Introduction
Abercrombie & Fitch is globally specializing in accessories and apparel for women, men, and children using three famous brands. The brands consist of Abercrombie &Fitch, Hollister Co, and Abercrombie kids. For over 125 years, the Company has outfitted
explorers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Abercrombie Company was initially formed in 1892 by David T. Abercrombie in New York Manhattan (Schlossberg, 2016). It started by selling sports goods to consumers. Abercrombie partnered with Ezra Fitch. The Company was later renamed Abercrombie & Fitch in 1904. As time continued to move, Abercrombie and Fitch realized that their ideas were taking different paths. Abercrombie wanted to continue trading its outdoor products while Fitch wanted to make the Company more appealing. The currently struggle to keep the pace of its competitors in the market. Due to the disagreement between the two founders, Abercrombie sold his share and allowed Fitch to carry out his objectives. Soon after, the Company became the first store based in New York to market men and women apparel. Fitch retired in 1928 and handed his brother James S. Cobb the Company. His brother continued with the manufacturing of clothes and outdoor equipment. In the 1950s, the Company started enlarging its store in every part of the nation. Unfortunately, the sales drop in the 1960s resulted in the CEO changing the store’s location and image. Despite the efforts, the company sales continued to decrease, resulting in bankruptcy in 1976 (Hörz & Richter, 2017). In 1977, the Company was closed. However, a year later, Oshmonas Company bought Abercrombie & Fitch and opened its door. The companies continued to expand again with the CEO by Mike Jeffries, who started to appeal to young consumers. The struggles were as a result of the decline in the fashion of image, style, the logo of Abercrombie & Fitch in Northern America.
Target Markets
The Abercrombie & Fitch Company has gained ground with the target demographic who are Young people. According to Gennaro (2013), the primary market target for Abercrombie & Fitch is the teenagers or the Youngsters and young adults between the age of 28 and 14 years. Millennials are recommending the Company’s brand more than they did in the past. The improvement in the metrics results from the Company undergoing significant rebranding efforts incorporating tactics such as allowing customers to charge their phone in the fitting room. Abercrombie & Fitch started a campaign in October aimed at the millennial to widen the appeal of their brand past its traditional target. Adults between the age of 18 and 34 have a good impression of Abercrombie & Fitch products. The market of Abercrombie & Fitch is mainly composed of teens, which creates a necessity for the Company to adopt a youth marketing strategy in its operation. The Company customizes its band by the use of the timeless image of the youths. The image portrayed by the Company enables it to view itself as a powerful effect on the population as it recognizes itself with youths’ preferences. A secondary target market for Abercrombie & Fitch is Hollister Company (Ray, 2016). The Company was founded in 2000, based in Los Angeles, California. Hollister usually functions as a secondary target market for Abercrombie & Fitch. It supplies accessories and clothing for women and men. Just like Abercrombie & Fitch, its targets are mainly teenagers. It retails its products by chain stores in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The Company also sells its products online. Hollister Company is usually situated by stores that attract mainly the youths.
Analysis of Abercrombie & Fitch Website
Website Design Critique.
Abercrombie & Fitch Company has tried to modernize with various changes such as ditching its heavy style logo, re-designing store, and dropping its sexualized advertising. The design of the Abercrombie website indicates that retailers have significant troubles. Discounts in retail are standard. However, no brand agrees with every product to be 40 % to 60 % off (Arribas et al., 2014). The Company was promoting dress sales of 29$, but the discount is not accounted for dresses alone. Significant discounts on products imply that retailers get a difficult time clearing inventory. Some of the very steep discounts are on products that represent Abercrombie’s attempt to get recent trends. Comparing the website design of Abercrombie with those from other retailers reveals how the Company is falling short. From the website design of Abercrombie & Fitch, the Company seems to be struggling in finding out what its brand should be. As a result, the Company is stuck while trying to keep the pace of fast-fashion retailers.
