Kara Klaus
Shirtless men on store bags, dark, moody stores, size xxs everywhere and the overpowering stench of cologne floating in the air, welcome to Abercrombie and Fitch in the early 2000’s. This image remained with Abercrombie for over a decade and only recently, has begun to change. Abercrombie and Fitch’s less than desirable reputation led them to undergo a serious makeover that included new management and branding. With this new direction, Abercrombie pushed fresh campaigns to show a more inclusive and accepting brand. The “Denim Your Way” campaign is one of the recent campaigns Abercrombie and Fitch released to reconstruct their image. This campaign focused on size inclusivity and body positivity with the idea that everyone should have denim that makes them feel confident. The “Denim Your Way” campaign succeeded in rebranding Abercrombie and Fitch as an inclusive company, but did not fully take advantage of all social media resources to do so. Before tackling the specifics of Abercrombie and Fitch’s new campaign it is important to know the history of the store and what led them to introduce “Denim Your Way.”
David Abercrombie founded the store in 1892. It did not start as the teen and young adult fashion store it’s known for today, but originally began as an outdoor specialty retailer praised for its quality. In 1904 the name changed from Abercrombie to Abercrombie and Fitch, the name it is still known by today, as a result of Ezra Fitch becoming a business partner. At this time, A&F was seen as a luxury brand and highly prominent people such as President Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Amelia Earhart were seen sporting their clothing. Almost twenty-five years after Ezra Fitch joined Abercrombie and Fitch, the company traded hands to James S. Cobb in 1928 when Ezra Fitch retired.
During the 50-60’s the brand began to spread nationwide and continued to open stores across America. Jumping forward into the late 1980’s, Limited Brands bought Abercrombie and Fitch and ultimately began to give the company a new vision and target audience. A&F moved away from their roots as an outdoor specialty store and started hitting the market with current fashion trends. This big leap would take the company into the 21stcentury to the store we know today. In 1998 Abercrombie and Fitch took their next substantial step forward when it launched Abercrombie Kids, adding yet another building block on its new-found success. This growth also set in motion the founding of A&F’s sister brand Hollister Co. in the year 2000.
After the success of launching Hollister Co., Abercrombie and Fitch opened its first flagship store in 2005 on 5thAve. in New York City. Going forward the company then had some highs, such as creating flagship stores across the world in the early 2000’s, to increasing lows entering the 2010’s with a very controversial CEO leading the company. During 2014 Abercrombie and Fitch removed CEO Mike Jeffries after he had created a plethora of problems for the company. His removal would ultimately bring about a new era for Abercrombie.
Following the dismal, a new store prototype was tested in 2015, one considerably more open and inviting, as opposed to their previous dark and potent smelling stores. The success of this prototype store led to a complete rebranding of Abercrombie and Fitch and in 2017 A&F appointed the current CEO, Fran Horowitz, who has had a great impact on their new image. Due to this fresh branding, Abercrombie has achieved some great company accomplishments such as in 2018 ,when they exceeded one billion dollars annually on digital sales alone. The campaigns the company has run, such as their current “Denim Your Way” campaign, and others they continue to come up with are all in an effort to help reshape their image and move their company forward in rewarding ways.
The premise of the campaign centers around finding denim that makes one feel confident and good in their own skin regardless of their shape and size. In addition, a secondary goal aims to continue repairing and creating a new and better image for Abercrombie, one more inclusive for all individuals. As stated above, controversial CEO Mike Jeffries detrimentally hurt Abercrombie and Fitch’s reputation and market audience through a variety of appalling comments made during his time in leadership. He said in one interview “We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” This and other similar comments said during his time as CEO caused Abercrombie to gain an image as a retail outlet for only those of a size 00 to XS or a picture-perfect human like all of their clothing models. Not surprisingly, this portrayal lost them a number of valuable customers.
Moving forward to today, Abercrombie has done much to repair their tarnished image such as expanding sizing options and including size variances such as petite, regular and tall. Additionally, Abercrombie launched the “Denim Your Way” campaign in an effort to show they are trying to improve their inclusivity and are listening to what their customers want. In preparation for the campaign they hired real everyday people to come in and try on their jeans and give them feedback as to what they would like changed or what may or may not be comfortable on all body types. Abercrombie then revised styles and even introduced their Curve Love line to accommodate people with a curvier figure. Abercrombie and Fitch further announced they were doing open casting calls in order to have everyday, ordinary people be part of their “Denim Your Way” campaign. The open casting call closed on January 30, 2021 and now we are awaiting to see the models who were selected to participate.
