The UK Fashion Industry with a Focus on Nike Women Wear

Introduction

Fashion industry UK, which is the largest creative clothing market has always been a wide range of business including imports and export from British Isles to other countries and from other countries to British Isles. The past studies say that the UK’s fashion industry has been estimated of worth 26 billion providing about 800,000 jobs to the country economy. This assignment is about the factors, challenges, principles and concepts of the UK fashion industry in brief. The company chosen to bring out the scenario is Nike Women wear of UK. The functioning of the organisation is highlighted and few recommendations are provided to make the business better.

LO1. Factors that influence the consumer behavior and communication

The most critical and crucial aspect of the fashion industry is to understand the changing buying preferences and customer behaviour in the fashion industry. Fashion is that thing which updates and differentiates every minute and second. Customer purchasing behaviour changes with the changing trends and the fashion clothing brands also needs to be updated to communicate with the buyers (Ayertey, & Ozuem, , 2018). There are some prime factors which are the influencing points to analyse the consumer behaviour for gaining the effective communication skills and hence will help in building a strong, loyal and dependable customer base for Nike Women wear & other brands.

Population culture & subculture - Culture and subculture are an important influencing factor in fashion industry and it is necessary to foresee the cultural and subcultural shifts of the market for being able to comprehend the movements of trends in the fashion industry. Culture is categorised in to parts which includes high culture means the elite population who goes for design and visualisation (Esteban-Santos, , Medina, , Carey, , & Bellido-Pérez, , 2018). The pop culture is understood by the larger portion of the population & low culture includes the local street choices such as graffiti or hip hop. Nike women wear is comprised of all three cultural clothing fore covering all the cultures.

Social class – Cultural differentiation is the primary factor that influences both the impulsive buying consumer behaviour and traits of the buying impulsiveness. The social class factor is directly related to the permanent divisions of the society who shares similar interests, behaviours and values (Grappi, , Romani, , & Barbarossa, , 2017). Fashion industry has a huge impact due to the class structural choices for buying clothing.

Consumer psychology & attitudes – It has always been very difficult for clothing brands to understand the buyers’ psychology and attitude towards the brands while shopping whether online or offline. Nike has always been ahead of other fashion brands in understanding the psychological demand of the buyers and attracting the various types of attitudes of consumers while they buy cloths (nike.com, 2021).

Brand ethics & personality – The ethics of a clothing brand is as important to create the personality and image of their products for grabbing the customer attention which Nike uses as their marketing strategy. Nike’s women wear collection focuses on female comfort, likes, trendy apparels and those points which will bring them to Nike stores.

LO2. Customer communication strategies

The brand slogan of Nike says “Just Do It”, which reveals what they think and what their motto is to regulate their business activities in the market. Nike has always been creative with their online and offline marketing strategies and campaigns to communicate with the buyers about their products and their usefulnesses (Jin, & Cedrola, , 2017). The digital customer communication strategies of Nike are effectively supported by the unique and brilliant advertisements. Every brand should build their brand taglines having meaningful stories or baselines. This is a strong power of Nike women wear that it creates stories that touches the emotions, either they motive and energises the buyers so they ignites the aspirations of people (Kao, , Hsiao, , Wang, , & Wang, , 2020). They target to appeal to the emotional sides of the consumers.

Another strategic support of Nike is their wide range of distribution partners. A component of Nike women wear’s communication strategies include their digital marketing strategies through various channels like e-commerce websites, supermarkets & resellers, retailers who distributes Nike’s products across the globe. Nike women wear’s advertisements promotes equality among people whether men, women or LQBTQ community which is a big benefit for their products (Ozuem, & Azemi, , Digital Marketing Strategies for Fashion and Luxury Brands., 2017). Nike women wear shows supportive and encouraging marketing strategies to communicate their message to the people out there. Nike took another brilliant step by collaborating with Nike Air Jordan and Facebook Messenger bots and for creating successful campaigns they teamed up with conversational AI platforms. Nike ensures to be separate & different when setting up their consumer targeting campaigns and strategies to maintain their top brand image and position. Nike women wear chooses those technologies which are cutting-edged just like the hyperadapt technology (nike.com, 2021). As per the survey records of various brands, Nike has been seen as the most valuable and ethical global apparel brand having the value of around 28 billion dollars in the market. According to the survey done in the year 2017, Nike emerged as the largest clothing brand to hold the fashion industry market share of 208 per cent along with a strong financial company record. Nike women wear has been the most promising and good imaged brand for the past four consecutive years and also to mention that Nike succeeded in generating for over 30 billion dollars as their revenue calculations (nike.com, 2021). In order to have a strong consumer communicating strategy, Nike focused on having a highly emotional and creative campaigning and marketing roles.

