Pricing and Retail Strategy of H&M
Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) is a Swedish clothing retail company. The company was founded by Erling Pesson in 1947. The first H&M store was opened in Vaesteras, Sweden in 1947. The mission of H&M is to offer fashion and quality at the best price where “quality includes ensuring that products are manufactured in a way that is environmentally and socially sustainable” (H&M, vision & policy, n.d., para. 1). This essay is to highlight the current market analysis, pricing strategy, retail strategy, and competitive advantage analysis of the company.
Current Market Analysis
H&M is the world’s second largest retailer, only behind its main rival Zara of Inditex (Petro, 2012). The company currently has 3006 stores in 53
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Promotion
H&M utilizes multiple communication channels to promote its brand awareness. The most implemented method is featuring well-known celebrities, singers, and designers in its billboard, internet/mobile ads, and television ads. In addition, H&M also promote its brand identity with social awareness ad campaigns like “Fashion Against Aids” or “Fashion for Conscious”. In addition, H&M raises its brand awareness as well as brand loyalty through coupons offers, special promotions, mobile commerce, social networking sites, reward program, and its online sites. For instance, just on its Facebook page alone, there are more than 16 million fans, who constantly comment and respond to H&M newsfeeds. This high social hype not only helps the company to create more brand familiarity but also helps the company to know what its customers want and demand
Place
Since the main target segments are the generation X, Y, and Z, most of H&M stores are located in hip, visible, crowded part of shopping pavilions or inside the malls. Spaces within high-traffic volume outlet shopping centers are also ideal locations for the company. In addition, H&M’s target market places also include mobile commerce and e-commerce.
Competitive Advantage Analysis
The H&M focuses its sustainability on three areas: innovative technology, low-price strategy, and expansion.
Innovative Technology
H&M prides itself for utilizing the
Hennes and Mauritz AB is a Swedish retail-clothing company, which has expanded enormously in the past years. H&M has grown from one single store in a small town in Sweden to a multinational ranked as the second largest global fashion retailer with its 3,600 stores in over 58 countries and $22 billion in annual sales (The World’s). This incredible story of success makes us wonder about their strategies and how they managed to get where they are today.
Some key determinants of a successful social media promotional campaign is measuring brand reach or viewers, and the level of engagement interacting with the promotional message. Level of influence can inspire followers to take some kind of action such as engaging with your message or making a purchase. Measurables such as tracking social media traffic to a company’s website or even time spent on a specific page, viewing of various products and other such actions can also provide valuable data. These are all relevant from a marketing perspective in evaluating increased brand awareness or appeal of interest to the promotional campaign.
That being said, suppliers can have some power in regards to choosing the number of stores where their product can be purchased at. This allows the suppliers to regulate their sales and stay away from the “red tape”. The bargaining power of customers impacts HBC as customers are able to influence pricing based on their buying habits. Of course, customers do not choose the retail prices offered to them, however, if inexpensive clothing were to lead the industry, retail stores would adapt to this consumer demand and offer an abundance of inexpensive clothing due to consumer preferences. These forces lead to rivalry among competitors due to the many options offered to consumers to grant their desires. These forces combine to cause strategic implications for HBC. HBC must differentiate itself from its competitors who, similar to HBC, have large annual revenue, strong and profitable supplier agreements and large amounts of capital. As well, due to competitors large sale volumes, competitive pricing is an implication which faces
This report contains the analysis of value and culture of reputable apparel retailer H&M, as well as three analysis method, which is PETEL, Porter’s five forces, and VRIO framework, to analyse the external influence factors, competitors, and competitive advantages of H&M.
* Procurement: As it is the second Europe’s cloth retailer company, for the production H&M uses a lot of material and workers so its mains recourses are material, labour and energy. That is why small changes in prices can affect the company’s profit a lot, and the fact that it does not own any manufactories causes some problems in controlling the production’s prices. However, not owning the factories can be an advantage in some cases. Indeed, if a problem appears, H&M can easily change its suppliers. Moreover, due to its huge size, H&M can easily manipulate with its suppliers to have the best quality at the lowest production’s price.
