BFT/18/529 Apparel Merchandising: H&M Brand Analysis Report

This report provides a detailed analysis of the apparel brand H&M, examining its vision and mission statements, color assortment, and introduction to the company's history and global presence. It delves into H&M's price strategy, segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategies, focusing on its 'fast-fashion' model and target market of young, fashion-conscious consumers. The report further explores H&M's marketing efforts, including its social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, and its co-branding initiatives with luxury designers, highlighting the benefits of these collaborations. It also covers H&M's sustainability campaigns and concludes with a SWOT analysis, outlining the brand's strengths, weaknesses, and competitive advantages. This analysis offers a comprehensive overview of H&M's business and marketing strategies within the fashion industry.

APPAREL MERCHANDISING
TOPIC:APPAREL BRANDS AND THEIR PRICE POINT, FIT,STYLE,MATERIALS & COLOUR
(ASSIGNMENT-1)
SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:
MR. PRABHAT KUMAR AMRITA RAY (BFT/18/529)
MEHELI DAS (BFT/18/505)
RUMJHUM (BFT/18/480)
SAYANTANI GHOSH (BFT/18/494)
PRANAV PRIYADARSHI (BFT/18/1035)

VISION STATEMENT &MISSION STATEMENT
VISION STATEMENT
 H&M VISION STATEMENT IS“TO LEAD THE CHANGE
TOWARDS CIRCULAR AND RENEWABLE FASHION WHILE
BEING A FAIR AND EQUAL COMPANY.”
MISSION STATEMENT
 H&M’s mission statement is“to drive long-lasting
positive change and improve living conditions by
investing in people, communities, and innovative
ideas.”
 H&M offers the largest amount of products but shows
little variations throughout the year.

Colour Assortment
 Let’s take a look at colors. H&M offers more color options with 2,1% colors,
on average,H&M offers more color diversity with significant proportions for
blue, pink and grey.

INTRODUCTION TO H&M
 As the globe’s second largest retailer in the fashion industry, Hennes and Mauritz (H&M) has
done well in establishing and maintaining customers’trust since 1947. The Swedish Company
was founded by Erling Persson, who opened the first store in Västerås as Hennes (Swedish word
for “hers”), offering fashionable women’s wear. In 1968, he acquired Mauritz Wildforss, a hunting
and fishing equipment store located in Stockholm and began the extension of men and
children’s clothing lines. H&M then diversified over the years and progressively expanded its
product width to include accessories, shoes, top-to-toe beauty care products and cosmetics
and home furnishing collections.
 Since its inception, H&M has rapidly grown into the global markets with more than 3924 stores
spread in 61 countries (Cruz, 2012) and more than 148,000 employees (Hm.com, 2015). H&M has
made Singapore its 5th Southeast Asian debut in 2011 after Hong Kong, Shanghai, Japan, Korea
and has robustly expanded across the island and opened ten stores within five years after
entering the market.

Price strategy
 The price strategy of H&M is designed based on their customers needs
which is low price and high fashion. In fact, this is the one of the biggest
challenges for H&M. If not making this happen, the special feature of H&M
cannot be realized. How could they combine fashion and cheapness? This
objective was achieved by two steps: first, H&M outsources the production
to countries where the labour cost is much lower. To control transportation
cost, outsourcing was arranged according to different product. Those high
fashion product which target at the European market were produced in
Turkey, because of the short product life cycle. In addition, basic product
are produced in Asia because they allow longer transportation time and
bear lower risk. Second, the company also conduct strict cost control plan.
For example,very few executives have secretaries or have cellphone
priviledge(Jobber, 2007).

