After The Industry‘s Brand + Commercial Master Class last week, special guest Ceci Guicciardi outlines her key points.
The Industry‘s Ceci Guicciardi spoke at our Master Class with Brand + Commercial last week. Within the luxurious interior of Sanderson‘s Billiard Room, she talked members through a whole host of questions coiled around the central issue of commercial brand management. With a focus on digital, here she sums up the event with tips, insight and expertise that covers everything from sales processing to intelligent data mining.
They say that historic events can only be fully grasped in retrospect. Certainly, it is sometimes hard to comprehend what a tectonic impact the digital age is having on our collective society as we live through such fast-changing times.
Without a doubt, the internet has fundamentally revolutionised access to data and information. Clay Sharkey, in an article in the The Wall Street Journal a few years back, elegantly equated the invention of the internet with the invention of the Gutenberg press, which with the introduction of movable type heralded the end of the scribal system and with it the start of an era where the proliferation of information and ideas grew exponentially.
In a similar way, Sharky says “digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global.” The internet has ushered in a new way of accessing information and, perhaps more importantly from a commercial standpoint, accessing and commercialising products.
Nonetheless, in such fast-changing times it is critical to remember that while the digital space is changing everything, the fundamentals of selling remain the same. Products still must be desirable, particularly when dealing with Veblen or ‘positional’ goods such as luxury and fashion where desire replaces economic demand, and therefore requires a finely attuned approach to brand strategy and product development.
Prices – though somewhat more elastic in the luxury segment than elsewhere – necessitate a correct application of costing principles. The on-going debate as to whether commercialising luxury ought to be about selling more, or selling smarter may continue, but the bottom line is that sales departments must be revenue centres, not cost centres.
Networking in full swing between members, Tahir Basheer of Sheridans law firm, Stardoll’s Katie Bell & Rupsi Gill from The Industry
Interestingly, places and processes are the marketing components that are most impacted by the digital revolution. The internet certainly affords brands and retailers an increased number of formats and spaces in which to re-consider and fine-tune commercialising fashion: from the many hybrid e-commerce models that successfully and inventively marry commerce, content and communities, to selling platforms that have completely re-conceived selling, such as the D2C or subscription-based models.
Meanwhile, the digital format is ideally suited to offer firms improved new ways to create efficiencies in the day-to-day running of the business, forever changing internal business processes. A simple Google search will unearth a myriad of apps designed to increase productivity and decrease complexity, some probably more plausibly than others.
From a commercial standpoint within the fashion industry, it’s the game-changers when it comes to wholesaling and retailing fashion that really stand out. From sales software systems that enable brands to cost, track and analyse products and client orders, to sales tools that connect buyers and brands to create a more dynamic marketplace, to retailer-end apps designed to drive traffic back to bricks-and-mortar stores (remember those?), the B2B marketplace is growing at an exciting rate.
What’s interesting to note is the emphasis on the value of data and business intelligence that these new places and processes have engendered. Indeed, as previously noted across our pages, going forward the focus will certainly be increasingly on big data, with all the challenges – capture, curation, storage, search, sharing and so on – that come with it.
Despite the inherent complexity however, economic productivity rides on taking a data-focused approach. A recent study by McKinsey noted, tellingly, that while in the past, productivity was about labour plus capital, in the future the equation will read: labour, plus capital plus data. A study of so-called data-driven companies from the MIT Center for Digital Business supports this view, noting that “the more companies characterise themselves as data-driven, the better they performed on objective measures of financial and operational results.”
The internet has and will continue to transform the way we access information and commercialise products, signalling a fertile time for brands and retailers – small and large – to rethink commercialising fashion.
Republished via Brand + Commercial. To see the original article by Industry member Ceci, click here.
Get in touch with Ceci via The Industry Directory
