Marketing Strategies and Promotional Activities of River Island Report

This report provides a comprehensive overview of River Island's promotional techniques and marketing strategies. It begins with an executive summary and table of contents, followed by an introduction to the company and an analysis of its promotional mix, including advertising, public relations, internet marketing, and sponsorship. The report delves into the application of the communication model and the push and pull model within River Island's marketing efforts, evaluating the effectiveness of each. The analysis covers various aspects such as target audience, brand positioning, brand signals, and the use of social media. The study also examines the company's direct marketing tactics, internet marketing strategies, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. The report concludes with an evaluation of the effectiveness of the communication model, considering key performance indicators and customer feedback. The report provides an in-depth look at how River Island utilizes various marketing tools to reach its target audience and achieve its business objectives.

Running Head: MARKETING
MARKETING
Name of the Student
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Author Note

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Executive Summary
The main purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the promotional techniques of
River Island Company. The study is supported by supported by analysing the marketing mix
strategy of the company. It is found that, company use various marketing strategies to reach
the customers.

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Table of Contents
Task One....................................................................................................................................3
1. Introduction........................................................................................................................3
1.1 Overview of the Company...............................................................................................3
2. Promotional Mix and Activity of River Island..................................................................3
2.1 Advertising...................................................................................................................3
2.2 Public Relations...........................................................................................................5
2.3 Internet Marketing........................................................................................................7
2.4 Sponsorship..................................................................................................................7
Task Two....................................................................................................................................8
Model 1 (i.e. Communication Model)....................................................................................8
1.1 Definition of Model......................................................................................................8
2.2 Application of Communication Model in River Island................................................9
2.3 Evaluation of Effectiveness........................................................................................10
2.0 Model 2 (i.e. Push and Pull Model)...............................................................................11
2.1 Definition of Model....................................................................................................11
Pull Strategy:............................................................................................................................11
2.2 Application of Push and Pull strategy in River Island...................................................12
2.3 Evaluation of Effectiveness............................................................................................13
References................................................................................................................................14

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Task One
1. Introduction
1.1 Overview of the Company
River Island is a fashion and textile industry that is headquartered in London. It is a
private owned company that has its head office in several of locations of London. The main
products of the company are women’s, men’s and children clothing, footwear and
accessories. Lewis Trust Group is the parent group of the company. The company has started
trading in the British market from the year 1959 (Vanbergen et al. 2017). It has various retail
stores in the country. There are over 350 retail stores in UK, Ireland and all over the world.
The company was separated from “Lewis separates” in the year 1965 and was rebranded as
Chelsea Girl. This brand became the first boutique chain of UK. In the year 1933, this brand
was first opened in Ireland and was then expanded into various markets of Russia, Poland and
Middle East. In the year 2010, the company has introduced another brand known as RI Baby
of kid’s wearing. This company is owned by Lewis family of United Kingdom. The group
had launched its first home décor business in the year 2018.
2. Promotional Mix and Activity of River Island
2.1 Advertising
River Island advertise in magazines and campaigns to sell its accessories and clothing
garments. The company has joined with Look in autumn 2007, which is the first glossy
weekly magazine of United Kingdom to advertise and campaign their products and
accessories. In order to promote its products the company has designed its stores according to
different aspects of collection. The company has also launched online marketing with a music
brand known as NME.com to promote its products in online marketing (Cossu, Grinham and
Heatherington 2017). The most common promotional techniques used by the company is

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through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. River Island also has
appointed celebrities like Pixie Lot and JLS to model their garments and promote their
products to attract their fans in River Island brand.
Target audience- Women and men are the target audience of the company. Company
has diversified its target audience from 0-3 years and teens above 13 years and focuses on
delivering the product to the younger generations and also their parents. Therefore, the target
audience is middle-age men and women between 18-35. For the fashion lovers of age
between 18-35, River Island produces best shopping experience to these market segmentation
(Manneh 2017).
Brand Positioning- The company is focused on positioning the customers’ needs and
complete their head to toe look.
Positioning Map of the competitors
River Island allows their customers to design & personalise their own fashions in their
stores and in online. The company also produce products like Children’s Apple IPad, which
can support the busy mothers to shop and allow them opportunities to fashion trends. The
brand also helps to various fashionista, which dreams to work in fashion field and wants to