Critique of SEO Best practices on the Site
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique for enhancing the ranking of the Site. It entails finding out the phrases and keywords used by the target audience when identifying the services and products of the Company. Abercrombie utilizes the SEO to build its brand (Hofmann, 2014). Although branding is perceived as a traditional marketing technique, the SEO falls under the category of Digital. Branding and SEO practices utilize the same steps.
However, building a brand calls for consideration of what the Company wants to provide and its target market.
The Company creates content in line with the customers’ interests and needs by selecting keywords and images it wants its brand to have. It later identifies ways to earn links to the content from various Sites. The Company keeps the relationship in mind when forming its SEO technique, which enables it to choose the keyword and form content in line with the image of the brand. SEO practices in Abercrombie & Fitch Company enable its website to earn more traffic. Using SEO improves the Site’s ranking in searching for the results, which to attract more traffic. The traffic is then converted leads and customers, which increases sales. Another of SEO’s best practices is that it does not need to pay the cost of ad space (Hofmann, 2014). The Company decides where it wants its brand to appear, whether on the magazine page, on a particular TV channel, or a radio station. The SEO within the Company ensures that its brands stay competitive in a world where there is a lot of competition in page ranking and content marketing. The higher the company name or brand name is ranked in Google results, the higher the probability of people clicking to that niche when searching for products or services.
Critique of Social Media Integration with the Site
To with the attention of young shoppers, Abercrombie &Fitch Company has tried to modernize its outfit and utilize a marketing technique that efficiently markets their consumer base that they desire. When Abercrombie & Fitch launched social media platforms, it was not as popular today (Bardh & Rasmussen, 2017). The Company decided to revisit its strategies to develop the best technique for using today’s technology. One way that the Company chose its criteria was by forming an integration with E! Face Forward Snap-chat. It is a snap-chat show that utilizes beauty and fashion stylist Tiarra Monet, Patrick, and Johnny Wujek giving different audience makeover (Bardh & Rasmussen, 2017). The show was vital for Abercrombie since the demographic that faced forward reached the matches’ perspectives correctly. Besides the integration, Abercrombie conduct advertisement using footage from “Face Forward” to put together 90-second pods running across all Snap-chat accounts. The integration attracted approximately 40,000 customers into the Company’s store, resulting in a 10 % increase in the brand’s favorability and a 15.4 % rise in brand awareness.
Social Media Audit
Current platforms used.
Abercrombie & Fitch is active on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. However, since 2015, the Company has been using “Spredfast,” a social media platform to manage its activities (Osterholm, 2013). The platform has enabled the Company to develop by the use of modern dashboards and analytical tools. With the platform, the Company can access social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as mentioned earlier. The platform enables the Company to interact with its followers and gain more followers to see and buy products from its brand.
Critique of How Platforms are used
Abercrombie & Fitch are utilizing Instagram as a vital platform for marketing their products and services (Newman, 2015). However, the Company was faced with many critics because of their half-naked photos of ladies and men in front of the store (Walters, 2016). The Company decided to delete its older photos and placed a single image. The Company is committed to adhering to all the applicable regulations and laws that require accurate and precise messages of advertising on any social media platform. Besides, the Company uses testimonials and endorsement communicating with the customers on social media platforms, including disclosing all materials connecting the company promotion and user involvement in the promotion (Ambroise et al., 2014). The policy aims at providing the guidelines vital for ensuring compliance with the regulations and laws. The policy applies to all the Company’s independent contractors, employees, and agents, including bloggers, writers, o anyone posting on any platform. Failing to comply with the regulations and laws results in rejection of the posts or being pulled from the Company’s page and disqualification of being a user of the Company’s social media page. Instagram is the most popular social media platform, with more than 2.5 million counting and followers. The company post photos of their brand and interacts with their followers using “#AFstyle.”
Analysis of Engagement Level Using Metrics
The Company’s social media goal determines its metrics. Awareness metrics create brand attention of the Company across all social media platforms. Abercrombie & Fitch creates awareness of its product through social metrics such as shares, @mention, links, and impressions (Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2014).
