MANAGING SUCCESSIVE COBRANDING ALLIANCES IN FASHION FIRMS

Marie-Agnès Parmentier,Eileen Fischer 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2015 Global Fashion Management Conference Vol.2015 No.06

“What makes a label sell: its name or the person behind it?” (The Guardian, 3-3-2000) It seems like fashion houses have spent the last decade playing the musical chairs game with their fashion designers (Socha, 2012). At Saint Laurent Paris, for instance, Hedi Slimane, who was the label’s men’s creative director from 1997 to 2000, came back as creative director in 2012 to replace Stefano Pilati (2004-2012) who, himself, had replaced Tom Ford (2000-2004) previously. Meanwhile, at Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière left Balenciaga to fill the shoes of Marc Jacobs who had been creative director for the label since the late 1990s (1997-2013). And at Dior, Raf Simons took over from Bill Gaytten (2011-2012) who had discretely held the ship after the abrupt departure of John Galliano (1996-2011). The phenomenon of a brand having to replace a key persona with whom it is cobranded is far from rare: sports team regularly draft new athletes, television screenwriters kill beloved characters because actors are leaving their shows, and political parties must replace departing leaders. In these contexts, as in fashion firms, maintaining brand equity across successive cobranding alliances with key personae is a challenging brand management issue. In this research project, we aim to further our understanding of how fashion brands can maintain equity by examining how they manage ongoing cobranding between the house and the designer, especially given the challenges faced by the succession of designers – or game of musical chairs - most houses face. The research questions guiding this effort are as follows: 1) Why do fashion houses cobrand with key personas? 2) What challenges are associated with cobranding with key personas? and 3) What strategies are enacted to address these challenges? To investigate these questions, we have examined the ways that some of the most successful fashion houses manage their brand equity through the dynamics of cobranding. We illustrate our findings with the case of Saint Laurent Paris, a fashion house established in 1968 by Algerian-born French designer Yves Saint Laurent. In this abstract, we first review some key literature on cobranding, then discuss our methodology. We conclude by presenting our preliminary findings. Theoretical Perspectives on Cobranding A generic definition of cobranding refers to it as an alliance “in which two or more brands are presented to the public” (Newmeyer, Venkatesh and Chatterjee 2014). In practice, conceptualizations of cobranding vary. One that is common entails “ingredient branding” in which a key ingredient of one brand is some other brand, such as an Intel chip inside a Dell computer (e.g., Desai and Keller 2002). Another common conceptualization refers to two parent brands launching a new product, as when “two leading fashion houses…join forces to create a new line of clothing” (Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007, 391). Recent work has also acknowledged that cobranding can take place between people and brands. For example Wilcox and Carroll (2008) discuss celebrity cobranding, wherein a celebrity cobrands with a product brand. And in the organizational literature, the fact that a CEO’s personal brand is intermingled with that of the company that person manages has been well recognized (e.g., Graffin, Carpenter, and Boivie 2011). Our conceptualization of fashion designers as cobranded with the houses that employ them is consistent with such research, in that it considers a type of cobranding in which an employee who is a key persona in a company, and that company’s product offerings, are together presented to the public. A frequent assumption in much cobranding research is that it takes places “between two successful brands” (Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007, 389); however, in practice, it is possible for the two brands in an alliance to vary in the extent to which they are already well known and successful (Cunha, Forehand and Angle 2015). Further, cobranding arrangements can vary in terms of the level of integration; in some instances, cobranding might entail mere co-location, whereas in others, the brand partnership may mean that the features of the each brand are tightly integrated and difficult to decouple (Newmeyer et al. 2014). Relatedly, cobranding may vary in terms of duration, ranging from a promotional cobranding that is intentionally short-lived to enduring cobranding that is intended to persist for years or decades. The focus of past cobranding research has frequently been on exploring how consumers respond to cobrands. However, scholarly attention has also been turned to the strategies that firms use to manage the challenges of cobranding. Our work falls within the latter category. Methodology Data Collection To examine the dynamics of cobranding with a key persona in the fashion context, we collected a combination of archival and observational data from five major fashion houses: Balenciaga, Dior, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Saint Laurent Paris. The archival data includes articles drawn from the fashion coverage of the last fifteen years of: The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph and Le Monde. Coverage from fashion industry key media references such as Women’s Wear Daily, Style.com and Vogue.com is comprised as