Who could get over Carrie Bradshaw’s Fendi Baguette bag, and Blair’s school uniforms? Or, one day you might want to become part of the elites of the regency as Bridgerton’s women, and the next day, you might find yourself doing the Wednesday dance in a full goth look. To project these trends and short-term personas, “fashion” is an unavoidable tool. In fact, Gossip Girl Reboot brought out the dark academia aesthetic again, leading to an increase in interest in varsity jackets (by 53%), and plaid vests (47%), as well as House of Gucci, has caused a peak in the attraction towards Gucci products with its release.
Image: Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw’s Fendi Baguette bag
Over the decades, TV series are known to be the inspiration of trends and unique lifestyles, with significant portrayals from the fashion land. Our lives and the way we behave are constantly transforming with the shows we binge-watch and get the illusion of becoming one of the personas within them until another mega-hit arrives. Inevitably, just as previous mainstream tv shows, streaming platforms have become and are becoming the main trendsetters as well.
Fashion as the main tool of the appreciation of popular tv culture gave birth to a brand new term called Netflix-inspired fashion since the shows aired on Netflix (mostly) led to the emergence of trends or consciously fueled to create them.
Image: Gossip Girl Reboot, dark academia aesthetic
Apparently, given the hype train that continuously changes its route, could be highly beneficial for the fashion industry. Taking instant reactions to the trends according to solid strategies could be challenging, but understanding them could help brands create new routes as well.
In this reading, we will provide a brief for you to grasp possible opportunities and updates of streaming platforms’ impact on consumers' behavior and decision-making.
Why TV Has a Bewitching Effect on Consumers?
With the pandemic, the average time of streaming and watching TV increased to 9 hours a day. Eventually, viral shows’ impact on people started to become unavoidable, making TV call the shots for the future of fashion trends for the audience more than ever, and even managed to make tracksuits IN again with Squid Game, or made you put glitters and rhinestones to every part of your face with Euphoria.
However, the main answer is under the term “sense of belonging” - the urge to become a part of a bigger, unique realm that makes us feel safe and important. We want to become the people that we adore, thus we dress up and act like them and when many of us want to be in the same new realm at the same time, a new trend arises.
As one can see, consumers decide whether a show is going to be viral or not, and brands and productions could only forecast the situation. Especially fashion and cosmetic sectors are highly aware of the need to emotionally bond with consumers and gain popularity among them.
Given consumer traits in parallel with the subject, have become valuable sources for Maisons to design alternative engagement styles according to popular streaming culture since being associated with fiction worlds most likely has a significant positive effect on profitability.
Image: Wednesday, goth aesthetic
Netflix Inspired Fashion
Fashion as the main appreciation tool of popular tv culture gave birth to a brand new term called Netflix-inspired fashion since the shows aired on Netflix (mostly) led to the emergence of trends or consciously platform itself fueled them.
Since the costumes have a critical part in the storytelling of productions, market analysts and creatives could avert the challenge of reflecting brand persona and image accurately by having a part in the costume design and styling process for Netflix -including other streamers- shows to communicate with their audience precisely, converting emotion into wearable art.
To elaborate, data demonstrates how the launch of Bridgerton brought back the interest towards corsets, resulting 123% increase in search traffic according to Lyst.com, and the same applies to other lingerie brands such as La Perla. Likewise, designers elucidated “Regencycore”, and used British Regency as the main muse for their new collections.
Image: @chiquemuffin, use of corsets in daily life
Image: Bridgerton
Moreover, apparel stores that use low-priced strategies, such as SHEIN and Bershka also observed a 325% search growth for corsets, while Instagram and TikTok users illustrated how to style them for multiple occasions.
Producers besides Netflix have broken the internet as well. For instance, Euphoria is the new judge of fashion trends: Amina Muaddi heels saw a 125% rise in searches after Alexa Demie wore them on the show with a matching black cut-out dress.
Image: Alexa Demie wearing Amina Muaddi heels
Your Next Move as a Brand
Companies are moving in parallel with trends for increased profits, nevertheless, they recently started to become aware of how impactful it can be to set up an advertising campaign through Netflix -and alikes- content.
Brands using different pricing strategies seem to follow different paths:
- High-end fashion brands choose to be inspired and restructure their concepts liberally
- Lower-ends are creating collections for the fans on purpose, as Pull&Bear has done with Sex Education, and Asos became a master of replicating fits as an immediate response, even though its name stands for “As Seen on Screen”.
Image: Pull & Bear x Netflix Sex Education collection
The main reason lies behind these different approaches for “Netflix-inspired fashion” is that luxury brands have longer production cycles that make them respond slower to fleeting trends. Thus, they choose to get the upper hand by engaging with streaming platforms and creating fashion collaborations that are presented with the production launch.
VP of consumer products at Netflix, Josh Simon, explains the success of collaborations happens when the brand embeds the show’s culture towards its collections.
For finding the secret to making use of collaborations, Balmain is the perfect example to understand the given strategy:
Oliver Rousting, creative director of Balmain, signed into two successful collaborations for the show industry, launching a capsule collection featured in Netflix Western, The Harder They Fall, and observed positive returns. Likewise, they engaged with UK’s Channel 4’s mini-series Fracture, which has 6 million views. In addition to that, they partnered with Tencent to air Fracture in China, gaining 120 million views.
Moreover, brands had already created product partnerships before even the second season premiere of Emily in Paris and launched the items on Netflix shop and Saks.com.
Image: Emily in Paris products in Netflix Shop
Image: Emily in Paris products in Saks.com
A New Investment Opportunity: Ad-Supported Tier on Netflix
Netflix recently announced an ad-supported tier with 15-30 seconds commercials, that gives additional opportunities for brands to showcase themselves, besides integrating them into the whole production. The streaming market has a “bluer” ocean compared to the social media advertising world which is getting more costly and inoperative.
Netflix’s main outlet is its audience which is 200 million on average. However, the expected results are yet to come, creating hesitancy to become an early adaptor. Another challenge for the brands is the high-priced service, $65 for 1K impressions, which is 3 to 4 times higher than social media ads. Consequently, bigger brands with wider budgets are expected to be pioneers for emerging brands to witness.
Targeting is also another limited feature of Netflix ads that are based on locations, and genre. However, Netflix provides fewer occasions for customizing and tracking brands since they are not considering sharing comprehensive data with business clients, leaving brands in the shadows. In this manner, it may seem strategically correct to engage with third parties to gather full information, however, Netflix is not willing to disclose the data to them as well. Hence, with these big risks, it could be smarter for emerging brands to wait-and-see.
To conclude, the key steps to take when you plan your streaming platform strategy could be beneficial to focus on the aspects below:
1. Brand Strategy
Which pricing strategy do you use? If it is low cost, you should be fast to capture the trends and elevate your collections with fan merch. On the contrary, if you are a luxury brand with a slower-paced production cycle, you could look into production collaborations with capsule collections beforehand.
2. Make yourself stand out
Wednesday viewers would understand -spoiler alert- if I mention the woman in red boots, but they wouldn’t know the brand of it most likely. If you have the chance to embed your products into popular shows, make sure that your brand is also could be recognized with an agile marketing strategy.
3. Engage with the right productions
Engage with the productions before their upcoming seasons or their launches, if it matches your brand image, of course.
4. Find your Netflix ad strategy
Will you wait and see or become one of the early adaptors? Keep in mind investing in Netflix with its current pricing plan could be risky for emerging businesses.
To get in-depth and grasp more insights to create long-term and profitable strategies, we are here to help!
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