For analyzing my brand and how it want it to be presented and come across I have decided to do a competitive shop in detail on two online retailers as I feel that it is important to look at these as to give me an idea as to how I want to create my detailed customer profile which I will be working on this week.
I may go into further detail with regards to the comp shop and look at other brands later on in the project to give me more inspiration with regards to creating the website.
Competitive shop:
For my competitive shop for the Haus brand I have decided
that considering that my business is an online business that I should look at
other online fashion business websites that my customer demographic would shop
at. I have also taken into consideration what other sort of product and places
they would shop and socialise in the UK this gives me an idea of how the brand
should be presented from a visual and marketing stand point:
Websites:
Urban Outfitters.co.uk:
Brand Brief: A quote from Wikipedia gives about the origin
of the brand states: “Urban Outfitters
originated as "The Free People's Store" in 1970 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, focusing on "funky" fashion and
household products. Shortly thereafter the owner and now Chairman, Richard Hayne, changed the name to Urban Outfitters.
The Customer: There main customer is from 18 to 30 year old. A good example of the
brand influence was when in 2009 urban outfitters decided to sell limited
editions of the Polaroid ONE600 instant cameras as well as the Type 779 instant film in the form of a partnership with the Austrian entrepreneur
Florian Kaps, who acquired the rights to manufacture 700 copies of the out of
date product after he saw the growing market for vintage or retro products and
lifestyle.
Website Layout: The website itself is laid out in a very
basic form with a lot of use of visuals and product advertisement but yet it
does not bombard you with too much information. All areas are accessed through
the use of the main navigation bars. It
allows you to browse via category, brand, style or trend. With a wide range of
areas from women’s, men’s, home and gifts, brands, sale as well as looking for
product directly through use of the traditional search engine mode. One of the unique aspects of the website is the
UO community page which links to a wide variety of brand social media sites,
interviews, inspiration, music, places we love, wallpapers and more. This page
really expresses how the brand wants to come across on not just a marketing
side but also from a customer side. With their links to their flicker, twitter,
facebook and youtube pages this page will be great inspiration for when I
create my website and marketing strategy.
Product: Urban Outfitters has been described as selling hip,
kitschy, and ironic merchandise, for example, T-shirts emblazoned with the
words "Jive Turkey" or "Atari".
Their product style has evolved from vintage, bohemian, retro, hipster, ironically humorous, kitschy apparel
and furniture and started to include luxury brands and a number of different
designer collaborations.
Overall impression: With Haus being a subrand of Urban
Outfitters (UO) this research on this website gives me a very clear idea of how
I will create and layout the website for the brand and connect it to UO in a
similar so that is appeals to the customer demographic.
ASOS.com
Brand Brief: Composed as a series of quotes from
Wikipedia about “ASOS.com is
the UK’ s largest online-only fashion and beauty store and offers over 50,000 branded and
own label product lines across womenswear, menswear, footwear, accessories,
jewellery and beauty. Sales for the financial year ending 31 March 2011 were £339.7 million.
ASOS has websites targeting the UK, USA, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and
Australia and also ships to over 190 other countries from its central
distribution centre in the UK.”
Layout:
In terms of layout the website itself uses a plain format
and relies upon product and promotion advertisements as the strongest aspects
of the visual stand points. It also advertises it student discount area which
is a unique feature of the brand and appeals to the customer market well and
shows that it understands its target customer. All areas are accessed through
the use of the main navigation bars.
One of the unique areas of the
website is their ASOS blogs area, Wikipedia sums up the page well by saying: “ASOS Life, which
launched 13 April 2009 in beta and officially launched to the public 6 May 2009, is a
section of the ASOS.com site which allows users to create their own profiles
and communicate through forums, blogs and groups. The pure-play retailer announced the launch of
the ASOS Life community through Twitter and Facebook.
Existing customers have the same login for the e-commerce and community
site, but a username has be chosen to gain access to ASOS Life.
The site features
blogs from members of employees, and a help forum that allows customers to answer
each other's questions. In addition, an 'ideas' section permits customers to
submit suggestions for site improvements and rate each other’s suggestions.”
The Customer: The customer base for ASOS is very
wide, considering first of all, that the brand is a global business means that
there is a huge range of customers. There target age group is between 16-34 men
and women. They have broad interest in different areas of fashion. With
customers taking inspiration from both designer, high street and social trends
as well creating their own looks or style. With regards to price they can be
broken down into how much spend on products with some buying a large amount of
high street products while some spend more on one luxury product such as shoes
or a dress.
Product: Product browsing on the website has a
mixture of browsing via category, brand, style and price as well as the
traditional search engine mode. High street and branded and luxury product will
be placed together into areas and included together, this makes the website and
some of the more luxury brands more accessible to the customer who
traditionally not look at these type of products and the same situation with
the more higher end customer. For example by looking in the jewellery section
it allows you to break down the product and isolate your search into areas such
as price (through the use of price scroll bar), colour, brand, ASOS own brand
and product type.
Overall impression: ASOS is the most versatile of the
websites due to the fact that it sells both luxury and high street retail
products and presents them in such a way they complement each other and
increase the variety of customers on the website. The ASOS look pages are a
perfect example of the sort of way I would want the Haus brand to be presented
to on the website with regards to uploading your own images and the voting for
the most popular look. The ASOS blog area as well is a very well presented in
how it incorporates the brand and its style all together through its social
media pages and inspiration and is a great reference place to use for my
plan-o-gram of how my website is going to look.
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