LO3. Principles and concepts to understand the consumer nature

Principles and concepts are those pillars upon which the business functions and activities depend to get better day by day for the competitive growing market. Understanding the consumer behavioural principles and concepts helps every organisation in every industry to get the scenario of the changes of consumer taste and preference trends (Ozuem, , Patten, , & Azemi, , Harnessing omni-channel marketing strategies for fashion and luxury brands., 2019). A prime concept to analyse the buyers’ purchasing nature basically for fashion industry is the Consumer Behavioural theory. The consumer behavioural theory is trying to understand that what’s going on in the head of the consumers and knowing that what exactly makes them to buy the products of a brand. Consumer behavioural theory is basically the study of how the consumers decides when they think of buying something which will help the brands and the marketers to capitalise on their behaviours by making predictions of how and when can a consumer purchase products (Ryding,, Henninger, , Alevizou, , & Goworek, , 2017). This concept helps in identifying that what factors are that which influences the purchasing decisions as well as it highlights those strategies for proactively manipulating the buyers’ behaviour (Stringer, , Mortimer, , & Payne, , 2020). There are certain factors that influences the purchasing behaviour of consumers-

• Personal- this characteristic includes buyers’ gender, age, financial stability, culture, background, occupation and location too. As example older people will choose their clothing differently than younger group of people.
• Psychological- The psychological characteristics are those things like a person’s attitude towards the brand, the perception of a person about a situation, the brand’s ability of understanding the information, consumers’ beliefs and personality and the facts that motivates the buyers to buy products (Sudha, & Sheena,, 2017).
• Social- The social factor is the influencing from the family and friends, community, school or work community or either the local associate groups. This social factor consisted of the social class, fashion senses, living conditions and education.

This theory is important and Nike women wear utilises this as their consumer understanding concept so that they could identify their target customer base and craft their marketing and promotional plans influencing the buying habits and peer the targeted goal (nike.com, 2021). This concept initiation helped them to also picturise that what consumers think of the competitor brands and alternative directions of getting the customers’ buying patterns in higher inclinations whether the purchasing is offline or online.

LO4. Issues & challenges of the fashion industry

Challenges and issues come in every business sector, so in fashion industry also there are some challenges and issue which brings down or stops the growing businesses of brands. Few of the issues can be identified as gender inequality issues, inclusive cultural issues and last one can be the social class issues. All these challenges can be faced with appropriate agendas and strategies to overcome the negative effects on the clothing brands.

Inclusive culture- nowadays all the customers want their clothing brands to fulfil their demand being proactive guarantors and also must advocate a wide range of diversity and inclusion in their product range. These two concepts will remain as a matter of competition for every brand so brands needed to be focusing on the plans that will prioritise the highest to lowest demands of the consumers (Wiederhold, & Martinez,, Ethical consumer behaviour in Germany: The attitude‐behaviour gap in the green apparel industry., (2018)). Nike have their own campaigning techniques and advertising ideas to grab the customer attention towards them but still keeping up with the continuous change in demands is also sometimes proved to be difficult for them.

Gender inequality- This is another brewing challenge for all brands in the fashion industry including Nike to deal with in their business. It is true that fashion mainly belongs to women wear but that does not overpower their rights to prioritise their demands in first place leaving men’s fashion back. A significant challenge for the brands is to make the world understand this fact that fashion is not only related with women wear, men are also equally part of that (Kao, , Hsiao, , Wang, , & Wang, , 2020). Sometimes it has been seen that women were identified as objects and treated or perpetuated them as objects to showcase the clothing.

