Buzzword. Sensing Fashion Brands through Social Networks

In the contemporary digital era, social media represent a powerful tool to stimulate discussion and build brand awareness, along with improving consumer relationships through interactivity and networking. As a result, social platforms like Twitter and Instagram are mostly exploited to promote engagement but also to develop digital marketing strategies to increase online sales and retail store traffic. Fashion brands, historically late user of these technologies, are slowly starting to understand the strategic potentialities of such tools also thanks to a band-wagon effect promote by new emerging brands which are intrinsically digital native. However, fashion brands capabilities to codify information from social network analytics and act upon them to implement their strategies is still limited. Within this framework, this paper presents the inspiring principles, first outcomes, and reflections of Buzzword, an ongoing research developed by FiP Research Collective at Design dept. - Politecnico di Milano, Italy, looking at sensing social media presence of fashion brands to prefiguring possible future marketing implications to support brands’ competitiveness.