The engagement level shows details of how many audience accounts are interacting with the company account. The number of likes, shares, comments are used to determine the level of engagement of the Company in social media platforms. The Abercrombie & Fitch Instagram engagement level is 70 percent more than on Facebook (Kumar, 2013).
The research conducted in 2017 showed that the level of engagement of the Company on Instagram is the greatest compared with Facebook and Twitter. Instagram engagement rate was 1.0 %, 0.59 % for Facebook, and 0.13 % for Twitter (Kumar, 2013). Instagram has more engagement levels due to frequent posting of highly liked, shared, and commented photos.
Example of Worst and Best Practices of Social
Worst Practices.
Abercrombie & Fitch is known for posting photos of men and women half-naked on social media platforms. Some of the Company’s advertisements were more pornographic imagery, and its catalog was outrageous, which could lure customers (Otterbring et al., 2018). Also, their shopping bags used to have pictures of half-naked men. The Company would hire shirtless models for specific events and use their photos for advertisement, which some of the ads are very provocative. The Company purposely hired good-looking people ranging from 17 to 22 years to represent the brand. Displaying sexual images for men and women was unethical for the Company. Besides, the Company could only sell its products to good-looking people, arguing that it would attract more good- looking people.
Best Practices.
Abercrombie is no longer posting sexual photos on social media for advertisement. The Company has ditched its sexual trademark for marketing and is progressively adopting acceptable practices. The Company’s Instagram posts are evidence of how less carnal the company imagery has turned out to be (Sburlino, 2019). Models are no longer half-naked but covered up appropriately. Besides, the shopping bags are no longer labeled with photos of shirtless men or half-naked women.
The Company has abolished the policy of hiring employees based on physical attractiveness or body type. It has introduced new dressing codes and focuses on inclusion and diversity in its advertisement and marketing.
How Abercrombie Can Use Instagram Better
Social media is a powerful technique used for advertisement by various companies. Abercrombie & Fitch can utilize Instagram to expand how customers can purchase their products online. The Company should enable customers to tap the product and get directed to the product’s specific page. From there, the customers should opt to complete their purchase without having to leave the app. Customers can make payments through PayPal, credit, or debit and get shipping or delivery alert through the app. Doing this will increase the engagement of customers leading to more sales.
Public Relations
Abercrombie in the News.
As among the largest Company, Abercrombie & Fitch get a lot of free press. The Company is written about for various reasons, but the common theme in various articles is how it markets its products. According to the company press release in 2018, it was reported that Abercrombie & Fitch Company’s net sales increased from $859 million to $861 million regardless of the effects from the foreign currency the calendar shift (Abercrombie & Davidson, 2020). The report also showed that direct to consumer’s net sales increased from 16 % to 28 % net sales. Being a large company comes with its drawbacks. A hostile press report with the Company in 2019 was that its daily chart indicates price gaps that were higher on the positive response to earning.
Use of New Items in Social; Crisis response
COO and the general council chaired the Abercrombie & Fitch team that managed the crisis. Whenever a crisis was identified, through real-time coordination of social media, TV, press, and message boards, the chair could investigate the issue and decide who to engage from the crisis management team. The Company extended crisis management included the heads of operation of the Company and outside PR, legal, insurance, financial, and other sources in the whole world. Social media quickly raise a minor thing into a major crisis. Abercrombie & Fitch crisis response and management team respond quickly in case of any crisis. By combining external and internal sources, the company internal PR team observes social media events depending on the tone and volume of what was being communicated and the persons involved and later elevate the event to the crisis response team (Baghi & Gabrielli, 2019). For instance, at one point, Abercrombie & Fitch was launching a store in South Korea. Some American “lifeguards” came to greet the customers during the opening and took photos with them. Some of the photos taken were posted on social media, wherein some of the photos. The lifeguards seemed to be mocking and making fun of the customers in a racist manner. There was a widespread issue across social media, which resulted in a regional crisis. The company crisis response team came together and formed a solution to a complicated situation. The internal public relation, human resources, and legal councils were approached for advice. After the decision was made, the Company provided an online apology in a culturally acceptable way in the region.