H&M STP Analysis
 Segments by class: H&M strategy is offering high fashion at low prices, typically
targeting working class, lower middle class and students.
 Segments by class/home: The most popular segment is women aging between
15 and 30 years, either still living at home, in student dorms, or in their first house
in urban regions
 Segments by age: The most popular segment is women aging between 15 and
30 years commonly known as generation Y, ambitious with high buying power.
 Segments by family life: Typical college to graduate females life at home single,
on their own in dorms or in their first home, either single or as a young couple
without children

Targeting Strategy:
The selection of potential customers to whom a business wishes to sell products or services.
The target customers of H&M belong to the group of fashionable and trendy consumers who
see shopping as a social activity provide pleasure in their daily life, who wants to follow the
trends without investing a lot of money. The target market for H&M is for younger people.
Even though H&M offers clothing and accessories for all ages, their target market is women.
Women usually shop more for them, but also buy all their children’s clothing and often their
husbands as well. With their low prices H&M targets woman in the lower middle class and
working class, this is a concentrated targeting strategy. Because their focus is to sell a
fashionable product for a low price they target married to single woman, mothers and
daughters. Many single young women who always want to stay on top of the fashion trends are
constantly upgrading their closets with H&Ms new affordable items. The consumers are not
highly brand loyal; rather they shop at multiple retailers in search for the perfect fashion
pieces. They shop anywhere from four to six stores on average. Customer attractiveness is
high, customer loyalty is low. According to dancehall dilemma theory, these are targets for
conversion, attractive enough to be worth chasing.

Positioning Strategy:
 Is a marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct
position, relative to competing brands, in the mind of the customers? H&M
is a retailer that is looking to provide consumers with fashionable, high-
quality clothing at the best price possible. They offer“fast-fashion” clothing,
in other words from runway to racks in record time, and sell European
influenced clothing in the American market. Additionally, H&M carries
clothing in a variety of categories including women’s casual, men’s
business, children’s wear, footwear and accessories. The company is the
second largest clothing retailer in the world, the largest in Europe and
actively engages in E-retailing. H&M is also economically, socially, and
environmentally sustainable.

Marketing by H&M
Facebook:
 H&M has attracted more than 14m fans to its Facebook page and posts several
updates a day except on weekends. Most of the updates focus solely on promoting
its products, but in among the blog standard“buy these trousers” posts there are
some really neat promotional ideas. For example, the retailer clearly does a lot of
blogger outreach and often links to third-party blog posts and articles on its H&M Life
site. Similarly, H&M has run several competitions recently that require fans to submit
their own photos for a chance to win, which is a great way to encourage
engagement that is relevant to the brand and more meaningful than just asking for a
‘like ’or re tweet. One example offered fans the chance to win tickets to Coachella
by posting photos of their festival style on Tumblr using the hashtag #HMCoachella,
while another asked entrants to post photos of their best‘bike style image’on
Instagram using the hashtag #HMBikeStyle for the chance to win clothes from the
H&M Brick Lane Bikes collection.

Marketing by H&M
Twitter:
 H&M has created separate Twitter feeds for each of the local markets in which it operates,
but each one uses the same background and header image so the branding is obviously
closely controlled. The feeds appear to be equally poor at responding to other users, with
each tending to churn out marketing messages rather than answering queries or @mentions.
Looking at the main corporate account for example, it tweets a number of product images,
links to blogs and competition promos each day, but generally responds to fewer than 10
@mentions. And most of the responses tend to simply be messages directing the query to
the dedicated customer service feed.
 One noteworthy Twitter campaign by H&M recently was a Q&A with brand ambassador
David Beckham.

Marketing by H&M
H&M Co-Branding
 H&M initiated its collaboration with designers with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004 and
collaborations in subsequent years include Stella McCartney, Viktor &
Rolf, Primadonna SpA, Roberto Cavali, Comme Des Garçons, Matthew
Williamson, Jimmy Choo, Sonia Rykiel, Lanvin, Versace, and Marni.
 H&M co-brands receive a high media exposure and co-branded items become most
sought-after. The whole collection of Marnifor H&M was sold out by lunchtime of the
first day of opening in London in March 2012. By collaborating with a luxury designer
fashion brand, a fast fashion brand like H&M can increase its brand equity as well as
its brand image. Collaborations between fast fashion and designer fashion brands,
which is recognized as‘fast fashion co-branding’, has shown an incredible market
response across countries as it can create a win-win situation for the brands involved.