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Brands, T-Shirts, & the Communication of Identity

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Brands, T-Shirts, & the Communication of Identity Designer ID: Brands, T-shirts, & the Communication of Identity Stylés Akira, PhD Casa La Doniccé, LLC [email protected] University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism 2 Copyright © 2015 Casa La Doniccé, LLC www.projectdesignerid.com 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ......................................................................................................... 5 OVERVIEW—THE COMMUNICATED WORLD OF FASHION AND IDENTITY ........ 6 FASHION .......................................................................................................................... 7 Luxury .................................................................................................................. 11 T-shirts ................................................................................................................. 13 Design .................................................................................................................. 13 IDENTITY ....................................................................................................................... 17 Branding and Group Identity ............................................................................... 23 BRANDING .................................................................................................................... 25 MARKET ASSESSMENT .............................................................................................. 27 Luxury and Mass Luxury ..................................................................................... 27 Dynamic Market Positioning ............................................................................... 29 Streetwear ............................................................................................................ 31 Mass-Market Makeover ....................................................................................... 32 INTERVIEWS—WHAT DO THE PROS SAY? .................................................................... 33 EXPERIMENTS DOES MAN MAKE THE BRAND OR DO CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN ...................... 39 Research Questions .......................................................................................................... 39 Method ............................................................................................................................. 40 Participant Description ......................................................................................... 40 Research Design ................................................................................................... 40 Measures .......................................................................................................................... 41 Status .................................................................................................................... 41 Consumer Status: ................................................................................................. 43 Annual Income (Socioeconomic Status) .................................................. 43 Attractiveness, Intelligence, and Coolness .............................................. 45 Brand Status: ........................................................................................................ 46 Familiarity, Innovativeness, and Quality ................................................. 48 Estimated Cost and Willingness to Pay ................................................... 49 Behavioral Economics ......................................................................................... 50 Results .............................................................................................................................. 53 Experiment 1 ........................................................................................................ 53 Interpretation ............................................................................................ 53 Experiment 2 ........................................................................................................ 53 Interpretation ............................................................................................ 53 SYNTHESIS OF FINDINGS—WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? .......................................... 54 CONCLUSION—WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? ...................................................... 63 4 Contribution ..................................................................................................................... 64 Implications ...................................................................................................................... 66 Recommendations ............................................................................................................ 67 Closing ............................................................................................................................. 69 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 70 NOTES ......................................................................................................................................... 78 5 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Project Designer ID examines how brand image and consumer identity influence one another when mediated by designer T-shirts. Specifically, it asks how changes in perceived status are likely to take place for both brands and consumers when individuals of different apparent social status are seen wearing designer T-shirts by brands from different market segments. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to provide a most complete analysis of these phenomena. STUDY 1 Study 1 involved 31 in-depth interviews with fashion industry professionals ranging from independent designers to business administrators to moguls of the trade. This research was used to establish a cultural framework for the current T-shirt market and gain insights about the value of the T-shirt as a high-stakes market commodity from an organizational perspective. It was also used to make informed decisions about the procedural methods carried out in the study that followed. STUDY 2 Study 2 (N = 1237) consisted of one pilot study (n0 = 370) and two online experiments (n1 = 495), (n2 = 372) divided into a total of 26 cells of (41 ≤ n ≤53), which examined consumer perceptions of status using designer brand T-shirts and consumer identity as the independent variables. SYNTHESIS The combined results of these studies were assessed through the use of analytical synthesis in order to make highly informed generalizations about organizational and consumer behavior as both a theoretical and practical examination of popular culture and the consumer market at large. IMPLICATIONS Real market implications for this research and its findings are determined, and recommendations are provided for organization stakeholders, particularly marketers, aiming to maximize either profits or brand equity or for those seeking to optimize the balance between the two. 6 OVERVIEW —THE COMMUNICATED WORLD OF FASHION AND IDENTITY Fashion is a cultural construct incorporating art and design, constituting a class of visual communication embedded within a complex system of social interactions. Like other cultural constructs, it determines particular aspects of the structural organization of the world we live in. Consequently it engages other forms of production and these collectively influence and are influenced by the ideological imperatives, which determine the social, political and economic modes of existence in a society. Specifically fashion determines the exposure, color, shape, physical mobility, visibility and identification of human beings as they carry out the processes of everyday life. On a societal level these factors interact with other symbolic domains of sensory stimulation to produce what McCracken (1986) termed the culturally constituted world. Moreover, this culturally constituted world is in a state of perpetual exchange with the system of philosophical principles maintained by institutional power structures, which dictate the norms and values regulating the activities of a people in a society. More directly, this simply means that the way we dress is in an endless cycle of interaction with the way we speak, the sports we play, the music we listen to, the foods we eat, the interiors of our homes, the art we value, the lessons we teach, the places we work, the technology we use, the efficiency of our production, and the architecture that provides the visual images of our landscapes, etc. (Barthes, 2004). 1 Similarly, all of these sociocultural forms are in constant negotiation with the ideas disseminated by power structures such as religious institutions, government agencies, banks, and media outlets, which—by various means—determine the philosophical reasoning as to why these many cultural components take the forms they do. That is to say, why buildings are shaped the way they are, why we eat certain foods, why we use different terminology in different settings, why wealth is distributed in a certain way, and most notably to this study, why we wear the clothes we wear, etc. This complex of social organization is important because these norms and values give us many insights as to the causation of things we observe about the material conditions of a given society’s way of life; likewise, the material conditions of life in a given society can inform us greatly about the costs and benefits of institutionally
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