3 branding and marketing strategies that are out for 2024
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Last week, I spoke with Tony and Inii King, founders of 14-year-old King & Partners, about what’s “out” for 2024, in terms of brand strategies.?
King & Partners started as a digital agency largely focused on the e-commerce sites of luxury fashion brands including Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. But it’s since evolved its services to include strategy, branding and marketing, and built out its client base. Hospitality companies, including Edition Hotels, the Greenwich Hotel and MSD Partners’ Boca Raton Resort & Club, now drive 65% of the business. The remainder is made up of work for real estate, wellness, beauty, lifestyle and fashion brands. King & Partners’ clients outside of high fashion have included Skims, Good American, Frame, Merit Beauty and Fekkai, with JP Morgan Chase being a recent addition.?
“They want to know we can create a brand that's attractive to a premium consumer,” Tony King said, regarding how the agency’s work with fashion brands attracted clients from other industries.?
Below, Tony and Inii King discuss what branding and marketing strategies are working and not working for all brands, regardless of their focus category.?
Out: 3-minute campaign videos
Inii King: “We’ve been emphasizing that content has to look natural and has to be short. [The success of] short-form and TikTok content expedited clients’ understanding [of this]. They were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make three-minute videos that no one was going to watch. And people always felt uncomfortable putting out [raw content], even though unnatural content doesn’t have the same impact. But now, clients are asking for something that feels natural and in the moment.”?
Tony King: “We were born out of digital and e-commerce. So, we look at analytics, and we know exactly how long people look at something. … We know you’d [see more success] with five 20-second videos than with a two-and-a-half-minute brand video.”
Out: Soulless brands?
Inii King: “So many clients or brands are just looking at the best practices of successful brands and then telling us we need to do A, B, C, D, E, F and G perfectly, based on their data. But in the end, if the brand doesn’t have a true vision —?if there’s no soul, no one driving the vision and no personality —?people just don’t love the brand. People can see when things are calculated.”??
Tony King: “A lot of brands that come to us look like they were built in a spreadsheet. It’s almost like the product category and what they’re selling are afterthoughts. They just know that if they can spend X on performance marketing, they can get X out of the machine at the other end. And we’re always like, ‘You’ve got to get people excited about the romance of your product or where you are in the market.’”?
Inii King: “The most successful brands on social media are the ones that feel like there’s just one interesting person at the brand running [social] and just having fun with it.”?
Out: Leaning on celebrity, vs. product
Tony King: “The celebrity thing at a lot of brands just doesn't work. You can't chuck celebrity at product to equal success.”
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Inii King: “It’s all about product. Rhode is successful because their products are really good.”
Tony King: “Skims got very successful because of Kim, but the product is good. Would it be a $4 billion brand now [without Kim]? Probably not. But it would still be successful.”?
Catch up on the week’s 5 most-read beauty and fashion stories below.
On Wednesday, Target shared that it has 1,000 new wellness-related products to offer its customers, ranging from apparel and accessories to beauty, supplements and technology. Target recently made headlines for bringing on new and buzzy brands like Kourtney Kardashian Barker's supplements brand Lemme, Hum Nutrition and Bala bangles.?
On Thursday, LVMH shared in its 2023 year-end earnings report that selective retailing, the business unit that houses Sephora, posted a year-over-year revenue increase of 25%, to $19.4 billion, ahead of the luxury conglomerate’s four other units. Behind selective retailing was fashion and luxury goods, with a 14% year-over-year gain, and then perfumes and cosmetics, with an 11% year-over-year gain.?
Q1 is the most important selling season of the year for the wellness industry, and as more brands enter the space, those leading in innovation and safety are doubling down on their points of difference.?
California Naturals' new brand campaign features video content starring Wilson that will be shared on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. In addition, the brand is working with 11 paid macro- and mega-influencers with a combined following of 17 million who will create their own spins on the videos by stitching them on TikTok and Instagram.?
Even though influencer Matilda Djerf lives in Sweden, when she wants vintage Chanel flats, she calls L.A.-based Julia Rabinowitsch. When the team behind Mirror Palais needs shoes for its fashion shows, they call her, too. On Instagram, she goes by @TheMillennialDecorator (75,000 followers). She started the account in 2020 "in the dark ages of the pandemic," while living on unemployment. It's followed by major influencers and stylists including Negin Mirsalehi, Marianna Hewitt, Mimi Cutrell and Allison Bornstein. Today, through the account, she sells vintage shoes averaging $500 a pair via 10-12 drops per year.?
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