The better you understand your audience, the better your brand will perform

In today’s crowded market, success depends on more than product – it’s about knowing your consumer’s world.

We need new roadmaps in fashion. Leaving design school with an uber-creative graduate collection, some Instagram clout, and an i-D feature is of little use if there isn’t good business nous underpinning it. With this in mind, we’ve partnered with AZ Academy, a Milan-based fashion course born out of the late Alber Elbaz’s AZ Factory – his brand turned fashion incubator – and overseen by Richemont, Creative Academy and Accademia Costume & Moda (ACM), to democratise access to its valuable lessons on how creative people can build commercially-successful brands. Read the seventh edition here.

By Tom George

The transition from being a graduate designer to an emerging brand is not a simple one. And that’s because you’ve gone from an academic space where you’re designing collections to showcase your techniques and creative prowess, to designing in order to pay rent. For many designers, it can feel like a war between creativity and business – what you want to make and what will actually sell. Is there a difference between those liking your BTS of the runway TikToks, or those stunning lookbook pictures shot by the next David Sims, and those who actually buy the pieces? How do you vye for the attention of consumers when you’re competing against more established brands? Through the experience and real-world knowledge of fashion and design lecturer, journalist, and podcaster Paolo Ferrarini and benchmarking and merchandising expert Manuela Giuffré, AZ Academy’s module on brand positioning offers techniques to gain a solid, tangible understanding of who you actually design for and how to stand out within the market.

You’re not a number, you’re a human being

It’s perhaps easy to say you’re catering to a Gen Z or millennial audience, but, in reality, this is a broad oversimplification that gives you an inaccurate understanding of your demographic. “Sure, we sometimes need to define the main characteristics of a generation, but there are people who don’t follow the rules,” Ferrarini says. “I studied History of Art and, while we learn about artists in terms of generations, there are those on the outside and less easy to define, and these are the most interesting people to study because this is where you see the seeds of what is going to happen in the future.” Similarly, while age demographics can be useful in many ways for marketing and advertising, they fail to give us much in terms of qualitative insights about our audience. “We need to consider that there are some boomers with the behaviours of millennials,” Ferrarini says. “Why not?”

Instead, Ferrarini suggests that designers should think about clients like the party game Taboo, where players must describe a word or phrase without saying it aloud. “Obviously, the market is made up of consumers, that’s true, but why don’t we think of society as made of people who are in love with… fill in the blank. Maybe that’s ‘in love with fashion’ or ‘in love with comics’ or ‘cinema’”. By thinking about your clients in terms of people with interests rather than marketing targets, you add a more niche layer of meaning and understanding that is more likely to grab their attention and cater to their interests. Think about how Marc Jacobs’ Heaven stores also sell nostalgic Y2K memorabilia like Björk’s Björkgraphy or Larry Clark’s Kids soundtrack on CD. Or how the commercial brands of pop stars often play into the culture behind the artists and their fandoms: the drag vibes of Gaga’s Haus Labs or the joyful, or the “Treat People with Kindness“ values of Harry Styles’ Pleasing.

Part of the reason it is so important to understand the qualitative aspects of your brand’s consumers is due to the drastic changes in the market over recent years. In some ways, dressing has become far more personal than it ever has. While clothing has always intrinsically been linked to identity and performance – in the words of RuPaul, “we’re all born naked and the rest is drag” – social media has only amplified this. It’s provided a more global stage for our costuming and the narrative we wish to showcase. Ferrarini suggests the rise of the beauty industry has increased our individual sense of costuming, with theatre and drag techniques like contouring becoming a part of normal life. “It's a very basic sociological theory in fashion but it’s becoming more and more extreme,” he argues. This is why it’s increasingly important for designers to understand their consumers’ interests. “In the past, the strongest drive in traditional subcultures was finding your tribe and defining yourself within a group. You take on those codes, styles, colours, behaviours and music and so forth. Today, it’s more selfish in a way. It’s more about defining your own identity and uniqueness.”

Take to the streets

In order to get a nuanced understanding of who your consumer community is, both Ferrarini and Giuffré agree that the most crucial first step is to go out and touch grass… or rather, the paving slabs of your local big city’s streets. This is for two reasons: to gain a better understanding of your audience, but also of your competitors. “Curiosity is crucial. It’s the first tool. Observe what’s happening around you,” Giuffré says. After all, a brand can’t be relevant unless it is situated within the needs and desires of the world in which it exists.

Ferrarini, being more interested in storytelling, focuses on the former reason: to gain a better understanding of your audience. He suggests that once you’ve figured out the interests of your desired client, then explore that scene like an alien visiting that space for the first time. He points to the example of the culture shock we all often feel when visiting a supermarket in another country. If you’re catering to comic book fans, go to a comic book store and view that space from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what an Ewok is. Ferrarini argues that the most interesting designers, the ones who stay ahead of consumer behavioral changes, are the ones who you could easily bump into on the street because they’re submerged in the world they design for. “If you live in Venice, you’ll stumble upon Rick Owens on the Biennale very easily, Marc Jacobs and Demna have great antennae in understanding reality too,” Ferrarini argues. “Alessandro Michele, too. If you live in Rome, you can see the specific areas of the city – the thrift stores and antiques – that he takes inspiration from. You can see he’s creating a sort of documentary of Rome.”

