I've been interested in fashion film as a way to promote brands having worked with start-ups who achieved successful responses to their films and used my Masters thesis to explore fashion films on Instagram Stories. The research was split into two parts; the first looking at what brands are posting and the second questioning the power of these films to influence customers who were not necessarily engaged on Instagram. I’m going to split the findings of both parts into four posts, so they aren’t too long.
I needed to find out if a range of brands across different fashion sectors, included film as part of their approach to stories which can give a less formal approach to posting on the channel. Who was posting video that disappeared and who left a trail of video content in their highlights, did any of these link through to specific landing pages to help track the customer journey or through to longer videos on IGTV allowing for a more immersive film experience and what content stood out in the sea of film? Did any brand make content in the right orientation for the platform or was it all repurposed from somewhere else?
It was also necessary to look at these posts through the lens of fashion film. Consensus on what defines fashion film isn't complete but Díaz Soloaga, P. & García Guerrero, L. (2016) framed it around brands and branded content recognising the importance they play in brand equity calling it the "heir of audiovisual advertisements, film, short films, video clips and video art." Exploring if fashion brands were taking the opportunity to create 15 second versions of fashion film (like these from apple) could prove interesting.
Before diving further in, there is a caveat to this part of the research - to be able to work with a succinct representation of these posts, I only selected the first four stories from accounts that actively posted, this ranged from a live story and three highlights with stills and text alongside video, to brands that hadn't utilised highlights at all or had any stories live on those days. So although it wasn’t a longitudinal approach (like this from Union Metrics), it was enough to get an idea of what brands were doing through this channel and reflects how IG users check out a brand’s profile to see if they’ll follow them. In the end this resulted in watching 102 stories from 34 brands varying in length from 15 seconds to around 10 minutes.
Anyone who has spent any time looking at fashion content on Stories will tell you there is a huge spectrum of approaches, including a variety of techniques to engage customers and a lot that is i forgettable. This is a great article on different approaches brands have taken and ideas to try out. Suffice to say that not all brands create great, engaging content but there is no need to dwell on the less effective posts some of which came from surprising quarters.
There was one brand I didn’t include in the analysis who deserve a separate mention. Coach have really nailed their use of stories and the majority of the themes that arose from the analysis (more of which below) can can be seen in their highlights, the only thing that doesn’t flow is their links to specific product pages to make the customer journey more complete (adidas are great at this, reflecting their overall digital strategy) but their rise in success suggests that it’s the content that followers are drawn to.
I broke down the stories into four themes that emerged, these were not all present on all accounts but they tended to appear across sectors from luxury to value so let’s look at them. The first one I will look at on this post and the remainder on a follow up post
Theme 1: Use a celebrity or influencer
81% of the brands used an influencer or celebrity in their stories. There is no doubt that both parties can benefit from this type of relationship and what became clear later in the research is that messages that came directly from brands were helped by a familiar face. Influencer spend is on the rise here and here so appealing to your audience through the “authentic” voice of an individual makes for a stronger campaign. Djafarova and Rushworth (2014) highlight this through Source Credibility Theory “where reviews or statements regarding products and services are perceived as valid on Instagram, consumers develop a positive attitude towards the brand being endorsed.”
There are so many more examples of the success of influencer marketing and the reasons behind that success such as parasocial interaction (see Gong and Li’s paper from 2017) and looking at the WeChat model (BOF) and (BOF) customers are definitely responsive to a familiar face, happy to spend money on product endorsed by the right personality with the right level of following. Interestingly Jiao et al. (2017) found that Western audiences responded more positively to marketer generated content in a social media brand community setting but Eastern audiences preferred user generated content. This study suggested that there would be a difference to the SMBC based on the platform and this is really important when addressing your audience. Where are they and what do they want to do on that platform? Looking at the platform itself is a good indicator and the features that are available - SMBCs work differently on each platform due to the different features but both Snapchat and YouTube (highlighted as the most popular networks in this study from Pew) rely on influencers to drive marketing efforts suggesting that the cultural differentiations may be less influential than the platform and the relevance of the content whether pushed out by brands or influencers. The take home message is that influencers and celebrities can be used really effectively especially if they are adding a different tone of voice to the brand on the platform.
I'll be adding the next section of themes over the next week, so connect with me on LinkedIn and you can find out when it's ready.
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