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make a successful career. The brand is focused on both the single and relationships with no
children’s to express themselves in a beautiful way. The unique fashion combination helps
the fashionista who regularly goes to the gym, regularly watches you tube makeup and
hairstyles from head to toe look (Chan and Raharja 2018). The unique styling of denims and
shoes helps the customers to give a perfect look.
The company mainly focuses on customer experience to all value to their clothing and
accessories. Most of its retailing stores are more focused on designing and giving direction to
the brand.
Brand Signals- River Island has 60 years of experience and has been loved as the
most stylish brand, which can also be affordable by middle income group. The company has
provided support to their communities in the form of charities. They provide fund to these
charities in order to give them some beneficial needs. The local communities of UK has
gained support from 300 stores of River Island in UK. The company also offers vouchers a
discount codes in online shopping. The company also interacts well with their customers to
provide a good customer experience (Eddablumenstein.files.wordpress.com. (2020). Various
customer experience includes e-commerce from high stores, marketing and operations. The
company has also undergone digital transformation to review their data and CRM processes
in order to better engage with their customers through mobile technologies. This means that,
the company provides accurate and trustworthy information to the customers. Hence, the
level of credibility of River Island brand is good for the business.
2.2 Public Relations
In the social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter ad facebook, the public are
obsessed with the fashion fix of the company. Public feel more confidence in their garments
and clothing styles. Public feels an excellent customer service from the stores. Online market

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stores have gained excellent services. Customers find it quick and easy to identify the best
product and accordingly select the product of their choice. The third party media channels has
supported the brand in the latest magazine. They have disclosed in the recent magazine of
“River Island’s Winter Issue” that, the winter collection for boys and girls of this brand is
more fashionable (Sari 2019). They tells that, the clothes, hats and footwear will be very
interesting for the customers. They have identified rive Island as the best brand and is used by
several models and pop stars.
Sales promotion
River Island provides discounts and voucher codes in their promotion techniques.
Company uses promotional discounts, special discounts and seasonal discounts to the
university students (Santoso et al. 2018). Discounts are also given to home delivery services
that purchase the clothes occasionally.
Personal Selling
The staffs sell the product through OMNI multi-channel approach that is integrated
with customer experience. The online stores provide all the information related to store
availability with the customers. Staffs are involved in every store point to deal with the
customers (Tewu Saerang and Tielung 2017). They are also pointed in mobile sell devices to
deal with the customers engaged in online marketing.
Direct Marketing
The company sells the products through various direct marketing tactics like through
e-mails, online advertisements, coupons and phone calls (Khan and Alam 2019.). They
usually send e-mails for the promotions.
E-mail promotion of River Island:

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2.3 Internet Marketing
River Island has now started digital marketing strategy to attract the customers and
boos their performance. The company has owned and earned the marketing channels as well
paid various social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter to target the fashion influencers
through mobile devices (Gnanapala 2017). In addition to these social media platforms, the
company has launched an event in the hangout that had been featured as notable fashion &
technology on developing strategy related to fashion and technology. The company has
partnered with google+hangouts to motivate the campaign.
2.4 Sponsorship
River Island works with many of the charities like Young Epilepsy, The British Red
Cross, Rays of Sunshine and many more. River Island is undertaking CSR. The company is
committed to ethical trading activities in the business (Hapsari, Stoffers and Gunawan 2017).
They maintain a long-term relationships with their employees, communities and the suppliers
and ensures a good business practices. They supports various charities and organisations to
improve the local communities of United Kingdom (Gao et al. 2019). They provides
unrestricted funding to these communities. The company is committed to their suppliers by

