User:Weiran Wang/sandbox

Contributions to Wikipedia: Social media in the fashion industry

Contents:

In 2016, there were 75% shoppers discovering products and fashion trends on social media; however, only 1.5% of online sales was contributed by this kind of media. In this case, as the administrations of various brands intend to import Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Wechat, and other social platforms as media and advertising tools, they anchor the hope of improvement of brands position in the market on the incredible volume of discovery on social media. Take Instagram as an example, it was originally acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars in 2012, and as one of the most popular platforms in the world, Instagram holds 600 million active users. In the last year, Instagram has been launched massive special features to offer convenience for users to shopping on social media. Specifically, as Instagram users can save their favorite image as a private image, a series of related favorite products can be directly searched by a simple click on the image tag.

Not only the high street brands depend on the promotion of social media, but also most of the luxury brands intend to establish a direct link from the embedded browser of the social media app to their official website. That is to say; by reducing the resistance of browsing, these marketing innovations create a much more simple process of online shopping. Moreover, the design concepts of those innovations are called ‘intention design’: when users save or like images, the social media will present more similar brands information, especially some products information for users. The direct click to the official website not only makes the business seamless but also improves the brand awareness with shopping integration, and, moreover, creates more and more simple manners for users to chase fashionable trends and even to shop on social media.

Postive/Negative aspects:

Due to the further development of social media, luxury brands not only promote on social media but also offer e-commerce as a new distributional channel in the market. However, it has triggered the increase of possibility of channel conflict, and the enlargement of the negative impact of increased distribution control: The luxury brands do not intend to sell their product at a lower price than that in physical stores. Therefore, most of those luxury brands, for protecting their brand reputation, have prohibited high discount on social media for attracting consumers to shop online.

Regional conflicts of products prices on social media, in addition, have impacted the sales in physical stores. It has broken up the regional price structure of diversity in the market. Specifically, if a brand sells a higher price in the Chinese physical store than that in the Europe, Chinese consumers could buy the same products through the European website channels at a lower price. However, if the authority decides to close the online shopping, a key branch of business for the brands would be lost. In addition, the channel operation of social media brings a negative impact on the physical stores. Specifically, as significant numbers of brands have established their official accounts on social media, the brand loyalty of consumers will be impaired by the massive comparison of products from the various brand.