LEARNING DIARY 23E58050 Consumer Behavior and Retail Experience

Management in Fashion and Design Business

Dyasanti Vidya Saputri

# 413781

It’s amazing how far this course has shifted my perception about the fashion

world. Before this course I was never particularly interested in fashion-related

matters—be it fashion editorials or clothing—but now that I have learned

about the different aspects of fashion, I realized that the concepts pertaining

to the fashion world could also be implemented in a much broader context. It

would only be appropriate for me to reflect on the lecture materials by

applying the abstract theories to real-life situations, and thus in this learning

diary I will mostly address cases from my country Indonesia and the fashion

system that I think is prevalent in our culture. If not, I will try to take examples

from relevant situations I’ve been in or articles I’ve come across.

Fashion as a Sign System and Language: Despite my hard time grasping Ronald Barthes’ take on ‘fashion system’ (in

fact, I’m still in the process of fully understanding it) as well as Blumer’s

definition of ‘fashion theory’, this topic was eye-opening as it enabled me to

see how ‘fashion’ isn’t always about clothing and accessories. What struck me

the most was the complicated nature of fashion itself.

Starting off with examples from my own country; Blumer’s (1969) concept of

‘collective taste’ prevails amongst Indonesian youth by their seemingly

communal way of dressing. In 2008, it was asymmetrical haircuts. In 2011, it

was feminine translucent chiffon blouses that sway side-to-side when you

walk. In 2012, the boys began to dress drapperly with their crisp, patterned

button-downs and their mustard washed denim trousers. Mind that I observed

this as part of the so-called youth, therefore I experienced it first-hand. As I

too felt the need to move in the direction everyone else was going, a

 

realization dawned upon me—everybody was doing it for the sake of

acknowledgment. They were all seeking for that sought-after confirmation of

their existence in the community. Copying each other’s way of dressing

oneself was, indeed, one of the easiest things to do to be accepted into a

social circle.

Needless to say, Blumer’s theory of the ‘acting crowd’ is pertinent to many

aspects of today’s social issues. The five stages,

1. Tension or unrest

2. Exciting event

3. Milling

4. A common object of attention

5. Common impulses

are common features one can find in perhaps every single social movement,

including fashion.

Fashion as a Power Structure:

Referring to Bourdieu’s idea of social capital and his system of ‘habitus’,

‘capital’ and ‘field’—I think it’s safe to say that in Indonesia, we still have this

massive wall dividing the different social classes. As an exchange student

here in Finland, I’ve been very impressed by how the country is run based on

equality, diminishing the gap between each social class as much as possible.

It’s an entirely different case back in my country.

Interestingly, this class difference is highlighted through fashion—amongst

other things, of course. One of the many cases for Indonesian youth

correlates nicely with what Sundie et al. (2011) suggests, “Men might use

costly products to display their wealth to potential mates.” The current trend

amongst Indonesian young men is to join the ‘hipster movement’ (clean

shave, smart-casual clothing, possible futile addition of a beanie/cardigan) by

purchasing and wearing expensive local handmade products. Fig. 1 and 2 are

examples taken from two local Indonesian products whose target segment

includes said young men.

 

Another article that was also brought up on the subject of power structure was

written by Perez et al. (2010) that discusses an issue mainly found in

developing countries; the consumption of counterfeit luxury goods. The case

in Indonesia is not very much different—you will find shops that are dedicated

to counterfeit goods everywhere you go. It reaches to a point where none can

no longer tell which one’s legitimate and which one’s fake. My mother, being

one of those women who actually make an effort to purchase the authentic

goods, would, in fact, think twice about walking out of the house with a

branded bag. The consensus is that those with authentic goods would most

likely group together, and those who pride themselves in being able to find

eerily similar counterfeit goods belong to a whole different social circle. When

the two clash, they probably couldn’t care less, as long as their closest friends

in the group know which one it is they’ve got.

Fashion as a Retail Experience:

When discussing fashion as a retail experience in class, I was reminded by an

article on Harvard Business Review (September 2013) I once read,

“Touchpoints matter, but it’s the full journey that really counts.” The idea is to

ensure that customers do not feel like they’ve lost connection with the brand

in the middle of his/her purchasing journey. If done well, customer journeys

can deliver an unquestionable competitive advantage over competitors.

Fig. 1 and 2. A picture from Hooghan ID’s lookbook (on the left). A picture from AYE! Denim’s lookbook (on the right).

 

In Indonesia, there’s an increasingly popular phenomenon that is “Instagram

online shops”, which is pretty much self-explanatory—Instagram accounts are

used as a catalogue, lookbook, and method of order at the same time. These

people are often resellers of imported clothes from Bangkok or Hong Kong

that might have else ended up at a factory outlet. But never doubt the power

of low prices—these shops, although at a disadvantage in terms of physical

store elements, are still able to generate profits and secure loyal customers.

