9. Discussion on sustainability of Zara minimal advertising
Zara adopts the minimal advertising strategy spending around 0.3% comparing to industry average of 3-4% (Pearson). Retailer uses this to invest on state-of-the-art stores in prime locations. This is quite a strategic move for Zara as it could be clearly seen that they positioned themselves close to luxury brands such as Chanel. ‘It shares Champs Elysees real estate with Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co, Guerlain and Cartier’ (Doran, 2014). By having stores near luxury brands, customers could easily links Zara to these prestige brands, hence, increasing its brand equity. These stores also attract new visitors like tourists through high footfall locations. Moreover, the store concept is carefully designed with luxury cues such as faceless white mannequins, minimal mirrors, and a monochrome colour palette. Secondly, Zara uses fashion campaigns to communicate its positioning. It was reported that Zara hired Freja Beha Erichsen, the same face appearing in Chanel campaigns and asked Patrick Demarchelier to make SS14 campaign (Cabon, 2014). Communication through traditional tools like H&M may decrease the exclusivity and luxury of Zara’s brand. Hence, selective quality brand communication creates higher brand image. From the analysis above, Zara depends on its fashionable products as its main attraction. The changing stream of products makes consumers to visit stores 17 times annually (Choi, 2014). Therefore, the retailer
They are women with incomes of $25,000 or more a year that care about their appearance and spend money on beauty products. They tend to have curly or frizzy hair. They are women that tend to use beauty salons and keep up with fashion and fashion trends.
Zara is a high-end street store offering the latest tastes in fashion for women, men, and children alike. Amancio Ortego, Zara’s founder, has made the store grow with rapid success in both its home country, Spain, and internationally. One of the distinct reasons why Zara is such a unique company compared to its competitors is its foundation of the quick response system. Today, Zara’s cycle time is six weeks, in which it responds to its customers’ demand very quickly, unlike most stores that take half a year. Overall, Zara is distinct from most apparel stores in its ability to travel globally and from its international strategy.
The business idea of Zara is to link customer demand to manufacturing, and to link manufacturing to distribution. And based on this general idea, Zara has several essential elements for its business model. First, speed and decision making, which means that in the external level, Zara need to respond very quickly to demands of target customers, and always keep in style. While for the inside, Zara treasure intelligence and judgment of common employees who enjoy a great deal of autonomy. Second, its marketing, merchandising and advertising strategy. Zara does not spend on virtually advertising, while it spends heavily on stores, and no selling online because of
With which of the international competitors listed in the case is it most interesting to compare Inditex’s financial results? What do comparisons indicate about Inditex’s relative operating economics? Its relative capital efficiency?
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Zara International is considered a high end clothing store that is affordable. Due to its quality in fashion, low prices and immediate availability, popular stores such as Gap and H&M fail to keep up with Zara’s success. Zara’s well known tactic of fast fashion has separated them from their competition. The ‘fast fashion’ objective is to distribute top trends of fashion within the runway to customers by selling them in local stores. Zara has been able to achieve the fast fashion perspective by hiring approximately 200 people that will assist in getting these trends out in stores within a matter of weeks.
The Spanish retail chain Zara has unique supply chain management practices that enable it to gain a competitive advantage over other fashion retailers in the industry. Zara’s rapid response time enables the firm to quickly respond to changing fashions while deliberately under producing products. This strategy, which is supported by competencies in logistic management, design and information systems, allows the company to maintain less inventory and higher profit margins and is a key factor to Zara’s success. The firm should continue to add value by seeking new opportunities to expand in the retail market and maintain their sustainable growth.
Zara currently employs no advertising at all. As word of mouth is very important in retail, this low key approach is in line with Zara 's culture. A well structured marketing campaign could, however, spread the word of Zara 's expansion across the US, while maintaining their mysterious boutique-type image. Billboards or print ads with a "teaser" approach could accomplish this goal. Advertising will become important to increase Zara 's profile during expansion. Due to its comfortable profit margins, a modest advertising budget could be afforded.
The basic strategy for fighting competition is to attract buyers at lower prices, more unique designs, high-quality design, efficient customer service and solid image brand. Thus bargaining power of buyer for apparel industry is high as the products falls under the basic needs in human lives. There is no much difference in terms of products offered by the apparel company, so if buyer is unhappy with the product or service they can easily switch to another brand. Thus, Zara are trying to strengthen its position in the market by using their unique strategy by giving priority to buyer to meet their special needs.
In society is such opinion about prices, if the product price is low, it means that the quality is low. People think that everything with high prices has high quality, but it is not true. In this case Zara did not want to be seen as a low quality brand. Hence they create products of high quality. They wanted to be first between fashion brands and add new designs to their collections twice a week. For customers is not good to look the same designs two week, the company knows about customers needs and they remove the products that do not sell well and changes the stores’ organization twice a week. Products can be different by their functional aspects, by the price and the quality. Zara differentiates by these elements. The main point of the differentiation strategy for Zara is combination of the low price and high quality and if other companies want to be desirable, they must do the same. Zara tries to decrease the product in the inventory and increase the number of variable
The core concept of Zara 's business model is they sell "medium quality fashion clothing at affordable prices", and vertical integration and quick-response is key to Zara 's business model. Through the entire process of Zara 's business system: designing, sourcing and manufacturing, distribution and retailing, they presented four fundamental success factors: short cycle time, small batches per product, extensive variety of product every season and heavy investment in information and communication technology. These four elements are involved in every aspect of the business.
Fast fashion is merely more than a one hit wonder. The fast fashion industry has grown and has ultimately proven itself to be profitable industry in the clothing market. The retailer most distinguished for a fast fashion approach is Zara (Hayes & Jones, 2006). Zara is a child company of the parent company Inditex. Zara stores have established the stride for merchants around the globe in creating and shipping fashionable clothing (“Case 3-4. Continued Growth for Zara and Inditex”, 2013). Their marketing approach has helped them become extremely successful in terms of providing the customer with. International marketing strategies and its efficiency assists in the expansion of Zara. Cultural understanding is virtuously
When an advertiser places one of their advertisements into a newspaper, they want their advertisement to appeal to the readers of that particular magazine. They could have the exact same message, but considering their audience, they could make it more effective if they use a different strategy to market their product. This is very common for advertising strategies to change when the content of the magazine changes. You can relate the way that the magazine producers choose their ads by when Steve Craig says that " program producers and schedulers must consider the target audience needs of their clients" (162). The types of advertisements are driven by the content of the magazine. Sports Illustrated provides a
Next, the essay will concern about five performance objectives that help Zara achieve competitive advantage in business. About quality, beauty, affordable prices and fashion are factors leading to magic success of Zara as well as other brands of Inditex, but it is not easy to do that. Amancio Ortega is president of the corporation with 32,000 employees, but he still has habit of operating as a family company with a clever and simple style. Zara operates with closed model from research, design, production, distribution and retail. Diversity, abundance and frequent changes of clothing design have become the biggest competitive advantage of Zara. The competitors expect to have the attraction like Zara. Most customers feel loss or lack
Zara is a Spanish brand of clothing founded by the visionary Amancio Ortega Gaona and Rosalia Mera in Artexio, Galicia. Zara was founded in the year 1975. It is one of the major selling brands of one of the biggest fashion retailer "INDITEX". Zara is now available in 86 countries with total of 1,763 stores worldwide.