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making worldwide ethical policy with the contracts and prevent unethical conduct in the
business.
Task Two
Model 1 (i.e. Communication Model)
1.1 Definition of Model
Communication model is a model that is used to visually represent, identify and
classify the various parts of a process. In this model; the sender, media and receiver are
associated to deliver the message (Wok and Hashim 2017). The overall communication
process are represented in a picture and it is then known as communication model. It is
diagrammatically represented in the communication process to clearly send the message to
the receiver.
Diagram:
Every part of communication process have been arranged in a sequential way. The
above is the diagram representation of communication model. This is the logical settings of
the overall process. This model helps to efficiently perform the process. One can easily learn
and understand what the message is, this model will also help in logically do the research.
This model is beneficial because it helps to logically understand the message (Schultz and
Malthouse 2017). This model will show how information passes from one person to another.
Communicator Encoding Message Receiver Decode
Feedback

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It can also help to solve the problem of very complex issue. The issues related to any
communication activity will easily be identified from this model.
2.2 Application of Communication Model in River Island
River Island has efficiently used this model to communicate the features of their
brands to the customers. The company has now focused on various marketing channels to
efficiently deliver their value to the targeted customers (GU et al. 2019). One of such
marketing channel is communication through social media post.
Figure: (Social media post in Instagram)
The above image includes the items, events, quotes and celebrities using the fashion
trends to the target market. The company has used hashtags on their photos, images and
clothing. The company uses hashtags more frequently to give a clear attention to the
customers. They use these strategy to allow the users to check their styling in terms of
clothing and accessories in their online stores (Company 2 - River Island. 2015). The
company is the sender of the communication process and the customers are the receiver of
this model (Ball et al. 2017). Social media platform like Instagram is the medium of the
message that has been encoded from the company and then reaches to the customers i.e. the

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receivers in the communication process. Then the customers who uses the Instagram reaches
to the above advertisements and can communicate with the company through comments,
posts or likes. Customer’s cam share opinions about the products related to how they think
the styling can be improved and what is not present in the product. Then this feedback is
communicated to the company and then the company communicates this back to the
customers in order to build a strong customer relationship (Berger et al. 2018). This means
that, the company is efficiently using the communication model to communicate the message
to the customer.
Diagram:
2.3 Evaluation of Effectiveness
The effectiveness of communication model is very flexible. The company tracks the
sales per hour with their staff team. The sales Key Performance Indicator tracks the annual
turnover and historical information of the company. This is efficiently done with the team
members of the company. Other KPIs of the company include Gross margin, inventory
turnover that are used in the communication model to critically analyse the business
opportunity and to expand their business according to the feedbacks of the customers.
Company estimates the sales from the feedbacks that has been communicated by the
customers, and according set their unique goals to add value to the customers and give them
overall fashion sense of the business (Balchin et al. 2019). Hence, from this the effectiveness
of the communication model of River Island can be determined easily.
Feedback
Company Encoding Message Customer Decode

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2.0 Model 2 (i.e. Push and Pull Model)
2.1 Definition of Model
Push and Pull strategy is a type of promotional tool that is used in the marketing
strategy of a company. In this strategy, either the product is pushed towards the customers or
the customer pulls the product through retail stores towards them. This method has been
adopted by various marketers in their promotional strategy. Push strategy can be helpful in
finding out the distributors that helps to promote their product. Pull strategy is used by the
company to create a more perceived value to the customers. Push strategy gives a larger
exposure to the company (Balchin et al. 2019). It test the new products in the market in order
to reach towards the customers. Pull strategy is used to directly contact to the customers. The
customers can give ideas to the company for product development and in this strategy, the
customers give instant payment to the company.
Diagram
Push strategy:
Pull Strategy:
Manufacturer IntermediariesMarketing activities Demand End user
Demand
Manufacturer IntermediariesDemand Demand End user
Marketing activities