Crowdsourcing
Consumer blogs and reviews
Since Abercrombie & Fitch is a large company, consumers give many blogs and reviews about the Company on various review websites. The Company has to verify their consumers’ reviews to make them acceptable for the public. Consumer reviews are vital for drawing in new customers and notifying the Company of the services and products that need improvement. Abercrombie & Fitch gets a lot of publicity through articles written and blogs concerning its products and services. All consumer blogs and reviews are relevant for an in-depth investigation of Abercrombie & Fitch before new customers go to the Company’s store. From most of the consumer reviews, they indicate that Abercrombie’s clothes are stylish. However, their clothes are a bit overpriced and mostly for millennials. The clothes are rated with good smelling perfumes which make them liked by various customers. Some of the sites that we can find consumer reviews of Abercrombie & Fitch include influenster.com, trustpilot.com, consumeraffairs.com, glassdoor.com, among others. A large portion of the Abercrombie & Fitch business model depends on consumer blogs. The Company utilizes the consumer’s content to help new customers get the best products and services. The actual consumers write the majority of the content of the Company. Utilizing consumer blog content is significant in establishing trust among customers.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) refers to any content such as videos, texts, reviews, images, among others, created by consumers rather than the Company’s brand. The primary platform for Abercrombie UGC is Instagram. Consumers form and create brand featuring the Company’s brand by exposing their services and products. Abercrombie utilizes UGC to promote company authenticity. Consumers are more likely to use UGC since they believe it is more authentic than the brand’s created content. The consumer will always want to know about the services or products they should order before ordering it. For instance, most millennials would not just check the Instagram posts as they do not trust the photos would be what they will be looking for. Most Abercrombie customers check the Company’s profile and content from other consumers to decide what to buy. UGC aims at creating trust among the customers. The majority of people trust recommendations from consumers within the Company and read online reviews, chats, videos, and suggestions from consumers.
Critiques of Current Social Campaigns
Abercrombie & Fitch have recently been using Instagram to conduct their denim campaign. The slogan used in their Campaign was “Do it in Denim” (Taylor, 2019). The 30 women and men engaged in campaigning were advised to style up themselves and behave naturally. Abercrombie & Fitch reinitiated its denim line in 2017and it progressing well in that area.
For the Company, denim has been the fundamental of their brand since the 1990s (Taylor, 2019). Their denim campaign mirrors the adaptability of the apparel and the personal opinion of the consumers of denim. After re-launching the whole denim assortment, the Company re-designed the whole style to provide the most comfortable and complementary fit and refined style.
At Abercrombie & Fitch stores, protesting campaigns were held in 2018, requiring workers to be given safety rights.
At Abercrombie & Fitch stores, protesting campaigns were held in 2018, requiring workers to be given safety rights. The demonstrations were planned jointly by United Students, International Labor Rights Forum, Workers United, Against Sweatshops, and an affiliate of the International Union Service of Employees. The demonstrations indicated that the Company was unaware of the danger and harm that the garment workers face. In 2010, some of the Bangladeshi employees died while sewing for Abercrombie. The death resulted from a fire break out in the Sportswear factory where workers were trapped inside. In April 2013 Rana Plaza building collapsed, which resulted in 1,134 workers losing their lives. After a powerful protest and demonstrations campaign, Abercrombie decided to improve the working condition of its workers. The Company agreed to sign a legally binding program concerning work safety.
Social Media Strengths
The greatest strength of Abercrombie is its dedication to ensuring the content posted on social media platforms is visually appealing. Appealing images and video play a vital role in enabling the Company to present its mission and winning more customers. One of the strengths of social media in Abercrombie Company is its ability to increase brand awareness (sKim, 2019). Using social platforms helps in syndicating content and increase the visibility of the business. Instagram is a popular platform for Abercrombie, where they use it to increase their brands’ recognition since they can interact with a broad audience of customers. The Company started by creating a social media profile for its business and started interacting with potential consumers.
