ZARA marketing strategies

 


      Before I came here, I worked at ZARA which is clothing shop based in Spain. Inditex is their parent's company and now the company is the biggest fashion group in the world. Their sales is the top almost every year and their evolution do not stop.  Now, even there are so many fashion companies in this world and they do not use advertisement strategy that much, why they can keep their sales better more than the other companies in the world. The reason was their marketing strategies which other companies cannot imitate (sustainable competitive advantage).

First their target is young,price-conscious, and highly sensitive to the latest fashion trends. This generation are obsessed with fashion but almost younger does not have much money to buy expensive clothes and ZARA could success narrowing down a target. ZARA was the pioneer to start fast fashion in the world and then many other companies kept following it and fast fashion became very famous industry.


And what surprising strategy is that they copy other expensive brand design. Of course they design what they sell themselves too but one of the biggest reason why they could success like this will the fact. Some fast fashion designer said "Our work is to look at fashion show and copy their very new design". And also they take the designers who worked in expensive brand by paying much money.

They do not have many stocks so even if the products was so popular, after they sold the every products they have, customers cannot get them. (Sometimes, they reproduce very popular products though.) It is unusual thing in fashion industry because they miss the chance to sell their clothes if they do not have stock when customer want the product. Then why ZARA are doing this strategy?
Because they want to make customer think ZARA always have new products. So after the products were sold everything they have, it means new products will be sold instead of selling same thing before. This made it possible to make customers not get bored. New products come to stores second time for a week so even if you go to ZARA once a week, you will find out new products every single week.



Having their own factory is also one of the big reason they succeeded. Almost fashion brand does not have their own factory and they rely on other companies of developing countries. However this  makes it difficult to manage the quality of products and the time to make them so it is difficult to sell their new products in their store on good timing. On the other hand, ZARA has own their factory so it made possible to sell new products on good timing and it takes only two or three weeks to sell their products after they designed the products. This is impossible speed  in other brand does not have own factory.



And most questioning thing is why they do not do advertisement but their sales is the best in the world. It makes other companies think "Is advertisement meaningless?"and I felt too when I knew this fact. What ZARA made possible this is "where their shop are". They think where their shops are the best advertisement so they have their shops in the place many people gather.




So these different strategies from other companies made them the best fashion company in the world. They did not care about common sense of fashion industry and they did revolution thing for their customer so they could success. They taught me the most important thing is always to believe our own way and do what we believe it is good.