Fashion Branding Essay -- Social Identity, Clothes

Fashion Branding "Clothing is primarily a means of communicating, not personal identity, but social identity" as, said by Noesjirwan and Crawford (1982) who defines clothing as a ‘code’ (McCracken and Roth 1989) or symbolic representation. Clothing has been spoken by many theoriest in the past and they refer clothing as a code, a language, which allows a message to be created and (selectively) understood (Hollander, 1978; Holman, 1980; McCracken and Roth, 1989). Compliance towards a brand today showcases the social strata of the individual or the social group they belong to. "If I'm wearing a white T-shirt and sneakers, that label [Armani] will fill in the rest of the information about me. I want to give out the right impression", says a customer in a London shop selecting her tenth pair of Armani jeans (Financial Times, 1995). This statement by an individual showcases the importance of branding. Today if we talk in any industry branding is playing a vital role. International brand devel opment or entry technique is employed by creation of brand that is recognized as a social brand. Consumers’ perception today, among the young youth as said by Belk et al., (1981) is "consumption-based stereotypes", which means creating a perception about a persons wealth by what they own and not knowing the person. It could be termed as unanimous judgements about the person without actually knowing the person. This paper will look into the academic literature available in consumption pattern in fashion brands and would further elaborate in the entry techniques in developing or emerging nation. This paper would also highlight the importance of building brand equity and maintenance of the same. In a put shell this paper would deal with the relations... ...in focus of these brand managers is the short-term financial gain rather than long-term customer relation and profitability. Branding, unlike brand, is a clearly defined and established research area, still it lacks in conceptualisation similarities (Blumenthal, 2004; Bridson and Evans, 2004). de Chernatony and Dall’Olmo (1998) say the available branding literature has been failed in developing the boundaries and brand construct that would allow for methodological, epistemological, semantical and formal sets of criteria. de Chernatony and Dall’Olmo (1998) through their research study proposed a model which lays the foundation for brand theory, thus support in defining construct and boundaries of brand. In order to set boundaries of the construct of brand twelve themes were proposed by them which, in the branding literature, were categorized as vital propositions.