Communication Strategy of Thomas Pink for the UK Market - Essay Example

?Topic Thomas Pink’s Communications Strategy Targeted at the UK market ThomasPink was established in 1984 by the Mullen brothers, based upon their being inspired by an 18th century London tailor, and the idea behind the brand was to reinvent the Jermyn shirt and take it to a wider more sophisticated audience. They opened their first store in Chelsea, London producing only shirts. This was followed closely by more stores across the UK as a part of its success story. Thomas Pink now has 75 stores worldwide and backed by loyal and admiring customers; they’re looking to take it up another notch. Pink is now part of a French luxury brands group called LVMH which has helped them to expand more, they now cater to their customers with a treasure trove of silk ties, leather goods and other accessories. Thomas Pink, also operates a state of the art website, through which customers can purchase its luxury products at any hour of any day at any place in the world. (LinkedIn). To a novice, Thomas Pink’s success story may seem like a fairytale that has been riding a continuous success wave held up by sheer dumb luck. However, this is not how Thomas Pink has been able to climb up the rungs of the ladder of corporate success. They have, over the course of time implemented various policies and techniques that have given the brand an edge over its competitors and helped propel it from just another shirt manufacturer to one of the leading names of luxury brands in the UK. One of the things most important for a brand’s rapid success in the marketing sphere is its communication strategy. As effective as a good communication strategy can be, it can sometimes also be very difficult to develop, fashioned to best suit the companies needs. Thus, many companies suffer from either the lack of a communications strategy or the ineffectiveness of one. A successful communications strategy explains and promotes the company’s goals and what it hopes to achieve. It creates the “voice” of the company used to reach its customer base and it is upon this communications strategy that the company can base subsequent tactics. First and foremost, the company needs to get some things in order. The management needs to decide on five management decisions which are further explained below. First, the company needs to ascertain what its audience is. Who are the people it wants to reach and communicate its goals to? Second, the company needs to figure out what it needs to change about its behavior. Things it needs to do differently, new actions that it will have to take to reach its newly defined audience and communication routes it will have to redirect and realign. Third, the management needs to decide which messages will be suitable for the defined audience. Do they have to restructure the messages? Or will they have to be changed completely? Once the messages to be conveyed to the audience are decided, the management can now work on what channels will be required to convey the message. These will also be in accordance with the defined audience to be targeted. The last job of the management concerning the implementation of a communications strategy is that of evaluation. How will the success of implementation of such a strategy be measured? Should the management set some goals or aims to be achieved? And how will they be able to quantify results? Thomas Pink’s communications strategy changed greatly with time as it expanded and its audience changed. Initially, it was just producing luxury men’s shirts for an audience that was prepared to pay a premium price for premium quality. This required Thomas Pink to target a particular segment of the rich and image conscious male market that would purchase the brand’s products with a loyalty only associated with people with money who stick with brands because those brands offer a small part to the completion of their personalities. When Thomas Pink joined LVMH, it expanded into different markets like a firework. It was now producing accessories and leather goods in addition to its traditional shirts. Today, the brand offers its customers casual and formal collections for men and women both, in addition to accessories and a wedding collection. Its website, as a communications tool is designed accordingly to allure and fetch to itself people of both genders with a dominating aesthetic sense and a higher desire to dress and look smarter with the help of a luxury brand name. The website, it simply laid out with drop down menus for different sections of the collections showcased on the website. The advertisement campaign on the website employs slick photography and a use of catchy slogans revolving around the themes of “finding your perfect fit” and “finding a tie with a difference”. It promotes clothes that will help you stand out by catering to you with clothes and accessories that look and feel like they were made “just” for you. The defined audience is a market segment, that is young, hip and fashion conscious. Wants to be well dressed and has the money to sustain that kind of lifestyle. The required change in behavior for Thomas Pink has been to focus more on online channels to reach its target audience. The messages it has used to communicate its image and identity to its market have centered around a high end but not stuck up modern fashion lifestyle that is reflected through its clothes and accessories. Channels it has used are online channels and other social and communications media. Lastly, the company has to define criteria and use them to develop the effectiveness of its current communications strategy so that it can see whether such a move on its part has been profitable, this will help Thomas Pink’s management to determine future marketing moves. The company can normally use three main channels for its communications strategy. It can use the internet in the case that it wants to transfer distributor cost and control content about itself that it wants its audience to see. However, this will require constant maintenance and upkeep/updating of the website. Thomas Pink operates an official website, which displays its content and showcases new collections. The company can also use social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter etcetera to reach a larger section of its target audience. Social networking websites are becoming very popular these days and there is hardly anyone who uses the internet who is not a member of one such site or the other. Setting up a brand page on a few of the most prominent of these websites will help the company reach a large section of the target audience without incurring much cost. Thomas Pink operates in addition to its website, pages on Facebook, Moodmedia, YouTube, Twitter and Linked In etcetera. Where Facebook and Twitter are channels that help Thomas Pink access customers, Linked In, which is a website with the official information of individuals and corporate entities helps bridge Thomas Pink to its corporate stakeholders. The second option is to mobilize your stakeholders. If they are given a direction and an agenda they can be quite effective in putting the company’s ideas across to its customers because they profit only if the company profits, so they are more likely to put in all efforts and possible resources to help the company achieve its target. If this is not an option, the company can use interpersonal