Even though one might deem it impossible to gain a customer base simply

through the use of one single social media platform, these shops have proved

him wrong. Regardless of their limited resources, these shops have If we

were to break down dissect these “Instagram shops” according to the Online

Customer Experience framework provided by Gentile et al. (2007), it would be

as follows:

• Sensorial: Pictures of the garments are used to stimulate sight. Most

shops almost always include brief information about the material of the

clothing to give potential customers a better sense of the fabric.

• Emotional: There isn’t any significant emotional experience generated by

these shops. Their focus is short-term—as long as the items are sold,

they’ll be satisfied.

Fig. 3 and 4. Screenshots taken from two Indonesian online “Instagram shops”, @iymelsayshijab (on the left) and @girlshoooop (on the right).

 

• Cognitive: The obvious mental process is that if the price is inside a certain

range, most of the time the customer wouldn’t even think twice about

purchasing it—these shops tend to sell garments at a fairly low price.

• Pragmatic: The concept of usability is helped through celebrity

endorsements. These endorsements aren’t what you may be used to

seeing—all they need to do is to ship the garments to singer A and then

wait until said singer posts a picture of herself in the garment on her social

media account (primarily Instagram), while at the same time promoting the

shop by including captions such as, “Thank you for the dress, @XXshop!”

• Lifestyle: Not quite present. The majority of these shops does not care

about long-term branding and thus very rarely tries to show how their

items will reaffirm one’s beliefs and values.

• Relational: There is an occasional attempt at the creation of communities

by posting testimonials from previous customers as Instagram posts

(hence why the feed often looks messy due to lack of organization and

prior planning).

Fashion as a Movement:

Describing fashion as a movement may be well translated into creating a

whole new consumer phenomenon in which fashion plays a big part. For

example, McQuarrie (2013) suggests that the online platform is changing

today’s consumer behavior in a way that ordinary consumers today—‘ordinary

consumers’ refer to consumers outside of the existing ‘fashion system’

(McCracken 1986)—are able to “grab hold of the megaphone”. The Internet

allows ongoing communication by ordinary consumers to a mass of strangers,

and consumers such as fashion bloggers use this opportunity to its full

potential.

Fashion bloggers share user-generated content and end up acquiring a mass

audience for these posts, allowing them to slowly climb up the ‘taste

leadership’ (Gronow 1997) ladder. I thought this article was relevant to the

subject of employing fashion as a movement from the way it discusses the

 

possibility of turning an ordinary consumer into a leader inside the fashion

system.

In unrelated news, I’ve seen firsthand the ‘possession rituals’ activities

discussed by Campbell (2005) and I thought I’d share it here. In my second

year of college, I was involved in a project where we produced products of our

own with the intention of selling them to generate a certain amount of

revenue. One of our products was a notebook wrapped in cork fabric, and

customers could opt for a ‘personalized’ notebook which meant that they were

able to request for a specific drawing to be engraved on the front cover—

referring to Campbell (2005), ‘personalizing’ means “produced products are

‘marked’, either by the retailer or the individual consumer, so as to indicate

that they are the singular possession of a specific individual”. These

notebooks sold very well compared to our other products that couldn’t be

personalized. This goes to show how personalization is very often sought out.

Fashion and Reproduction of Gender: Out of all the lecture materials I must admit that this sub-topic was the one I

was most interested in. The media’s representation of women is a

continuously debatable topic, with fresh content being reported each day. One

case I personally deem memorable is Dove’s Dove Real Beauty Sketches

campaign that went viral on YouTube with more than 60 million views. I

remember coming across an article that fully opposes this campaign by

mentioning how in retrospect, instead of making women realize just how

beautiful they are, it’s indirectly emphasizing the notion of none other than

exterior beauty itself—your face is what your degree of beauty is being

decided upon. It’s amusing how even the most seemingly sincere campaigns

can spark controversy.

In regard to the talk of beauty, women are relentlessly being bombarded with

the concept of flawlessness, what’s with all those Photoshopped false

advertisings and whatnot. Consequently, this creates an environment where

men are given the power to suppress women with these ideals, seeing that

 

men aren’t the ones being told to trim down their waist or lift their bust. Who

then suffers? The female individuals who fall into this trap thinking that they

need to conform to such standards.

That being said, women high in the fashion system hierarchy are almost like

aforementioned men—fashion system being “the designers and

manufacturers of fashion clothing and accessories, the media institutions that

promote such clothing in editorials and advertising, and the social elite who

engage in the vast public relations machine” (McCracken 1986). These

women have the cultural and social capital and thus, the authority to construct

certain ideals for ‘lower’ women to abide by. Examples include female editors

of high-fashion magazines who literally handpick the styles that are to be

featured each month for the rest of the female population to follow. The

question is: if women still do this to one another, are we really in the position

of wishing the men—the media—would stop?

