Hi everyone,

Please find here the summary of my research on the fast-fashion industry in the context on Facebook.

The research question focus on the relation between the fast-fashion industry culture and strategy and its presence on Facebook and how a fast-fashion company can engage effectively its customers through Facebook to compete against its competitors.

Analysis & Findings:

Zara

Zara uses Facebook mainly to post pictures of its clothing collection. We can describe Zara as an occasional to rare poster on Facebook. Because of its very low usage frequency of its page, Zara fails to engage its customers. The consequence is that customers do not participate and react to its posts even if the brand has a great number of fans online. The variety of posts is extremely poor also and disengage even more the attention of its customers.

H&M

The brand is able to post regularly on its pages and the usage of sub-pages dedicated to countries in particularly helps H&M to mobilize its customers’ attention. Thanks to the frequency of its posts, the brand can communicate efficiently what are the new trends and the new products in local stores as on the online store. Thanks to this usages of the sub-pages H&M is also able to target more precisely its customers per country and address special content to each category.

Mango

Mango’s Facebook page is mainly used to post pictures of its products, videos of photo shootings or events organized and links to the online store for its products. Mango has a clear advantage on its competitors: thanks to the frequency as the variety of its posts, it can engage a larger part of its Facebook fans, even if the brand counts less fans in total.

Strategies:

Suppress weaknesses

A first strategy for Zara to better engage its customers would be to create sub-pages per country as H&M has done. The goal of this strategy is to create a better dialogue with its customers thanks to relevant posts targeting precisely them and to avoid general messages which cannot reach any target as it is the case actually

A second strategy Zara can learn from its competitors is to post interesting content regularly on its Facebook page. This strategy is closely related with the first one as the content will need to be targeted to customers for each sub-page. Moreover, as Zara business strategy is to respond quickly to its customers’ demand thanks to its efficient supply chain, its presence online should reflect that strength of delivering new products quickly by posting shootings and videos to present these new products to its customers.

Build strengths

A strategy would be to create a dialogue between stylists of Zara and its customers. Each week a new stylist from Zara will share its tips with the fans. Stylists will provide tips on the Facebook pages concerning the way to mix different garments, which garments to select in order to fit to each morphology… Zara could moderate the dialogue between the stylists and its customers, and between customers themselves.

Finally, Zara could create contests on its Facebook page. The aim of the contest is to share pictures, on the Zara’s page, of customers wearing Zara’s products and obtain the maximum of likes from then Facebook population. These contests should empower fans to become brand ambassadors

Thank you reading!

Loïc

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