Brand merchandising strategies are becoming an important aspect for many lifestyle and brand-driven retailers today.
It is hard to keep up to one with rapid changes occuring in styles and trends but also changing consumer attitudes. As a retailer, one must create ways or opportunities to add to the consumer experience to enable people to buy branded products from him.
In the 90s, brand merchandising was what street wear brands were doing all along without even knowing what was branding merchandise.
Today, individuals, influencers and celebrities are brands and not logos.
The rise of branded celebrity merchandise
Today, we see branded merchandise everywhere, especially in the form of t-shirts, hoodies and ball caps among many other things. Celebrity branded merchandise has also reached new heights with celebrities such as Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and even so Hema Malini with the brands they endorse or their own clothing lines. These celebrities leverage their brand identity with merchandise to create a stronger brand resonance with consumers.
They are able to generate popularity around these branded merchandise for their fans. Earlier, merchandises were solely available at concerts, but now they are available online and even in the ‘pop-up’ shops.
Many new and emerging lifestyle brands are struggling to create brand resonance with a particular lifestyle – hence they use the term lifestyle brand.
Others are focusing on ensuring the brand is positioned in a particular category or type of fashion, be it street wear, hipster, etc. Importantly, this is not the best strategy and as seen by many celebrities who have ventured into brand merchandising, the key it seems is the message behind the logo.
What is a lifestyle brand?
A lifestyle brand is a company that markets its products or services to embody the interests, attitudes and opinions of a group or a culture.
Lifestyle brands seek to inspire, guide and motivate people with the goal of their products contributing to the definition of the consumer’s way of life. These brands invest in communication strategies to communicate a brand message, brand personality, brand consistency and reinforce the message to the target audience while engaging them in the ways they want to be engaged.
It’s important to stick to the importance of one’s brand identity, and he does this on every communication channel – whatever he is in the public domain.
How does one develop his own brand identity?
In marketing terms, it is said that branding is what somebody says about one when he is not in the room. But, this statement is not effective if we do not add one key piece to it often what many lifestyle brands and brand retailers fail to understand. And that is whatever decision one takes now for positioning his brand and for that develops a brand merchandising strategy, it will be nearly impossible to change later.