According to the mission statement of Anthropologie: “Lifestyle merchandising is our business and our passion. The goal for our brands is to build a strong emotional bond with the customer. To do this we must build lifestyle environments that appeal emotionally, and offer fashion correct products on a timely basis. Our customers are the reason and the inspiration for everything we do.” UO considers the relationship it has with its customers before making decisions that affect them. Therefore, UO has kept in touch with customers continuously by utilizing various platforms such as SNS messages, connections with its online store, campaigns, events, and social media. In 2016, the growth rate of the company of retail segment is 1.6%, $47.4 million (URBN FY 2016 Annual report, 35). The basic concept of gaining inspiration from customers forms a diverse and progressive corporate culture; this is the driving force behind the development of the
Of the hundreds of named brand clothing that form part of the retail and fashion industry I chose to compare, for my analysis, Abercrombie & Fitch, Forever 21, American Eagle, and H&M. These stores are prominent, well-known for selling apparel, shoes, and accessories by the means of offering sales and promotions to their customers. This is a clever strategy for attracting customers, allowing them to believe that they bought goods at affordable, convenient prices – and not to mention the prestigious name prescribed to the clothing brands. Using keyhole.co as my main source, I obtained relevant and valuable information regarding the status of these brands. My intentions were to compare a period of 14 days, however, due to the limited access that I received from my free trial, the program only allowed me to see fewer of the dates than I anticipated. I want to take this opportunity and mention ahead of time that due to the various and distinctive products that are sold from these stores, when looking for the “spending capacity” I decided to focus on shirts/ jeans for men and women and compare the prices among them since each of these retailers carry those items and as a way to make this report easier to contrast and comprehend. Also, when approaching the section of “setting”, I screen-shotted some of the images on Instagram and made them into a collage to separate the type of clothes and trends that each of these brands sell currently. In the following modules
Even though H&M follows a strategy which differs significantly from Inditex’s approach it is the closest competitor from the financial point of view. H&M differs from Zara because it outsources all of the production, it is more price oriented and spends more money on advertising. But both companies are based in Europe, are fashion forward at lower price retailers, and have a strong international expansion strategy. Exhibit 6 indicates that the financial results of Inditex and H&M seem to
Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) is one of the largest clothing retailers worldwide. Their target market range age group is about 0-40 years old, but is most popular for those 15-30 years old. The brand reputation has achieved the assumption that their goal is to offer fashionable clothing at a reasonable price. Their clothing is always on trend, and sold at an affordable price from about $0.80 to $450. H&M buys stock in large columns to keep prices affordable for their average consumer. They partake in many collaborations with designers and celebrities, such as, David Beckham, Alexander Wang, and the most recent, Kenzo, as well as many more. They have worked to achieve a quick and well established system with stores all around the world, and a large consumer variety. H&M is regularly featured in respectable fashion magazines, such as Vogue and Elle. The following shows all of the countries a customer is able to shop from on the online website.
One the main features of H&M is the rapidity of shifts in demand and respond to customers’ needs. In fact when necessities of customers change, in only three weeks H&M can create new items. A normal clothes company needs six months to create new collections or articles. That’s why H&M does many researches all the time to find out new tendencies or variations of styles, giving shoppers last tendencies clothes.
The H&M guarantees value for their low pricing. This strategy of low prices has made the company very successful in emerging markets, according to Jepeson (2014). From the research conducted H&M seems to be practicing a cost based pricing model. The two major constituents of the brand pricing is the high fashion and the lower cost. The company collaborates with renowned designers in order to offer innovative product design but manages to keep prices low through the manufacturing
Since social media is so easily accessible to everyone nowadays people don't care to go and grab the latest vogue for inspiration, they will go on their phones and check their instagram, twitter, Facebook or any social media account to see whats trending. In L2's Advanced IQ List, which positions form brands as per their site offerings, online business, computerized advertising and web-based social networking mindfulness, US ladies' dress planner Tory Burch beats understood worldwide extravagance brands, for example, Gucci, Hermes and Chanel. This shows the huge impact the influence of social media can have on the Fashion industry, the world is moving and progressing through social media and those who chose not to utilize this part of technology so widely used, are going to fall behind those who do. People who are very high up in social media have a very big platform to promote and influence others. Nowadays if you have a huge amount of followers you are practically famous with all eyes watching you. Fashion corporations want people who have this huge platform on social media to promote their styles due to the fact people are going to be strongly persuaded to want or to want to look like something if someone they keep up with on social media looks a certain way or wears a certain piece. Fashion trends from all over the world come to meet each other, merge, change and evolve through social media. The concept of the see
In my opinion, the best online retailer is Amazon. They easily have the best customer service and product fulfillment when compared to other online retailers. The inventory in the USA is over 200 million products, making such a feat impossible for a physical retail store to compete (Export, 2013). The following essay will discuss Amazon’s pricing and retail strategy. Both are key factors of their marketing that allow Amazon to sustain their market dominance and retain their loyal customers.
H&M became one of the biggest worldwide leading fashion retailers. Until Year 2010, H&M has around 2,000 stores in 37 markets (Data from H&M-US Website). Details of market overview of H&M can be referred to Appendix I.
There is no doubt that the customer is king because without customer, there is no business. Today, brand can easily attract or lose customers. With the increasing number of social platform and numbers of creating account, customers’ voices are raised among social media, web sites or forum. In fact, we can observe that, nowadays, customers don’t hesitate to question brands, to congratulate, to criticize and even to require that brand deliver them messages adapted to their profile and their interest. Particularly with