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COMPANIES The new rules of guerrilla marketing in fashion BY KATI CHITRAKORN23 MARCH 2020 As traditional advertising channels lose favour, fashion brands are using more creative measures to establish direct connections. Prada Key takeaways: · Amid the Covid-19 outbreak, which has caused a decline in retail footfall, brands are using guerrilla marketing tactics to expand their reach. · The shift also comes as digital advertising spend surpassed non-digital for the first time in 2019, capturing more than half of all dollars spent by advertisers. · While ROI might be hard to track, guerrilla marketing is a cost-effective way to get exposure and establish direct relationships with consumers. When Gucci Beauty launched its first-ever mascara in early March, the brand celebrated with an interactive pop-up shop in Los Angeles. In the warehouse-like space, models — including punk singer Dani Miller, who went viral for her imperfect teeth in the brand’s lipstick ads — danced wearing Gucci, while influencers and editors drank champagne, played around with the new L’Obscur mascara and snapped mirror selfies in the Gucci Bloom dressing room. For everyone else, an AR Instagram filter debuted the new Gucci Beauty product to users. The “Eyes-o-Matic” filter features a gold robot that digitally applies mascara onto the user. As Gucci touts its new product as “buildable” for both a subtle or bold look, users can control how many times the robot tops up their lashes. Traditional advertising channels are in decline. Digital ad spend surpassed non-digital for the first time in 2019, capturing more than half of all dollars spent by advertisers, according to eMarketer. That shift has prompted more luxury brands to embrace “guerilla marketing”, or unconventional advertising methods, says Nick Stickland, founder and executive creative director of Odd, an integrated creative agency specialising in consumer marketing for fashion and lifestyle brands. By creating a buzzy or memorable experience, guerilla marketing tactics increase the likelihood that someone who has interacted with the campaign will tell their friends about it. As a result, the product being advertised automatically reaches more people than initially anticipated. Successful guerrilla campaigns are typically lower budget, helping to relieve brands of the pressure of rising customer acquisition costs in online channels. "Most people hate advertisements. Guerrilla marketing, when done well, intercepts an audience in a unique way and captures attention," adds Evy Lyons, vice president of marketing at Traackr. New technologies and social platforms have also enabled companies to guerrilla market their brand in ways that were not possible before — something that is more pertinent amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has caused store closures, a decline in retail footfall and a greater shift to online shopping. As companies strive to strike the right chord when communicating with customers during the pandemic, being creative can help foster a feeling of community. Beyond AR filters, fashion brands have launched online campaigns that harness the power of the public, while others have turned to hacks to boost their reach on Instagram. The impact of a successful campaign “lies in the element of surprise, humour and uniqueness”, says Natalie Hughes, founding director of social media agency The Fashion Digital. “In an increasingly noisy social media space, brands have to think creatively — online and offline — to be seen, heard and, most importantly now, shared.” Appeal to a wider base With over 500 million people using Instagram Stories every day according to the company, brands like Gucci, Burberry, JW Anderson and Coperni have all started to experiment with the virality of AR face filters by creating their own custom ones for the social media platform. When Gucci launched the Instagram account @GucciBeauty for its beauty line dedicated to creative director Alessandro Michele’s “vision of beauty”, it also introduced its first AR filter where users could pick from three different looks, each reminiscent of the renaissance or baroque-period portraits the brand often shares on its feed. For its Spring/Summer 2020 show, Burberry unveiled an interactive AR filter that covers the user's face with white lace, the same pattern used for the house's fashion show invitation. To celebrate its pop-up in Selfridges this month, the brand launched a filter where people can capture videos of themselves with digital penguins flying around. Meanwhile, JW Anderson’s sleek anchor logo featured on a filter to mark the opening of his first London store, and Coperni created a Wi-Fi-inspired filter for its Autumn/Winter 2020 show in Paris. Coperni's Instagram filter launched for their AW20 show © Coperni Coperni’s filter has multiple stages: at the beginning a symbol of a Wi-Fi connection appears and the user’s face is blurred, but the longer you click and interact with the filter, the more clear the person’s appearance becomes, although their features also start to morph. The idea is that “you become more and more connected until [you reach the] cyborg phase”, explains Sébastien Meyer, who co-founded the French brand with Arnaud Vaillant. “It was a teaser for the show. We launched it two days earlier and people just started playing with it; models at the show did it, and some of the audience took videos of the models walking with the filter layered on, as if we had cyborgs in the room,” Meyer says. According to the designer, the filter has been used more than 200,000 times. Creating a custom AR filter for Instagram Stories is a