Mad for Massclusivity: Consumer Responses to the Use of Guest Fashion Designers as a Co-branded Marketing Strategy

This paper focuses on the current fashion retail trend to use guest celebrity fashion designers by high street fashion brand such as HM from 2004 onwards. This promotional strategy has resulted in global scenes of urban customers queuing overnight pre-opening, followed by scenes of frenzied shoppers emptying racks and shelves of designer branded items in seconds with resulting media buzz as customers are turned into ‘lustomers’ (Brown 2007). As the fashion system is increasingly image-driven, designers are personified, individualized and aestheticised, whilst also branded and co-branded (Hameide, 2011; Okonkwo, 2007) by the cultural intermediaries whose job it is to align and position them within a consumer niche of shared values and lifestyles. These symbiotic relationships borrow interest from each other as trickle down and bottom up brands cohabit in the interests of establishing brand visibility and credibility amongst aspirational consumers. The question remains as to whether the ‘lustomer’ syndrome is sustainable or a passing fashion fad? The benefits of this close design collaboration relationship appear to facilitate a win-win commercial outcome promising benefits for both parties in terms of heightened brand visibility and increased sales (Chang 2009). Conversely, there are risks in these commercial liaisons including the inability to control the consumer response to the relationship and as HM have found not all co-branding relationships are equally successful. Also, are customers likely to get bored with the celebrity circus or just come to expect it so that the marketing buzz will fail to activate the manic desire for affordable and fleeting luxury that we have seen with previous collections. A qualitative study of HM consumers in Hong Kong using focus groups and interviews tested out these lines of enquiry in this study. Its findings demonstrate that, whilst the intentions of the co-branding strategists to motivate consumers to trade upwards by implementing celebrity designer crossover collections has been largely successful in engaging fashion brand fans on an affective level, there is evidence of increasing consumer agency, cynicism and saturation with regard to this strategy in view of changing economic conditions and evolving consumer needs.The paper will suggest that these HM cross-over designer collections have been successful so far for HM because of the affordance of cultural capital where customers as part of a participatory fashion fan club (Jenkins 1992) or ‘lustomers’ with an appreciation for, and understanding of, the backstory of the selected brands can indulge their desire for, and their knowledge of, the elite brands for their own personal conspicuous consumption, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) and performative consumptive habits (Hills 2002) or as gifts for others (Cialdini 2001) especially in Asia. On another level, economic capital is also a stake turning some consumers into active economic agents who are using the collections to source garments, and style clients for a profit in retail outlets or on e-bay. On the surface, it all appears to be a win-win relationship with the co-producers and consumer getting what they want out of the frenzied performance of consumption. Yet, at the end of the day, HM is all about fast assembly line produced fashion and the process of turning rags into designer gowns is a collusion between the guardians of brand identity and consumers and fashion fans exercising various forms of agency and affect under the illusion of democratising fashion.