Another strength of the social media platform is improving Search engine ranking for Abercrombie products and services. Search engine optimizations are vital for gaining higher page ranking and acquiring traffic for the Company’s business. When a company is ranked top position for its keywords, the traffic is revolutionized, enabling positive results being generated into the business. Abercrombie ensures that the content of blogs, photos, info-graphics, and case studies make their business profile intriguing, thus building a social media community where users highly like, share, and comment about the products and services of the brand. One of the best strategies of Abercrombie’s effective use of social media platforms is its ability to post quality content, which allows it to get ahead of the competitors. Another focus of the strength of social media for Abercrombie advertisement is its cost-effectiveness. Using social media for marketing saves a lot of cost for Abercrombie. The Company only requires to sing and create a profile for almost all the platforms, which are free. Social media being cost-effective creates an advantage in that the Company can get a great return and retain a bigger budget for business expenses and marketing. Using social media by Abercrombie creates its marketplace insight. The Company can know the consumers’ needs and thoughts through comments and likes in social media posts. Abercrombie uses social media as a complementary research tool to gain more information to understand their Company.
Social Media Weakness
Elicit attitude sexualized marketing, and negative brand image caused negative publicity that resulted in challenges in restoring Abercrombie to growth (Enete, 2019). Using social media resulted in Abercrombie exposing itself publicly to various types of people who may not or may have the motives of buying the products. Some people give negative comments about the brand products and services, thus damaging the Company’s reputation. Abercrombie Company is widely known, which creates more chances of getting attacks from the public. Malicious comments or reputations about the business spread quickly through social media. Another weakness of social media is that the Company always requires to be involved, monitor, and updating the marketing effort. Social media frequently change, which requires the Company to stay updated. For instance, if Abercrombie stays without posting its apparel, it is likely to lose its followers. People are always looking for new and fresh things on social media. Besides, social media cannot be used in measuring the market effort of the Company (Enete, 2019). In one instance, the Company gets many likes, shares, retweets, comments, and followers. However, the Company cannot tell exactly whether the metrics matter in their marketing effort. Using social media by Abercrombie poses security and privacy issues. Using social media for marketing requires the Company to surrender its information, both personal and public, to acquire the most out of its marketing effort. When Abercrombie uses social media marketing, it limits itself to social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter, which are limited to social media, unlike other channels such as SEM or SEO, which can be used in expanding marketing effort to multiple places. SEO and SEM are more flexible compared to social media platforms that stay on social media.
Suggested 4-Week Promotional Campaign
Campaign concept.
The Campaign will aim to increase awareness, preference, and liking of the Abercrombie brand over its competitors. The liking, wariness, and preference of the company brand will be tracked through various social media analytics. The tracking will be possible due to the broad brand awareness and customer base that the brand has already had. It will be possible to achieve the goal with four weeks since the Campaign’s driving force will be user-generated. The Campaign is targeted to all social media users and encourages them to find new apparel on various social media platforms and post their new apparel findings. The theme of the Campaign will focus on the appealing hashtag: #AFstyle. The hashtag is meant to attract potential social media users and potential leads into the Campaign. After attracting the users, they will be involved with messaging focused around the notion of Abercrombie & Fitch being seen differently. The #AFstyle will increase the noticeably different Abercrombie & Fitch Company since people will be excited to see the new and fresh apparel and share, like, repost, and give many comments on social media.
Platforms to
be used.
The Campaign will utilize Instagram for sharing UGC submission. When initiating the Campaign, a post will be posted on the Instagram page, indicating its theme and welcoming people to be involved. The people will be reminded daily about the Campaign on the Abercrombie Instagram story page. The post will be of high-quality content and visually appealing to merge with the previous Abercrombie posts. Besides, Twitter and Facebook will be used in the Campaign to share UGC and interact directly with users. One or more tweets promoting the Company’s brand will be posted every day, urging people to be involved. Abercrombie will be answering every tweet that uses the Company hashtag and thanking all the participants. The Company will use Facebook for posting content created by the Abercrombie marketing team and UGC. The captions should encourage people to get involved in the Campaign by posting new outfits they have obtained from the brand. YouTube will be used for posting videos urging people to join the Campaign and give their opinions of the products and services of the Company.