clever growth hack: in order to access the filter, users need to follow the brand on Instagram or visit its profile to try it out. Users can also try on the filters if they see some of their friends using it in Instagram Stories, which adds to their reach. The nature of the ephemeral filters makes it hard to connect them to earned revenue, but Krista Corrigan, retail analyst at Edited, says they raise valuable brand awareness. “It’s important for [luxury brands] to capitalise on social media visibility, even if it doesn’t lead directly to sales [as it can make] the user more familiar and allow them to develop a connection with the brand,” agrees Traackr’s Lyons. “This exposure over time can help to facilitate purchases. It all comes down to staying top of mind in an engaging way.” However, brands looking to create new Instagram filters at this time have to be patient. According to Facebook, owner of both Instagram and Spark AR, the software that allows creators to develop filters, there will be a delay in the approval of new filters as the moderators, who assess new submissions, have been asked to leave the office due to the coronavirus. Harness the power of the public Self-Portrait founder and creative director Han Chong couldn’t find a stylish but practical bag to bring his lunch in, nor could his employees. That inspired Self-Portrait’s SS20 campaign, in which the brand partnered with bakeries around the world, including Gail’s in London, Fabrique in New York, La Tropézienne in Los Angeles and Dean & DeLuca in Thailand, to release food-filled, limited-edition totes. Worldwide, 1,200 bags were distributed for free. Much like AR filters, this kind of guerrilla marketing technique relies on the power of the public to share their finds and spread the word. “It’s often described as ‘free advertising’ and can have more in common with PR than traditional marketing in paid-for channels,” says Odd’s Stickland. A major draw of using guerrilla marketing tactics is the low cost involved if executed correctly. The only requirements for a successful campaign, continues Stickland, is that it requires thinking outside the box in order to capture the interest of passersby, enough so that they won’t be able to stop themselves from snapping, sharing and raving about their experience with the campaign. Saint Laurent was an early adopter of this approach. Under former creative director Stefano Pilati, the YSL manifesto — a 20-page handout inside a limited-edition cotton bag with the YSL logo painted upside down — was handed out every year in surprise locations in major cities like London, Milan, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Although the manifesto was discontinued seasons ago, it was a radical idea for the house to communicate directly with people, many of whom sought to collect issues that featured models like Arizona Muse or Daria Werbowy. (Some of these totes are still listed on resale platforms like Grailed for between $50 to $190.) Prada Resort 2020 campaign © Prada Prada has recently trialled this approach. For AW20 the brand gifted hoodies alongside a branded AR filter, which was amplified by activations with influencers and then many members of the public sharing it on Instagram Stories. It follows on from the Italian house’s meta approach for Resort 2020, where its campaign featured models like Freja Beha Erichsen and Sara Blomqvist Young clutching a flower bouquet. The same imagery was shown on the wrapping paper the models were holding, and was also plastered on Prada-branded wrapping paper at florists in London, Milan, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo and Moscow — “a highly Instagrammable moment”, says The Fashion Digital's Hughes. For those who weren’t able to pick up a bouquet of Prada’s flowers in real life, the campaign was also designed to be easily shared online, inspired by the idea of gifting flowers from one person to another, and there was also a filter that could be downloaded via Prada’s website. “Everyone is so glued to their phones that these campaigns incentivise you to look up, be in the present and disconnect in a tangible way,” says Rita Tabet, chief operating officer and partner at Pop Up Mob, an experiential marketing firm that works with brands like Everlane and Marc Jacobs. “The beauty of guerrilla marketing is that it can be universally impactful,” adds Hughes. Build an online tribe Some brands have turned to community hashtags to spread awareness and grow their audience. Kitri (#KitriInspiration) and Rotate Birger Christensen (#MakeItRotate) have their own hashtag iterations. This month Rixo introduced #IconsofRixo, featuring people who have been handpicked to be part of its first-ever global ambassador programme. “We weren’t looking at how many Instagram followers they had, but [at whether] they embodied one of our key values, which is inspiring and empowering others,” explains Henrietta Rix, who co-founded Rixo with Orlagh McCloskey. The brand received more than 800 applications when the application form went live in January 2020. Selected ambassadors are regularly gifted pieces and have first access to the collections. Each also has a unique discount code that can be shared with their community. But for everyone else who isn’t part of the chosen few, there’s another hashtag — #HumansofRixo — that can be used. While a hashtag may first be adopted by the brand and a collective of influencers, anyone can also choose to participate by adding the same to their own posts, thus creating a domino effect. Kelsey Marie, Nnenna Echem and Sophia Li as #IconsOfRixo © Rixo “Adopting hashtags that originate in a brand’s influencer community demonstrates that the