Fashion Revolution

Challenge

Increasing brand awareness

Fashion Revolution has made tremendous progress in a short amount of time. The movement aims to encourage the entire population to be curious about who made their clothes and embrace a more ethical and sustainable lifestyle. So how did a new and unknown movement manage to extend an Awareness Day into a week's work of initiatives after only 3 years, make a front page splash in Australian news and be invited to talk in the House of Commons? It all started with awareness; after all, the cause spoke for itself.

As with many businesses, Fashion Revolution still faced the same "limited awareness" difficulty that all organizations bump into. The importance of content marketing and resonating with the audience is imperative for the message spread. The audience isn't going to endorse a message they do not connect with.

Before Meltwater, Fashion Revolution had plenty of ideas around how to raise brand awareness by encouraging consumers to challenge brands about ethical trading, but they had no way of focusing on which ideas to pursue and develop further. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 new business ideas fail, so it's no surprise companies are cautious about those which they should invest in. This problem is especially real for non-profit organizations like Fashion Revolution, who need to make maximum impact on limited funds.

Solution

Data driven decisions

Any marketing expert knows that understanding the audience is the key to survival. Using social media monitoring to learn more about our brand followers can unearth valuable demographic and behavioral insights. Such information can be used to find new venues for advertising, for example, or develop campaign messages as Fashion Revolution explains. "Having unlimited searches was great as we could track all our key messaging and see which resonated best with the audience. We noticed our audience preferred more obvious hashtags when we saw greater buzz around #FashionRevolution instead of #FashionRev. This was surprising especially considering the character limit on Twitter."

In 2016, Fashion Revolution Day extended into Fashion Revolution Week, without the Marketing team knowing how to extend the initiatives of the campaign. Parry commented, "We used media monitoring and social media monitoring to analyze retrospective campaign data and grasp which type of activity generated the most PR coverage." Metrics such as impressions, reach and geographical spread were of particular importance to Fashion Revolution as this enabled the team to see the strongest performing activities of their campaign, and discovered themes journalists wanted to cover. "This allows us to focus better and plan campaigns that will the press and our audience want to engage with." says Martine Parry, Head of Media at Fashion Revolution.