C&A Fashion Like
Summary
To keep C&A as the leader in fast fashion in Brazil, we needed more than a factoid for the next collection. We needed to find a new opportunity to set the agenda in the fashion world.
Although the conversation about fashion on the social networks is huge, it’s rarely present at the point of purchase – and is there any other moment when peer opinion matters most than when consumers are at the store deciding what they’re actually buying?
Our strategic idea was to facilitate the validation of people’s choices via social networks, bringing that dynamic into the stores.
In the process, we built a new gadget: the “Fashion Like” hanger.
Special hangers counted the likes received on Facebook in real time. You liked a piece you enjoyed on the brand page, and that like instantly showed up on its respective hanger at the store.
We used the Internet as an ingredient, rather than just a canvas, to develop a new solution. And in the end, this turned out to be more than just a contribution from creative technology and social networks to C&A; it was also a contribution from C&A to the world of creative technology and social networks.
Case
The First Will Be First
If you are not familiar with the Brazilian C&A of today, then you’re not familiar with the Brazilian C&A at all. Locally, the brand has gone through a radical change over the last years. This reinvention moved the brand away from mere clothing retailer and lifted it to a leadership position in fast fashion. This is not an overstatement: C&A today is a trend-setting brand; it commands admiration from Brazilian consumers and is an authority in style – at affordable prices. A local Top Shop. And this leadership is no small business: this is a US$ 40 billion market.
Holding on to this leadership is obviously not an easy thing. Especially with the imminent arrival of strong competitors such as Top Shop, Uniqlo and H&M. C&A needs to constantly generate buzz to keep the edge.
One of the strategies the brand has used is to launch exclusive collections partnering with celebrities (Gisele Bündchen, Fergie, Nicole Scherzinger, Beyoncé) and top fashion designers (Stella McCartney, Herchcovitch). That has been a successful formula for some years now – but it’s starting to wear out. People already expect the brand to bring a new celebrity, a new cool style, every 2 or 3 months.
Chef Ferran Adrià is quoted as having said that the single finding that turned his career around (and the course of the culinary world) was that, whereas coming up with new recipes represents a creative opportunity that is merely incremental, creating new techniques opens much wider creative paths: based on a new technique – say, spherification – thousands of new recipes can be created. In short, developing a new creative method is the most powerful way to innovate, and by extension to define what people will talk about.
That was it. C&A needed such an opportunity: more than just a solution for the next collection, the brand needed to find a new way to take part on the conversation about fashion.
Tell Us Everything!
In order to identify potential opportunities, we rolled up our sleeves and dove into the discussion about trends in fashion retail. We spoke with fashion designers, editors, journalists, bloggers and consumers.
We learned that what most sparks these people’s curiosity today is the bridge between fashion and technological innovation. This is an extensive topic, of course, ranging from new technologies in fabric manufacturing to new techniques in on-demand production and distribution.
But a specific theme stood out in our conversations: the role of social networks in fashion consumption.
Social networks’ dynamics are strongly connected to fashion consumption. Both in the “discovery” stage – when people share information, update and hone their concepts -, and in the “validation” stage – when people look for peer approval.
C&A was one of many brands already leveraging “discovery” activities on social networks, mainly through content curation, bringing style experts to help fans “find out first” and share.
As for the “validation” activities, people were mostly on their own. We found that our consumers were increasingly using social networks to get the highly regarded approval from their friends. But most of the time, people were improvising ways to do so through the informal repurposing of social networks – such as the practice of posting photos on Instagram straight from the fitting room to get friends’ feedback in real time, before the item is even bought. There were no apps or devices especially developed to help in this process, not by C&A, nor by anyone else.
Based on these findings we arrived at the strategic idea: to facilitate the validation of people’s choices via social networks, bringing that dynamic into the stores.