Clearly Abercrombie is using Instagram and Facebook heavily to promote their “Denim Your Way” movement. This seems most reasonable as their target audience ranges between 16-26 and those age ranges have a high use on both of those two platforms. Also, seeing as Abercrombie represents a clothing brand, it would be vitally important for consumers to see the clothes firsthand that they are buying, making visual imagery particularly important. Instagram provides a great media source for A&F because it establishes visual connections directly between the business and the consumer. A connection which gives businesses a simple way to showcase the products they have to offer through striking imagery. Facebook continues to be the biggest user-populated platform with 2.74 billion active users. Therefore, when trying to spread new brand awareness, why not go for the social media platform with the most users? Abercrombie has done that very thing, and more. Both of these platforms make it easy to follow a hashtag and post using the #denimyourway, which Abercrombie and Fitch created for customers to share their own photos in A&F’s jeans, thereby promoting the company’s new image. Now to examine how the “Denim Your Way” campaign has unfolded over the past few months.
As expected, Abercrombie almost exclusively ran “Denim Your Way” on Instagram and Facebook. As mentioned, Instagram and Facebook made the most sense for Abercrombie and Fitch to post on as these places are home to their target audience, which is 16-26 year olds (Charello). When comparing Instagram vs. Facebook in terms of the campaign reaching out, Instagram dominated engagement and impressions from audiences. While both platforms possess the ability to virtually share pictures and videos, Instagram’s design outshines Facebook in terms of media sharing.
Instagram is the top picture platform of social media. Since fashion embraces visual elements, it makes sense to share a fashion brand on the most visual outlet available. Additionally, images are a great way to connect businesses to consumers, thus ultimately impacting sales in a positive manner (Charello). Evidence suggests the more a person sees a product, the more they think about it and in turn buy it. With the ultimate goal of Abercrombie being to sell clothing, social media allows them to put merchandise in front of consumers daily. I examined posts from December 28, 2020 to March 11, 2021 on Abercrombie’s Instagram. During that time A&F shared 141 posts, 21 of which were related to “Denim Your Way” and none of which contained the models from the casting call. Noticeably less than 15% of their posts are about their campaign, and as an outsider looking in this does not show great commitment or care to their campaign. However, it should be noted when they did post, A&F received high levels of engagement.
Posts that performed best were ones where Abercrombie partnered with influencers and reshared the content the influencer created. The importance of Influencers in today’s social media world is unparalleled. One survey found that 34% of frequent Instagram users had bought something based on an influencer’s recommendation. If Abercrombie wants to sell their clothing, influencers must be included in their marketing strategy (Newberry). A February 16, 2021 post received high engagement rates and it used influencers. Shown above is an example of Abercombie’s post next to influencer @brimartinezz post. Both posts performed well in engagement, and in fact, the Abercrombie post performed better than any other “Denim your Way”post, thus showing influencer marketing does indeed work.
Consumers also seem to be responding more favorably to these body inclusive ads. The post with @brimartinezz and @jade_meadows received comments such as “Love the use of different bodies in your ad!!!! 🙌🔥👏” and “This vid is the best content I’ve seen in a long time. More of this please!👏”. Generally people respond positively when it comes to body positivity and inclusivity posts, and yet, still some people will not let A&F forget the image they once held. One person commented “NO THANKS. I’m Old enough to remember your “looks policy””. While some people buy into and accept Abercrombie’s new image, others remain skeptical and more marketing needs to continue. In order to change the stigma of body shaming Abercrombie faces, they must keep reaching as many people as possible, as much as possible with their new ideology and Facebook excels as the perfect venue to do just that.
Over 8 million people “Like” Abercrombie and Fitch’s Facebook page compared to the 4 million that follow them on Instagram. It would make sense to promote this campaign on Facebook to facilitate the reach and awareness goals of the company. However, a problem lies with their execution. Abercrombie posted the same content to Facebook that they did to Instagram. First off, this reveals plain, lazy marketing, or a way to keep both accounts active with little work. Abercrombie clearly created the posts for Instagram and then shared them on Facebook. The problem with cross marketing unfolds when the messages posted on one platform do not always carry well over to the next one. For instance, hashtags that can be easily searched and followed on Instagram become nothing more than random mushed together words on Facebook. In a similar fashion, tagging users works differently on Facebook than Instagram so all the links become invalid (Cyca). As evidenced by my data, the use of cross over marketing led to less engagement by the target audience.
Even the posts that did the best in terms of engagement on Facebook only gained 862 likes and 16 shares. The lowest liked post on Instagram had over 1,000 likes, showing the response to their content is much better received. The comments on Facebook were also much different than those on Instagram. Facebook users posted comments such as “good style” “nice collection” and many other non descript statements that seemed impersonal and vague. While there is no correct way to comment, Instagram followers had far more engaging and conversation-starting responses. The differences lead me to believe that content was not what Facebook users were interested in seeing. Another interesting comparison can be found in platform-specific formatting. The influencer post that did the best on Instagram, performed the second worst on Facebook in terms of engagement with only 175 likes. The difference can be attributed to converting a Reel, which is a native Instagram format, to a generic video on Facebook. As a new feature, Instagram heavily promotes Reels and since Facebook uses a different algorithm to promote videos it may not have featured this content as widely. Clearly Abercrombie and Fitch succeeded in reaching audiences on Instagram, but fell short when cross marketing the same content to Facebook.