Calendars for post or promotion.
The calendar indicates the posting days and what will be posted on every platform for the 4-week Campaign. The process will be recurring, which means that the schedule will be the same every week. The Campaign is planned to start on December 15th, 2020, and ends on January 6th, 2021. The schedule is indicated in the calendar below, which is the same routine for the four weeks.
| Platforms
|
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
| Instagram
|
8. AM Post the company photo to create awareness of the Campaign | 10. AM
Promote the Campaign using UGC |
10. AM
Promote the Campaign using the company picture |
8.PM
Post-snap-chat story reminder of #AFstyle |
10.AM
Post a featured submission of #AFstyle |
8.PM
Post-snap-chat reminders of #AFstyle |
10.AM
Post a featured submission #AFstyle |
|
|
11. Am
Tweet promotion for Abercrombie |
7.Am
Retweet the submission of Abercrombie |
8.PM
Tweet promotion for Abercrombie |
6.AM
Retweet submission for Abercrombie |
11.AM
Tweet promotion for Abercrombie |
12.AM
Retweet submission for Abercrombie |
|
|
|
7. PM
Promote and explain what the Campaign is all about |
6.AM
Post a featured #AFstyle submission |
|
7.AM
Promote and explain Campaign using post |
8.PM
The post featured #AFstyle submission. |
||
| YouTube | 5.PM
Post weekly submission video |
Example of posts for the platforms
(B) Instagram
(C) Twitter
Goals and Measures of Success
Since the Campaign focuses on increasing brand awareness and winning more consumers, the data findings available should be analyzed consistently using digital measuring tools. The analysis should be conducted before starting the 4-week Campaign to evaluate whether the attempts to increase brand awareness have been achieved. Engagement levels in Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube should be checked before starting the Campaign to benchmark future comparison with the data analytic tool available. If the Campaign is successful, a change will be witnessed through Abercrombie’s social media accounts’ engagement level. The goal is to increase the number of sales and create billions of impressions on various social media platforms.
Conclusion
Abercrombie & Fitch is globally specializing in accessories and apparel for women, men, and children using three famous brands. The brands consist of Abercrombie &Fitch, Hollister Co, and Abercrombie kids. After analyzing the Abercrombie & Fitch Company, it can be concluded that the Company works hard to increase the positive impression of its brand and to create brand awareness through various social media platforms. Abercrombie has a high engagement rate on Instagram compared to other platforms. The Abercrombie & Fitch Company has gained ground with the target demographic who are Young people. The Company’s social media goal determines its metrics. Awareness metrics create brand attention of the Company across all social media platforms. Abercrombie & Fitch creates awareness of its product through social metrics such as shares, @mention, links, and impressions.
References
Arribas, V., García, I., Susaeta, L., & Pin, J. R. (2014). Abercrombie & Fitch: A business ethics perspective in the fashion industry.
Bardh, O. P., & Rasmussen, K. F. (2017). Leveraged Buyout Case Study of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Enete, S. (2019). Introduction to BRI.
Kim, S. B. (2019). Political Engagement of Social Media Users in Korea. Korea Observer, 50(4), 587-618.
Kumar, V. (2013). Profitable customer engagement: Concept, metrics, and strategies. SAGE Publications India
Osterholm, J. (2013). JC Penney Hitler Scandal to Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fat Feud: How Viral Content & Social Sharing Don’t Do a Company Good.
Ray, J. K. (2016). Abercrombie & Fitch: A Strategic Position.
Schlossberg, M. (2016). Business Insider: The bizarre history of016 Abercrombie & Fitch and how the retailer is transforming yet again.
. Taylor, L. (2019). Les multiples vies d’un dépôt de chiffons de Normandie (1900-1955): de la ferme, au dépôt, à la «pauvreté chic». Apparence (s), (9).