We saw a huge potential in this idea, as the dynamics of the social networks have quite close parallels with that of fashion retail. Per example, the value of sharing the boutique hotel you chose to spend the weekend in is similar to the value of showing off to your friends the smart new cardigan you’ve bought. This practice is highly valued by people – just look at the amount of time they dedicate to it.
C&A hearts geeks
We had yet stronger evidence that this was indeed a powerful idea when the creative director said:
“I believe this approach allows us to use the internet as an ingredient for things that exist outside of it, and today this is perceived as much cooler, fresher and more innovative than doing things that exist only within the internet itself.”
In other words, he saw the possibility of creating a new gadget, a new device that could build a bridge between social networks and physical stores.
Today, more than ever, there is a generalized, colossal infatuation with gadgets. In Brazil, their appeal reaches everyone, including consumers in the lower income ranges. This is particularly important to C&A, a brand that commands broad mass appeal.
“Brazilians lead the purchase of cellphones, HD TV, digital cameras and netbooks on a list of the top eight emerging and industrialized nations, in 2010. According to the annual research, the most striking feature was the “insatiable appetite” of emerging consumers for digital devices in comparison to more stable markets of rich nations.”
Finding Growth: The Emergence of a New Consumer Computing Paradigm
Accenture – Feb 2011
We continued our investigation and went deeper to understand which characteristics successful gadgets have in common. We found out that they are:
– Iconic: they have a striking design that is all their own.
– Specific: they perform only one task, rather than several.
– Easy to use: a key point for us, as people would have just a few seconds to understand how our gadget works.
We did not keep these learning to ourselves, obviously, but shared them with the entire team. Doing so has turned out to be very inspiring and productive.
The creative solution was simple and objective: clothes hangers connected to Facebook, with displays that show in real time the number of likes each piece already received, thus helping shoppers pick out a item to take home.
The “like hanger” was exactly the iconic, specific and easy-to-use gadget that we’d been looking for. And it arrived with a bang. Ten pieces forming a special collection, which we aptly dubbed “Fashion Like“, were shown on a tab on the brand’s Facebook fan page. Each piece had a ‘like’ button next to it. Each ‘like’ received was instantly tallied and the new total would be shown in the display of the respective hanger at C&A’s flagship store at fashionable Iguatemi Mall in São Paulo.
This solution brought the power of collectivity into the buying decision, in an unprecedented and quite powerful way. After all, the opinion of hundreds or thousands of people on a piece of clothing is a valuable input to be taken into consideration. In addition, we were using social networks to offer a real contribution to people – something far more substantive than the “like blackmail” that has plagued too many social initiatives.
At its core, “Fashion Like” simply leveraged the fundamental role of social networks: to connect people. C&A’s role was that of a mere facilitator of those connections.
C&A in the spotlight
After running for just a couple of weeks, the Fashion Like tab on Facebook had 53,674 views and the 10 pieces of the collection received a total of 7,138 likes.
C&A’s fanpage won 76,622 new fans.
Following the international buzz, C&A’s Brazilian fanpage won new fans in 20 different countries.
Source: Facebook Insights, April18 – May 5, 2012
Additionally, the initiative generated:
– 65,273 views of the introductory video.
– 7,011 mentions on Twitter, representing a potential for exposure to 8,872,606 people.
– 1,682 mentions on blogs, sites, and content aggregators.
– 1,050,000 Google search hits.
Source: Radian 6, April18 – May 5, 2012
Not to mention that half of the collection had flown off the racks in just under 24 hours.
Source: C&A
But here is the most important accomplishment:
In using the Internet as an ingredient, as a raw material, rather than just a canvas, to develop a new gadget – an object that iconically materialized the brand’s innovative spirit – we have triggered an innovative power that has relevance beyond the world of fashion. The repercussion generated by the project traveled way beyond fashion editorials and was talked about in business, communications and technology publications around the world.
In the end, this turned out to be more than just a contribution from creative technology and social networks to C&A; it was a contribution from C&A to the world of creative technology and social networks.