Trend setting is a product of fashion marketing. Fashion marketing uses many tools to direct the gaze of its audience toward the chosen trend. Research is at the core of how a fashion trend and marketing campaign is designed. The activities that swirl around that research are where the fashion marketer spends her energy. Fashion marketing techniques are meant to spin past the campaign and into the minds of potential buyers.
Definition
Wooing the potential customer is what fashion marketing is all about. Fashion marketing creates fantasy and desire around fashion products--garments, accessories, shoes, handbags and more--to entice people to purchase these items. Sales strategies promote the color, design and textiles of fashion within retail stores, on runways, in magazines, on television and on the Internet.
Fashion Marketing Careers
Fashion marketing is a combination of style and business strategy. The industry requires a number of different players to fuel the fashion marketing process. Careers include fashion market researcher, trend forecaster, sourcing expert, visual merchandiser, fashion copywriter, promotions expert, fashion advertiser, fashion graphics artist, communications director and marketing manager. Fashion marketers design product launches, product promotions and branding campaigns, and they conduct market research.
The Structure of Fashion Marketing
Fashion marketing uses the same basic planning tools other industries do, but within a much shorter time frame. The cycle of the fashion industry is based on up to eight different seasons or windows per year. Planning and marketing occurs in a very fast-paced environment. Fashion marketing must encompass the huge variation in potential customers while maintaining a hold on budget and marketing strategy.
Fashion Marketing Education
You can best achieve your goal of a career in fashion marketing education by including both of its aspects: fashion and marketing. You should educate yourself not only about the business side (economics, planning, forecasting, cost analysis, inventory control) of fashion but also the actual design and production process. Parsons, The New School For Design, offers a Fashion Marketing degree that can be earned online or at their New York campus. It offers internships in the real world of fashion and includes both a design and marketing curriculum.
Examples of Fashion Marketing
"Fashion Weeks," and the flurry of activity that surround them, are a fashion marketer's dream. These week-long fashion events are scheduled twice a year in the span of three months (January to March and September to November) and happen in all the fashion hot spots (New York, Milan, Paris and London) as well as many, many other cities across the globe. The trunk show is an example of fashion marketing that stems from Fashion Week. Trunk shows are private showings of a fashion line directed at retail personnel and special customers and are intended to promote the purchase of a particular designer's garments.
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