteristics that provide us with
key identifiers: age, gender, size, dress sense, intelligence, class, beliefs, attitudes
and so on. Not many of us would acknowledge complete certainty in
these contextual judgements. Many of us might recognize multiple identities
for any single person: Mother, wife, professional, fashionable, young, old, sister,
dancer, student, sportswoman, musician and so on. These multiple identities
then become identifiers in particular contexts with particular individuals
and groups of others. These multiple identities lead to multiple marketing
opportunities for fashion retailers if they can create a match between identity
and products they wish to supply. However, as we have witnessed in the segmentation
chapter this is not an easy task. Our social constructions of who we
are and who others are shifts through time and so in effect creates a moving
target for the fashion marketer. Perhaps this singular observation has led fashion
retailers to concentrate more on product than market. In other words if
you develop products and place them on offer in stores customers find them.
Whereas the marketing concept refers to notions of understanding who customers
are and what they buy with the purpose of creating products to satisfy
the discernable demand. If retailers follow the first route to market focusing
on product and place then this has implications for identity. In this context it
is the retailer identity that is important rather than the customer identity. This
is so because customers identify with the retailer and their products to build
parts of their own multiple identities manifested through what they wear.
This notion of retail identity and its importance in fashion markets is what the
rest of this chapter will focus on.
Corporate identity
Corporate identity is increasingly popular within the retailing industry. This
is because the sector depends heavily on its staff at the store level to interact
and communicate the identity to customers (Kennedy, 1977; Burghausen and
Fan, 2002). Nevertheless, there is limited empirical research on corporate identity
(Balmer, 1998; 2001a; Cornelissen and Elving, 2003), and more particularly
within a retailing context (Burt and Sparks, 2002). Although the literature
which considers how audiences recognize corporate identity has developed in
recent years; for example, Balmer and Soenen (1999), Kiriakidou and Millward
(2000) and van Rekom (1997), their research tends to focus more on the gap
between desired identity and actual identity. There is a paucity of research