well. Using Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, and the fashion houses’ own digital archives, we searched and collected articles that pertained to the disintegration of the cobranded alliance and integration into of the new cobranded alliance for the fashion houses mentioned above. In our dataset, we also included reviews of promotional materials such as fashion exhibitions (e.g., Müller and Chenoune’s (2010) “Yves Saint Laurent”), and popular culture artifacts such as films (e.g., Lespert’s (2014) “Yves Saint Laurent”). Furthermore, to help us contextualize the branding strategies and practices of the fashion houses, we reviewed documentaries and books published about the fashion industry such as Nicklaus (2012) “Fashion Go Global,” English’s (2007) “A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th century,” Palomo-Lovinski’s (2010) “The World’s Most influential Fashion Designers,” and Steele and Menkes’ (2012) “Fashion Designers: A-Z.” Finally, our archival dataset was complemented by observational data gathered from visits to the fashion houses’ New York City flagships and department stores’ concessions. Data Analysis Following the conventions of qualitative research (Belk, Fischer and Kozinets 2013), the analysis of our data was an iterative process of interpreting, deriving new questions, searching for and collecting new data, and rejecting, confirming, and refining our emerging interpretation until reaching sufficient interpretive convergence and theoretical saturation. We present a summary of our findings in the next section. Findings Below, we indicate our answers to the three research questions raised in the beginning of this abstract. 1) Why do fashion houses cobrand with key personas? Luxury fashion houses operate in an institutional field where the logic of art and the logic of commerce are intertwined (Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013). While fashion may not be art per se, well-respected figures such as Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s longtime romantic and business partner, consider that it requires an artist to create fashion (Bergé, 2015). Dion and Arnould (2011), in their research on the charismatic aura of contemporary luxury fashion designers, have argued that managing the relationship between a fashion house and its artist, i.e. the designer, is an essential element of successful luxury brand management. In the fashion industry, cobranding efforts between a fashion house and a designer thus appears to be a deeply institutionalized norm from which deviating could be risky. One reason behind this institutionalized norm is that the business of fashion requires constant renewal (e.g., Agogué and Nainville, 2010). The introduction of a new designer within an established house can serve this renewal purpose. Moreover, as celebrity culture seems to pervade every sphere of life, the phenomenon of celebrity designers resonates with broader socio-cultural trends (Agins, 2014; Oeppen and Jamal, 2014), reinforcing the value of a key persona’s vibrant image. 2) What challenges are associated with cobranding with key personas? For a fashion house, at least two challenges are associated with cobranding with a key persona: 1) maintaining brand continuity and 2) protecting the brand from a key persona’s imperfections. The first challenge implies that while the nature of the fashion industry invites brands to constantly refresh their offerings and engage in innovation (Oeppen and Jamal, 2014), fashion houses, like other brands, must also strive to maintain brand continuity in order to preserve their brand equity (Keller, 2000). Maintaining brand continuity while keeping the brand fresh suggests maintaining a clear and differentiated brand positioning while enrolling new brand meanings that can sometimes be contradictory or counterintuitive (e.g., “Gucci's top designer to refashion YSL look,” Finn, 2000). When a fashion house joins forces with a key persona, the aesthetic, style and cut of what the designer creates must somehow blend with the core attributes of the fashion house to create, an overall brand experience that is innovative, yet reminiscent of the house’s signature. The second challenge fashion houses face when cobranding with a key persona is protecting the brand from human imperfections. Among these “imperfections,” the most obvious is the inevitable mortality of key personas. In addition, key personas, by virtue of being human, have other purposes in life than consistently serving the market. Their actions and behaviors may sometimes conflict with, be counterproductive to, and/or undermine their own brand equity development (Parmentier and Fischer, 2012,) and that of their partner in a cobranding alliance (e.g., Béroard and Parmentier, 2014). 3) What strategies are enacted to address these challenges? We identify strategies enacted to disintegrate relationships with designers who are departing and those used to integrate new designers into cobranded relationships with the houses that hire them. Examples of strategies enacted to disintegrate cobranding relationships include “erasing” “denigrating,” and “respectfully acknowledging” the departing designer. Examples of integrating strategies include “legacy linking,” “restricting sphere of influence,” “fostering self promotion,” and “encouraging innovation.” The paper defines these strategies, notes that they are not mutually exclusive but rather may be complementary, offers examples of all strategies drawing on the data collected, and offers preliminary insights on the implications of these strategies.