Abercrombie missed opportunities for marketing on Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube. While these platforms are not necessarily home to A&F’s target demographic, they are missing out on reaching potential new audiences. All three social media outlets would have been beneficial to Abercrombie’s campaign, but they especially missed out by not utilizing Twitter. They only posted one Tweet about their initial casting call and then nothing. By not utilizing Twitter, A&F missed starting conversations with the public. Doing this would have allowed them to address the concerns of skeptics and talk about the motivation behind their campaign. Abercrombie also could have capitalized on #denimyourway by using Twitter to engage with users via Tweets and encouraging them to post pictures in their Abercrombie Denim. However, across all platforms their hashtag remained largely unutilized. This begs the question: why create a hashtag at all if it will not be used to its full potential?
Abercrombie also failed to take advantage of the large conversion rate of Twitter. One survey showed that 69% of people who followed a brand on Twitter purchased something from that brand. In addition, 79% of those people retweeted brand content (Charello). Abercrombie didn’t capitalize on this marketing opportunity as they only Tweeted once and did not reply to any of the people who commented. Approximately 85% of Twitter users also expressed their belief that it is important for a brand to provide customer service through the platform due to the ease of getting concerns or questions addressed (Charello). Without this interaction on Twitter Abercrombie limited the ways they reached their potential customers.
A different brand that ran a similar campaign, but took greater advantage of all social media platforms is Aerie’s #aerieREAL. This campaign, run by American Eagle’s lounge and intimate line, is all about inclusivity, body positivity and feeling beautiful in your own skin. Overall, people responded extremely favorably to Aerie’s campaign and not surprisingly Aerie maintains the largest share of voice in the fashion industry for body positivity (Charello). Where Abercrombie fell short, Aerie thrived. Foremost, they appear on all social platforms, and they maintain and build relationships with their customers thus giving them earned media (Charello). Aerie frequently shares, retweets and comments on their customers’ posts to show their love and appreciation for them. They also heavily utilize #aerieREAL as a way for them and their customers to easily find posts about their campaign, making their hashtag a living, growing marketing tool.
While Aerie’s success does not detract from what Abercrombie and Fitch produced for their body positivity campaign, Abercrombie could learn from Aerie how to better connect with their customers and fan base. Abercrombie’s biggest flaw in “Denim Your Way” is their lack of buy-in from customers. To convince their audience to believe they truly care about this new viewpoint they must be willing to engage and interact. Abercrombie failed to connect and show their followers an interest in them. Through these non-actions, the skeptic’s belief that A&F’s new campaign is just a publicity stunt to stay relevant with the times carries more validity. However, Abercrombie has still had success, even without follower connection.
The “Denim Your Way” campaign has helped Abercrombie and Fitch change their reputation, which in turn has given them return on their investment or ROI. In short, ROI’s allow companies like Abercrombie to tell if the investment into their campaign was worthwhile (Charello). There are differing ways to measure ROI, but Abercrombie could do this by measuring people’s response to their campaign as well as their sales statistics. Another major positive outcome materialized when the press no longer associated their brand with body shaming in current news. The company then introduced new models with a wide range of diversity in size, sexuality and ethnicity increasing their customer base. Posts with images and videos of their new diverse models received high levels of engagement and praise from their social media audience. Abercrombie also took initial steps to connect with influencers to drive engagement and sale conversions with the influencers’ audiences.
These strategies reflected success as Abercrombie’s jeans sold out in many styles and sizes at their online store demonstrating the benefit of building relationships with customers online. Companies who engage on social media consistently reach a wider potential customer base, leading them to increased sales. Reaching out and gaining customer loyalty is advantageous as a recent study showed 60-70% of customers were more likely to be repeat customers, whereas only 5-20% of customers were likely to buy from a new retailer. These reasons clearly indicate the critical importance of building relationships with customers and keeping them engaged with the brand.
In the area of responding and interacting with customers, Abercrombie fell far short. The company came off cold and impersonal due to the lack of interaction with and responsiveness to users’ posts. #denimyourway hardly had a presence in social media and essentially closed the door for A&F to gain earned media.
Overall, the Abercrombie and Fitch “Denim Your Way” campaign’s had a positive ROI as evident by their large number of jean sales and their largely positive response from followers on social media. Their use of social media and influencers significantly improved their outreach and engagement once again leading me to believe they obtained a positive return on investment. The campaign was not flawless, however. The company could have improved outcomes with the incorporation of more social media platforms, rather than their limited use of only Instagram and Facebook. Abercrombie would also have benefited from cultivating more personal online relationships with consumers buying their products. Without a doubt the “Denim Your Way” campaign succeeded in some aspects, but fell short in others as evidenced by their social media engagement. All things considered, Abercrombie and Fitch conveyed a positive effort to progress into the future as a more accepting and inclusive fashion industry.
References
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Today’s EggspertThis article was written by today’s Daily Eggspert. “What Is Customer Retention, Importance, Examples & Techniques.” The Daily Egg, 2 Mar. 2021, http://www.crazyegg.com/blog/customer-retention/.
Social Media Case Studies SP21 