contacts which is similar to using the stakeholders but on a more personal level. Thomas Pink for example, advertises itself through LVMH’s website as well as its own. This attaches in the mind of the consumer an added value, which is lent to the brand by the prestige of the stakeholder, in this case LVMH. People who open LVMH’s website to shop and are interested in similar things are more likely to stumble upon the link to a page on Thomas Pink. In this way, Thomas Pink effectively uses a stakeholder and their reputation to the advantage of its own promotion. The third section related to using marketing channels is that if using media as a marketing channel. In this avenue, the company loses control over what information it wants shared. For once media channels take the reins, they stop at no hurdles or commands and ride unbridled as fast and as far as they want to. This can turn out two polar outcomes, either the company benefits because the media helps saturate the market with the information that it wanted spread out. Or, it finds itself at a dangerous disadvantage level where the company is held to be irreversibly damaged by such information that the company wants to keep locked up and the media has somehow access to. However, the benefits are usually more than the costs incurred. This way, the company gains at a comparatively lower cost, the added credibility of the media channel which the internet can often not afford. The company should keep in mind an idea most crucial to its communications strategy. What should matter most to the marketing strategy of the company or the company a whole is the “perceived reality” it is subjected to. It is not so important what the company thinks of itself, it is way more important what the company’s target audience thinks of it. What the companies should aim for is listen to their target audience and try to understand them, instead of just blindly trying to mold them into what and how they want them to be. The target audience is human, not robotic. They have different wants and needs, feelings, emotions, reasons and methods that they apply to the world as they see fit. These emotions and needs change over time, with changing trends and seasons. A company with an efficient communications strategy will equip itself with enough data about its customer base to be able to predict and react to the changes that might occur in the collective attitude of its customer base. It will make it a key point to know at all times the level of information held by the audience, its attitude and dominating emotion and structure its message to them accordingly. The company will then use a communications channel which is more likely to better reach more of its target audience. This is what entails an audience centered communications strategy. It runs on what the consumer wants and perceives of the company not what the company can provide and thinks of itself. the company in question should also work more on having its message “understood” by the audience as opposed to just plain conveying it. Because as long as the message is not understood, it will hold no meaning and make no sense to the audience and until that doesn’t happen conveyance of the message will have no benefit whatsoever. The company can do this by basing its advertising campaigns on situations and scenarios that are most relevant to its target market. With the message based on something they can relate to, they will find it easier to understand the company’s ideas. However, the company should keep in mind that one size doesn’t fit all. Sometimes, a campaign based on a particular market segment will only have the intended effect on just a portion of the target. This is perfectly acceptable, because even though the audience is a collective entity, it is made up of individual personal entities that are in themselves all different from each other while being essentially the same. And thus the company must be prepared to face this minor setback. Thomas Pink has tried over time to take into account its audience in a more human form when it fashions the message to be communicated to it. One example of this is that, the new collections displayed on the website are all given names that convey the look and sound/feel of a certain place. There is the Hawaii shirt that an attractive female model is wearing in one of the images on the website, anyone who has been to Hawaii or has seen it on TV or online can roughly imagine what such a shirt would be like. People who like Hawaii will be more inclined to buy this shirt even without looking at it. Once this connection/relation is established with a particular consumer or set of consumers and the message has been “understood” per say, the communication becomes more effective. Additional measures to make the communications strategy more fitting and profitable are as follows. The team responsible for developing the strategy should make sure that the message to be conveyed is clear and concise, that it doesn’t have unnecessary wordiness and jargon that the layperson will not understand. It should also be kept in mind that, the message is concise enough to hold the attention of the customer throughout. Moreover, it should use data, stats and real stories so that it can deliver the concocted message while connecting to the consumer on a more human level. Thomas Pink’s official website is a prime example. The design is clutter free and artsy, with drop down menus for easier browsing. It employs strong imaging by using the pictures of attractive models to showcase new collections. It also has a link for a very interesting history of the brand. Things like these provide an additional connection with the audience while retaining attention for longer. One last aspect that needs to be considered is that the companies effectively establish its rapport and credibility with the audience. These develop as a natural process with time, as satisfied consumers turn to loyal consumers. However the process can be fast tracked by leaning on the credibility of an already established and reliable partner, like Thomas Pink used LVMH that was already famous and had a loyal customer base by the time Thomas Pink joined the group. (Unescap). After careful study and analysis of the current situation, it can be seen that Thomas Pink has a pretty strong and effective communications strategy which has enabled it to reach new heights of success in the short time period that it has been operating. A good communications strategy has given it and edge over its competitors and propelled it faster towards the achievement of its goals. It has really incorporated its audience in its message and reaped the subsequent fruit. Bibliography. Eat Me Magazine | LinkedIn. (n.d.). World's Largest Professional Network | LinkedIn. Retrieved April 15, 2012, from http://www.linkedin.com/company/eat-me-magazine Thomas Pink | Dress Shirts | Casual Shirts | Silk Ties | Cufflinks | Knitwear | Accessories for Men and Women.. (n.d.). Thomas Pink | Dress Shirts | Casual Shirts | Silk Ties | Cufflinks | Knitwear | Accessories for Men and Women.. Retrieved April 15, 2012, from http://www.thomaspink.com/ communication. (n.d.). Linkedin. Retrieved April 15, 2012, from www.unescap.org/stat/disability/census-ws/Session5-Media.pdf planning, b. t., & decision-making. (n.d.). Communication Strategy. Home. Retrieved April 15, 2012, from http://www.elwayresearch.com/commu Read More