Guest Speaker 3: strategy & PR consultant
Takeaways from my time listening to an expert in PR.
This is the third part to a five part series of the things I learned from guest speakers during my fashion merchandising class at Parsons.
For the past few years of a social media dominated world, the public relations industry has had but one thing on their mind – influencers.
Not only does it seem as though every third person you meet has a substantial following online, but by now, almost every brand has realized that influencers are integral in their marketing campaigns, especially when it comes to reaching younger generations.
These generations, starting with Gen Z, find influencers more trustworthy and authentic than regular campaigns or conventional celebrities. Even though brands reach out, give products to, and pay influencers to endorse their items, general audiences find this more honest and dependable than another facet. However, as the market has become inundated with influencers who seem to be supporting any brand imaginable, the public is ready for more authenticity.
This, according to our guest speaker today, means the entrance of User Generated Content (UGC). This kind of content is when a customer who bought an item, with their own money, decided to post about the item to the public. This is different from influencers, because influencer content is paying a person to write or post about your item.
Since UGC is so much more popular now, our guest speaker says that what brands are trying to do now is confuse the consumers into thinking influencer paid marketing campaigns are really just UGC content from normal people who bought the item and like it. These campaigns, mostly Tik Tok videos or ads in Youtube, reflect more of the style of everyday life and seem to be flawlessly integrated into a video or feed instead of taking a more apparent commercial break of sorts. She questions what will happen next in the world of marketing, but we all know there is no telling.
The next thing she brought up was a business model that I’ve been pondering over for a long time. There are so many more people thrifting now than in the past, but there’s no sustainable way to do that online. One of the most popular apps is Depop, but it still seems to be inefficient and waste resources. A buyer has to pay shipping from every seller they are purchasing from because everything is coming from different places. This means if you buy three different items one day, there is a very good chance that those items are all from different sellers meaning you pay for each shipping cost, they will all come in different packages, on different planes, and use 3x the resources since they are all being shipped separately.
It seems impossible to think of a way to make the process more efficient while still keeping the culture of reselling. It is almost as if every seller would need to ship their clothes to a third party warehouse where workers do the clothing listings, photograph the items, and ship them out from a centric location. However, this would mean either underpaying the sellers for their items, or pricing up the buyers since the third party company would need to make a profit. This process of things would also take out the democratized relationship of the reselling apps, where one 24-year old girl can sell to another 24-year-old girl just from taking a picture of her old shirt in her bedroom.
Our guest speaker estimated that the resale industry will be a $70 billion dollar in the near future, and whether they make it to that grand amount will come strictly by how they handle the logistics of it all. The same things were said when online shopping started to boom – retail success or detriment has always been about how it handles logistics.
One way that reselling apps have been differentiating themselves and working towards different revenue streams while still keeping a hold of sustainable fashion comes from ThredUp. ThredUp has already partnered with a lot of fashion brands, but their stand out partnership is with Madewell as a way to get their jeans back into the hands of Madewell so the company can reuse them. For each pair of Madewell jeans a consumer sends in for parts to be reused and upcycled, customers receive $20 off new jeans. Madewell also provides the free shipping label on the box used to send in the jeans. There have been a number of brands recently who are also working to eliminate barriers that inadvertently prevent textile recycling.
The other facet of PR we learned about, which I hadn’t previously had much experience in, was the events side of things. When advertising for something, there are three broad categories for how to do it. Insider events, workshops and seminars, or pop-ups.
Insider events are invite-only and have something specific to do with the brand that is hosting the event. The brand can be celebrating an opening, an anniversary, or simply using the event as a marketing strategy. Our guest speaker said that the best PR insider event she had ever been to was for AirBnB. She said it was in a house that was on the market as an AirBnB in Los Angeles with a pool that overlooked the skyline, and they were grilling burgers in the backyard. It was meant to feel like you were invited over to a friend’s house and they were throwing a party, but everything revolved around the house. The pool where everyone was swimming, the built-in grills that stayed in the backyard for guests to use, or the balcony on the second floor where everyone was taking photos.
Workshops and seminars can work depending on the type of brand. Having a workshop on ‘How to be an AirBnB Host’ definitely wouldn’t have gone over as well as renting the mansion in Los Angeles. When hosting a worship or seminar, it’s important to know the audience of the brand well, and question if it’s the kind of audience who would want to sit through a seminar, and if so, what would they want to hear about that would be groundbreaking and something they had never heard of before? People don’t want to just sit around and learn about what inspired the owners to make the company.
The last are pop-ups, something I’ve been to my fair share of since moving to NYC. A lot of times, pop-ups are used to test the market to see if a store could actually be successful in that location and if the people who lived close to the potential store are the correct audience. It costs a fortune to open up a shop in addition to having to sign a contract for the space when a standard corporate lease is for 10 months. When Hermes released their workout clothes line, they crafted an entire workout gym (that remained in their bougie aesthetic, of course) in Brooklyn and taught workout classes for a specified period of time. They did this because they were thinking about opening a new store in Brooklyn and wanted to see if they had consumers in that area. Hermes actually tested a few different places with pop-ups to see which one could drag in the foot traffic they need.
To finish out, we went through an exercise to create our own event for a brand of our choosing. Our guest speaker says that she uses this same exact template when she is planning events
Pick a brand
Pick an influencer for social media
Identify a potential partner (a merger of brands)
Pick an event to do
Do your research
[Influencer] interview [brand name]
[influencer] + [competitors name]
What’s the “why” for the brand partnership?
Will you sell products at the event?
Will you invite your influencer to the event?
Yours truly,
Calihan