STRATEGY

A structured strategic process that enhances your brand’s creative approach

INTRODUCTION

Within the world of luxury and fashion SUM is particularly strategic in its focus. Our clients invariably ask us to undertake a strategic stage of work at the start of their collaboration with the agency, which then enables the creative and design work on their brand to be highly-focused. The aim is to achieve a distinctive approach that will successfully differentiate your brand from its competitors.

We start the process by gaining a deep understanding of the consumer audiences, and carefully review the competition in its market category. The process then turns to the creation of a range of possible brand concepts, one of which will be progressed to become the anchor around which the remaining strategic building blocks are based, and ultimately the direction upon which all of the brand’s visual assets are created.

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Competitive Review

To achieve business success, your luxury or fashion brand will need to be different in some way to its competition.

This might be created by its aesthetic, but it can just as easily be about its approach to pricing or to distribution, or by creating a new kind of relationship with its consumers.

In considering all angles, SUM’s work on your competitive review will assess the competition across all aspects of the marketing mix.

We’ll aim to learn from best practices and to avoid the worst. It’s a process that is best addressed with a degree of humility because you’ll tend to find plenty of impressive thinking that already exists in your category.

By the end of the competitive review the nature of the challenge that lies ahead tends to be considerably clearer than at the start.

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Audience definition

There is a tendency among both new and existing brands to describe their audience in very basic terms, for example ‘Millennial women with an interest in sustainability’. As a consequence, brands can miss out on sales that would otherwise have been achieved with a more thorough and insightful audience definition.

At SUM we aim to work with you to identify audience segments that offer most potential, and develop insights about their behaviour and attitudes that will unlock new opportunities for the brand. We will include analysis of published research sources to inform our thinking, and where necessary commission new research through specialist research houses.

Brand positioning

In the luxury and fashion categories there tends to be a high degree of overlap between competitive brands. With literally hundreds of swimwear brands, thousands of jewellery brands, and tens of thousands of fashion labels, the need to create a differentiated positioning for your brand has never been more important.

We will work with you to define a potential basis for genuine competitive difference because this is likely to lie at the heart of your brand’s success.

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Communications strategy

Having prepared the initial brand strategy and associated creative assets, the modus operandum switches to one where we need to share our message with our chosen consumer audiences, wherever they may be in the world.

With a finite budget your brand will need to refine the targeting in terms of geographies, audience typologies, and communication platforms. For example, do we use only digital channels? Do we involve a degree of above-the-line traditional media? And how do we translate the main brand strategy into a more diversified digital strategy to engage audiences on selected media platforms?

While our planning at this stage, particularly as regards digital, becomes a whole lot more scientific and performance-oriented, we never lose sight of the need for creative thinking and storytelling. Indeed, this is so often the touchpoint at which the entirety of our strategic thinking on the brand meets the consumer for the very first time.

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SELECTED PROJECTS