Brands as Core Assets: Trends and Challenges of Branding in Fashion Business

Abstract

The importance of brand in the fashion business cannot be overemphasized. This chapter reviews the essence of fashion brand management, discussing the concepts of brand and brand equity, fashion brand development and management, and communication. The fashion brand communication section introduces the use of emergent social media and fashion blogs along with traditional media in the luxury and premium fashion industry. Challenges and trends in branding and communication in the fashion industry are also discussed. The challenges around luxury brands, such as counterfeit goods, commoditization, brand dilution, and brand avoidance are explained with prominent examples. In the subsequent section, trends in branding and communication are detailed: luxury brands’ offering online selling, limited edition, guerrilla marketing, pop-up stores, reinforcing brand equity by offering experiential spaces. Major concepts are explained using examples to help readers understand the larger scope of the topic, which will be instrumental in understanding branding strategies of five European luxury and premium brands cases in this volume.