Since I work above one of the biggest shopping malls in Hong Kong it is inevitable that I need to walk through it every morning, lunchtime and evening. Most of the shopping done is fashion related with about 90% of the shops catering to the fashion/brand aware. One casual lunchtime I walked past a shop proudly displaying the slogan, “The brand for brands”, and it got me thinking about the evolving retail phenomenon that is the brand within a brand.
I’ve come to realise more and more the sheer amount of ‘names’ within the fashion industry and that each ones brand success is based more and more upon the quality of their goods and not so much the personal image that a particular brand evokes, as used so blatantly by the likes of Nike, D&G, Louis Vuitton or any of the other large fashion retailers in the past. I mean there’s a reason you’d buy a pair of Levi’s over a pair of H&M or Primark jeans right? And if you don’t know it, one word: Longevity.
Department stores have been around for a while and their success has always been based on capitalising on the success of the brands sold within their walls. However, brands were always given their own space, allowed to breath and given the chance to advertise within the store itself, some examples being John Lewis in the UK or Sogo in Japan and Hong Kong. A new slant on this has taken shape as a store which sells brand clothes at discount rates. Often selling last years clothes or slightly damaged items. The popularity of these stores as based on the ‘treasure hunting’ model, where if you spend a long amount of time looking for the right brand within the hundreds of others jumbled together, another just as good or better will pop out at a better price, longevity isn’t a factor here. The next logical step is the brand name department store selling collections of brands, merged together as a superbrand becoming all controlling in showing people which Diesel jeans to wear with which D&G t-shirt. The emphasis on longevity is apparent because it’s already established by the superbrand, the only question now is: “Does this shirt match this dress?”.
Is this superbrand a brand or it just a different access point or approach for a wider diversity of people to buy what they want? And does a multi-layered superbrand diffuse the emphasis on the quality of the goods more, by giving the consumer more brand to wade through, or less by stripping the original ‘over-branding’ of a retailer as seen on the high street?
Interesting questions, even if it is Ramble-ville 2007.