FASHION MUST-HAVES FOR THE COMING SEASON: 4. A RIBBON.

It doesn’t have to be a ribbon. Could be anything really – a pattern, shape, lemon, hedgehog, just something visual associated with your brand. It’s beyond a logo. It should run through your communications like the name of a seaside town through a stick of rock. Not appearing alongside it, but informing what ‘it’ is. Why? It increases your chances of your messages being remembered as yours. The boffins at the Ehrenburg Institute call them ‘Distinctive Assets’. The bottle saysRead more

FASHION MUST-HAVES FOR THE COMING SEASON: 3. ACCESS.

Beauty may attract, but it also repels. Look at the impossibly gorgeous, 0% body-fat models in most fashion ads and you’re confronted by how different you are. So rather than the desired response ‘that could be me’, you may think the opposite ‘no way is that me’. It’s like a gang rejecting your membership application in real time. The nuances of how these gangs present themselves is important. A recent documentary showed how Ralph Lauren puts his gang together, and it wasn’t how I’d imagined. For aRead more

FASHION MUST-HAVES FOR THE COMING SEASON: 2. FAME.

Streaming killed Blockbuster. iPhones killed Nokia. What killed Gap? I know, I know, technically they’re not dead, but boy are they diminished. Back in the day, everyone I knew had something with Gap written on it in their wardrobe. Not any more. Did they just happen to be in the right place at the right time? Or maybe it was their advertising? Put simply; when ran good ads they were successful when they didn’t they weren’t. I realise that’s notRead more

FASHION MUST-HAVES FOR THE COMING SEASON: 1. A CONSCIENCE.

I hated this campaign. It didn’t follow any of the rules we were supposed to follow at the time. It didn’t focus on something uniquely Benetton. (History, products, ingredients, process, etc.) It didn’t even attempt to persuade anyone their products were better than the competition. And frankly, it didn’t seem very clever. It felt like a generic solution that just happened to have a Benetton logo stuck to it. In retrospect, I was wrong. It wasn’t generic, it shone aRead more