Social class- Fashion is a capable measure to signify a person’s propriety, culture, moral standards and values, economic status and social power also. So fashion is that powerful tool which negotiates and structurises the social relations of people and also helps to enforce the class differences. This class differences creates numerous problems previously and it will remain to be an issue that will bring challenges to fashion industry. Also to mention the big difference in the fashion of upper class and lower class differentiates them from each other which sometimes defame the lower class peoples’ respect in society (Wiederhold, & Martinez,, Ethical consumer behaviour in Germany: The attitude‐behaviour gap in the green apparel industry., 2018). However, now the lower class society also relentlessly has challenged the class structure to evade some of the sumptuary laws’ strictures.

LO5. Recommendations

The business of Nike women wear is doing very good as establishing themselves as one of the strong brand with emotional and motivating goals for people of society as well as for developing their business also. Nike’s strategies and future plans are good but this cannot be fixed or static, with the passing time as the market is emerging differently the brands must also need to emerge them for being up-to-mark in the fashion industry competition. This can be done will continuous target shifting among the people so that no community or class remains behind in fashion and Nike must also engage in new techniques for developing their consumer range in today’s sudden changing global environment where anything can happen with time. Some suggestions or recommendations could be helpful for Nike to cope with the issues rising and further excel in the competitive market.

• The most important thing to upgrade a brand is to make estimations of the future business growing including the targets so that there can be a sense of motivation and energy to achieve the set target. Nike’s business strategies need to be more advance where they can picturise them as the top fashion and apparel brand in the market.
• A significant change is required in Nike’s customer approach methods for marketing and promotion. Their plans have been a bit old and monotonous which could bring the risk of being laid back since the competitors are also trying their level hard to beat each other. In that aspect Nike can create something innovative this has always been their strong point when it comes to customer attention but needed to be advanced with time.
• Another recommendation is that the gender differentiation their related taboos need to be removed because in this century we consider gender equality in every aspect. So why to be stuck with women fashion prioritising when it comes to fashion sense and engagements. The global environment is changing day by day and that must be followed by Nike also by considering all the social classes and gender whether men, women or LQBTQ community should be paced equally. Nike being a popular and well renowned brand can initiate this to the community easily making people understand the fact.

Conclusion

Fashion is that weapon or tool that can bring major changes in societal thoughts and nature. This assignment basically revealed that how consumer behaviour is an effective communication skill for building a strong, loyal and dependable customer base. The factors like brand personality & ethics, population cultures & subculture and others are influencing aspects of the fashion industry to build up the market share. The challenges and issue can be solved or dealt with appropriate concepts and theories such as the consumer behavioural theory helps in resolving the consumer challenges and get a better understanding of that community. Lastly few recommendations were concluded so as to make Nike women wear remit the problems and grow in the market.

References

Sustainability,. (2021). Retrieved January 10th, 2021, from nike.com: https://www.nike.com/gb/sustainability

Ayertey,, S., & Ozuem, , W. (2018). Developing Compelling Online Recovery Strategies: Implications for the Fashion Clothing Industry. In Digital Marketing Strategies for Fashion and Luxury Brands . IGI Global., (pp. 264-288).

Esteban-Santos, , L., Medina, , I. G., Carey, , L., & Bellido-Pérez, , E. (2018). Fashion bloggers: communication tools for the fashion industry. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal.

Grappi, , S., Romani, , S., & Barbarossa, , C. (2017). Fashion without pollution: How consumers evaluate brands after an NGO campaign aimed at reducing toxic chemicals in the fashion industry. Journal of Cleaner Production,, 1164-1173.

Jin, , B., & Cedrola, , E. (2017). Fashion branding and communication: core strategies of European luxury brands. Springer.

Kao, , T. W., Hsiao, , S. H., Wang, , Y. Y., & Wang, , T. (2020). How social media shapes the fashion industry: The spillover effects between private labels and national brands. Industrial Marketing Management, 40-51.

Ozuem, , W., & Azemi, , Y. (2017). Digital Marketing Strategies for Fashion and Luxury Brands. IGI Global.

Ozuem, , W., Patten, , E., & Azemi, , Y. (2019). Harnessing omni-channel marketing strategies for fashion and luxury brands. Universal-Publishers.

Ryding,, D., Henninger, , C. E., Alevizou, , P. J., & Goworek, , H. (2017). Sustainability in fashion: A cradle to upcycle approach. Springer.

Stringer, , T., Mortimer, , G., & Payne, , A. R. (2020). Do ethical concerns and personal values influence the purchase intention of fast-fashion clothing?. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal.

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