Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

Fashion retailer desired and perceived identity 255
allows itself to be known and how it allows people to describe, remember and
relate to it. Although existing literature has identified that there is gap between
desired identity and actual identity, that is, whether the reality of organizations
reflect the top management’s vision, and how important this gap is to the corporate
identity management, for example, (Balmer, 2001b; Balmer and Soenen,
1999; Kiriakidou and Millward, 2000). The results of the present research, using
the case of the UK’s fast fashion sector, show that organizations cannot primarily
focus on the desired–actual identity gap and ignore the desired–perceived
identity gap. Perceived identity has appeared to be equally important in this
study. Organizations should take into account customers’ perceptions towards
their identity when they promote themselves to the audiences. The findings of
this study identifies the case companies have disparity between top management
and customers’ perceptions towards an organization’s corporate identity.
This chapter has a number of managerial implications for fashion retailers.
First, it demonstrates a significant divergence of insights into how customers
perceive corporate identity and how the retail organizational decision-makers
present it. We argue that an organization cannot simply present its corporate
mission statement to its employees at all levels (Kiriakidou and Millward,
2000) and expect them to promote this identity to its customers. Organizations
have to have effective internal communication channels and offer appropriate
training programmes to staff. The case studies for H&M and Zara, provide
some useful insights into the identify gap between desired and perceived
identity the next stage for retailers would be to consider appropriate strategies
that might reduce it.
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