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New York Fashion Week: Keeping Up With the Trends for Better Brand Positioning
For many of us, being caught up on what is currently ‘in style’ feels nearly impossible. As soon as you feel like you are ‘caught up’ on a trend, you are already behind the times. Then seemingly out of nowhere, the clothes you finally built up the courage to throw out from middle school are suddenly back in style again (shoutout to Y2K fashion).
Personally, I have felt this way as I near my 30s at a rate that feels much too swift for my liking. Why does everyone wear baggy jeans again? That was a style I hoped to never have to experience again… Nonetheless, we live in a ‘out with the old, in with the new (or in with the old, again) society.
So how do we navigate the trend landscape? How do we as marketers wrestle with the complexities of pop culture and fashion?
The Fast Pace of Fashion Trend Cycles
New York Fashion Week (NYFW) is a bi-annual event that contributes an estimated $900 million to the fashion industry. There are two shows a year, with roughly 250,000 participants (mainly celebrities, influencers, buyers, designers, and fashion editors) attending the week’s events.
The prevailing wisdom in the fashion industry has always been that a typical fashion cycle is about 20 years. In other words, things that were popular in the ‘50s became popular again in the ‘70s, and things that were hot in the ‘70s came back around in the ‘90s.
This loop seems to be speeding up, and quite rapidly at that. Things that were uncool only 6-7 years ago are suddenly back in style. It can feel disorienting, as it seems like everything is in style all at once, making it even more difficult to differentiate yourself from the crowd.
“TikTok has a weird way of making every single thing in style at once,” Rebecca Jenning, a Vox Internet Culture Senior Correspondent explained to NPR. “You can go to any corner of the app and something will be considered cool.”
Tips for Developing Your Brand’s Style
Like fashion, developing your brand and your style is very important. But with trends cycling at such a rapid pace, how do you develop your own personal style when it seems like it’s impossible?
It can be tempting to believe you have to continuously adapt and evolve alongside the times. And while this is true to some extent, it’s even more important to have a consistent brand message (aka brand style) that can latch on to your vision and mission statement.
A great example of an influencer doing this successfully is Celebrity Stylist and Wardrobe Specialist Allison Bornstein:
Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@allisonbornstein6?lang=en
Bornstein carefully crafts her TikTok to provide her followers with fashion advice, tips, and updates that complement and align with her services. She’s become known not for trends, but her focus on helping her followers learn about and develop their own personal style.
Much of Bornstein’s popularity can be attributed to her three-word styling method. Bornstein explains that the simple premise for this method is that one chooses three words for their current style and perhaps the style they are striving for. Bornstein has used this method to distill the specific identify styles offer celebrities for her followers, such as Kaia Gerber (class, tailored, and sporty), Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy (classic, minimal, elegant), and Zoë Kravitz (edgy, sexy, and effortless). As explained to Harper’s BAZAAR, “Everyone’s style can be synthesized into three adjectives, words that either describe their style as it is or that guide their style to its pinnacle form. Once you’ve identified your three words, they become a set of guidelines to remember when you’re assembling a new outfit from what you own—or when you’re deciding when something new is really going to work hard in your wardrobe.”
The way a person builds their own unique, personal style is similar to how brands must forge their own identity. Brand identity, like personal style, must establish a consistent and concise understanding of who that brand is and tap into the brand’s goals and truth, rather than be shaped exclusively by what is trending.
Trends offer brands opportunities to embrace and benefit from (and even have fun with) what’s popular, but it’s best to use trends to complement and enhance their true brand identity
At the end of the day, the key is to focus on authenticity over what’s coming into vogue. There are 5 main characteristics that differentiate ‘any old’ brand from a world class brand:
- Strong and clear positioning
- Consistent over time
- Rational and emotional appeal
- Demonstrated growth
- Above-average operating profits
A strong and clear positioning statement provides the foundation for all marketing and brand activities. It also identifies competitive differentiation, helps identify where employees spend their efforts (innovations, etc.), and helps drive consistency. The result is a better ability to integrate into marketing communications and ad campaigns.
Brand positioning is about owning a unique position in the mind of the target consumer. It is an attempt to answer the question: who are you in the minds of your consumers? Your positioning (and corresponding positioning statement) should signal differentiation relative to your competition with an eye on what is currently popular and trending among your audience. It is about making sure that when your target consumers think of your brand, they are aware of your unique benefit in relation to the marketplace.
Whether it be for a brand’s positioning or an individual’s style, having a solid and authentic identity to build from is priceless. Putting together the infrastructure of a strong brand positioning makes every marketing, innovation, research, and sales endeavor that follows more seamless and successful for years to come.
RedSky Strategy helps organizations identify their brand positioning with our proprietary approach through the lens of HumanSight. We help you see the world through the eyes of your consumers to better intuit their needs and plan accordingly.
Interested in working with RedSky Strategy? We look forward to helping you authentically differentiate your brand and position yourself as a leader to your target market.