By understanding the social context in which your brand will live, you can create for the needs of your community. “The starting point of your brand must be based within everyday life as much as possible; from there, you can make haute couture for the rich,” Ferrarini adds. “By understanding the base point of what is going on in the world, you can then decide whether to swim alongside the tide or go against it, but you must understand the direction your consumer community is heading in first in order to do either.”

Know your competition

Once you understand your consumer, you need to understand the others vying for their attention. “Don't just observe fashion through social media and magazines. Go in-store as much as possible and try things on,” Ferrarini says. Walking into a high-end boutique can be a daunting experience. Especially when you feel like the store may know your student budget means you’re not there to actually buy anything. Ferrarini argues that the best way to overcome this is honesty. “Sales advisors in boutiques know immediately if you’re a potential client or not, so I tell my students to go in and be honest about being a student and ask silly questions: why is this so expensive? How do I wash it? How do I clean it? Think about the life of the product in your own life. You will learn a lot because the staff in boutiques are very well-trained, and these questions will elicit honest answers.”

Giuffré has a similar exercise for her students. “Enter the stores and study the product and the feelings you have while inside,” she says, suggesting you then do what economists call a SWOT analysis. This is a matrix that chronicles the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the market and allows you to map what you can bring into your own brand’s market planning, the areas you can exploit, and what to look out for. She also recommends using a Price Positioning Matrix – this is a visual aid to compare your brand’s product value to competitors through a graph, often with ‘price’ on the Y axis and ‘quality’ on the X axis. The matrix is then split into four quadrants: premium (high price, high quality), economy (low price, low quality), penetration (low price, high quality), and skimming (high price, low quality). Mapping competitor products onto this graph allows you to find where there may be a gap in the market to exploit.

Once you’ve looked at the world around you, Ferrarini suggests going backwards to eventually go forwards; to think in reverse. His method for this is fittingly called TREND. “T is ‘track to trace’, which means to observe the present. This is the starting point. R is ‘recover to reload’, meaning to look to the past. E is ‘evolve to envision’, meaning use this knowledge to think about the future. N is ‘narrate to network’, which is the communication and storytelling aspect. This is not just the cherry on top – it should be analysed with everything else. Then D is ‘design to determine’. This is the creative part. It’s the moment of freedom, the moment of imagining incredible things and then starting to plan actual strategies.” By working in this way, Ferrarini argues you avoid falling into nostalgia by being too stuck in the past, or idealistic by thinking too far ahead. “If you start by observing what is happening around you and then go back, you have a good chance of thinking of something truly innovative but still in tune with reality. It won’t be wishful thinking. It creates a more meaningful analysis of the present.”

Finding the balance between creativity and business

The difficulty some designers can face is figuring out the balance between what they want their brand to be and what their consumers are actually purchasing. Giuffré, however, says that these two aspects – creativity and business – need not be enemies. This is because the product itself often plays less of a role in the marketing of a brand than ever. “Product is not the most important leverage, it’s about communicating something and storytelling.” She points to Jacquemus, whose stores embody the Mediterranean lifestyle with warm colours, light, and a sense of joy and playfulness – complete with vending machines, which reflect the more accessible price point of the items compared to competitors and allows for consumers to enjoy the stores as an evocative space. Another example is Burberry, which recently doubled down on “Bri’ish” culture with a takeover of famed London caff Norman’s, renaming Bond Street, and hosting a Glasto-themed pub quiz.

Even brands such as The Row, known for the elite quality of its products, create a detox culture around their brand with health-conscious snacks and drinks at shows and a no-social-media rule. “That was a crucial decision they made,” Giuffré points out. “Not communicating is communicating.” Giuffré suggests brands need to think wider than product when they design, to create evocative and immersive experiences for consumers that show them who the brand is and make them want to buy into it. “Activities are crucial today because clients want to be engaged and involved in something meaningful. They want to be part of a community. They care about what they buy and who they buy it from. They’re drawn to brands that share their values and engage them emotionally. Today, staying ahead means staying human. Listening, evolving, and building communities. It’s a continuous dance, but it’s here where the final clients identify themselves.”

What both Giuffré and Ferrarini’s techniques boil down to is context. Knowing the world in which your consumer exists, what they love, what they care about, and what else is seeking their attention will help you create an emotional connection with your audience that then breeds loyalty. Consumers will see your brand as a way in which to costume themselves, showcase the narrative they want to espouse, and share with the world their views and values. Quantitative methods can be great for seeing what sells right now, but it's qualitative analysis of your audience that helps you stay ahead within a quickly changing society. “It’s like our phone cameras,” Ferrarini finishes. “We tend to use the normal camera when we should be looking at everything around our brand with the utmost precision. We should be using 0.5.”