Debates arise as women continue to be objectified by mass media—their

bodies turned into things, denoting the absence of soul. Alex Blimes, the

Editor of one of the most acclaimed magazines, Esquire UK, even admitted so

himself, “The women we feature in in the magazine are ornamental,” to which

he added, “We provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures

of cool cars. It is ornamental,” (The Guardian, 2013). Literal examples of

objectification of women can be taken from many existing ads. Michelob Beer

uses the idea of recreating a beer bottle with a woman’s body—implying that

women are disposable, as are glass bottles (Fig. 5). Likewise, Che Men’s

Magazine connects a woman’s body to a game console—most likely to be

suggesting that women are to be played around (Fig. 6). This kind of ads

dehumanizes women, which is, sadly, the first step towards devaluation.

 

No wonder today we have moral degradation issues such as the culture of

plastic surgery in South Korea, where one in five women from 19 to 49 years

has undergone some sort of cosmetic surgery. The constant pressure of

having to be able to present oneself beautifully, along with the omnipresent

propaganda (Fig. 7 shows a plastic surgery ad that’s been put at a Subway

station somewhere in Seoul), has pushed these women’s level of self-

confidence to the point where they decide it’d be best to go under the knife to

settle everything once and for all.

Fig. 7. A South Korean subway ad on plastic surgery.

Fig. 5 and 6. Michelob beer ad (on the left), Che Men’s Magazine ad (on the right).

 

Looking back at the points I mentioned above regarding reproduction of

gender in fashion, it comes as no surprise to us why feminist movements and

campaigns are becoming more widespread than ever. Thanks to the burden

being put on women by various advertisements and media alike, major

problems such as eating disorders, gender inequality at work, and sexual

abuse have long begun to surface. I will not go in depth regarding the issue,

but come to think of it—women’s rights movements date back to the late 19th

century when the Suffragettes shook a greater part of the world by using

violence to get what they wanted, which was the right to vote. It’s both funny

and sad that even with all this history, a great deal of representations of

women today still linger on the demand for us to be “beautiful”—on the

outside that is—while blatantly disregarding a woman’s professional, critical

side.

It’s unfortunate that the media opts to continue to uphold these dehumanizing

ideals for women, while considering all the power it holds in a community

along with the large-scale media consumption that follows, essentially, they

should be used to advocate what’s “right” and “equal”—and in this case, it’s

definitely not the objectification of women. As actress Jennifer Lawrence so

aptly put it in an interview, “[...] With these unrealistic expectations for women,

it’s disappointing that the media keeps it alive and fuels that fire,”

(Yahoo!Screen, 2013).

In the end, I think we can all agree that fashion—amidst its ever-growing

popularity and relevance in today’s society—is still not to be glorified as a

cornerstone of moral judgment. As far as I’m concerned, fashion is to be

treated as a form of entertainment or hobby, a field of interest that can be

shared to form interpersonal ties or even spark arguments instead of being

used to alienate certain body types and face shapes. As part of an educated

society, we should all know better than to regard biased portrayals of

“perfection” as the true definition of beauty.

 

References: Blumer, H., 1969. Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection. Barthes, R., 1983. The Fashion System. California: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P., 1980, The Logic of Practice, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sundie et al., 2011. Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [online], Vol. 100, No. 4, 664–680 Perez, M.E., Castano, R. and Claudia Quintanilla, C., 2010. Constructing Identity Through the Consumption of Counterfeit Luxury Goods. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal [online], Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 219-235 Rawson, A., Duncan, E. and Jones, C., 2013. The Truth About Customer Experience. Harvard Business Review, 2013, pp. 90. Edward F. McQuarrie, Jessica Miller, and Barbara J. Phillips, 2013. The Megaphone Effect: Taste and Audience in Fashion Blogging. Journal of Consumer Research [online], Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 136-158 Campbell, C., 2005. The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft, and Consumption in the Post-modern Society. Journal of Consumer Culture [online], Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 23-42. Dove United States, 2013. Dove Real Beauty Sketches [video, online]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk [Accessed on December 6 2013].

Ahmed, M., 2013. What K-Pop Has to Do With South Korea's Plastic Surgery Obsession [online]. Jezebel. Available from: http://jezebel.com/what-k-pop-has-to-do-with-south-koreas-plastic-surgery-573424674 [Accessed on 6 December 2013]. Lee, H., 2013. Perfecting the Face-Lift, Gangnam Style [online]. Bloomberg Businessweek. Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/plastic-surgery-lifts-south-korean-tourism [Accessed on 6 December 2013]. Sweney, M., 2013. Esquire editor: We show 'ornamental' women in same way as cars [online]. The Guardian. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/mar/19/esquire-editor-show-women-like-cars [Accessed on 6 December 2013]. Media Education Foundation, 2012. Killing Us Softly 4 - Trailer [Featuring Jean Kilbourne] [video, online] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWKXit_3rpQ#t=121 [Accessed on 6 December 2013]. Yahoo!Screen, 2013. Jennifer Lawrence's Heartfelt Commentary on Body Image: 'Stop Calling Each Other Fat' [video, online]. Available from: http://screen.yahoo.com/jennifer-lawrences-heartfelt-commentary-body-234610417.html [Accessed on 6 December 2013].