Atomic structure governed diversity of exchange-driven spin helices in Fe nanoislands: Experiment and theory

Fischer, Jeison A.,Sandratskii, Leonid M.,Phark, Soo-hyon,Sander, Dirk,Parkin, Stuart American Physical Society 2017 Physical review. B Vol.96 No.14

<P>We combine spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM) and first-principles calculations to demonstrate the control of the wavelength of helical spin textures in Fe nanoislands by varying their atomic structure. We make use of the complexity of submonolayer growth of Fe on Cu(111) to prepare nanoislands characterized by different thickness and in-plane atomic structure. SP-STM results reveal that the magnetic states of different nanoislands are spin helices. The wavelength of the spin helices varies strongly. Calculations performed for Fe films with different thickness and in-plane atomic structure explain the strong variation of the wavelength by a subtle balance in the competition between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic exchange interactions. We identify the crucial role of the effectively enhanced weak antiferromagnetic exchange interactions between distant atoms.</P>

“Photonic” Cat States from Strongly Interacting Matter Waves

Fischer, Uwe R.,Kang, Myung-Kyun American Physical Society 2015 Physical Review Letters Vol.115 No.26

CHANGING THE CHINESE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE: REFORM OF STATE-OWNED ENTERPRISES IN CHINA

Fischer,William A The Institute of East and West Studies 1999 Global economic review Vol.28 No.1

China today and its industries are in flux economically and socially, moving towards a market that is significantly different from that of the past 50 years. With the rising increase of the West's interest in China's economy, foreign competition from multinational companies has risen and led to a change of China's landscape of customers and markets. In face of these changes, five tenets of faith regarding the Chinese economy were challenged to reveal that the country, in order to survive in the global market place, has undergone the following developments: build-up of national markets and brands, reliance on price competition, and classification of firms. Although China's struggle for its market presence as well as future growth encompasses many uncertainties for the future, it has become a country highly invested in. The question lies in what it exactly means to be in flux, and what changes need to be made when and how.

Aktuelle Entwicklungen des deutschen und europäischen Gesundheits- und Medizinrechts

Fischer, Eike Sven 이화여자대학교 생명의료법연구소 2012 BIOMEDICAL LAW & ETHICS Vol.6 No.2

In modern states the patient’s autonomy is getting more and more important. But progress, scarcity and the wish of individual medicine are close together and condition itself. The medicine - and biolaw can’t escape of his function to make patient’s wishes come true and to find answers for any problems which result from technical - scientific discovery at the same time. This function is already the main task for law. Fulfilling this job, law has to work between the rules of the general public, public affairs and individual freedom and can’t leave anything of it out of account. On the one hand it needs a lot of sensitivity; on the other hand it has to regulate extremely exactly with every word. Every small decision touches the thematic areas of possibility, financeability and ethics. The results of the “trial and error” - methods other countries performed could be used as a clue and an assistance in solving own problems or to avoid the mistakes in thinking and erforming like other states did.

近代 獨逸. 오스트리아. 스위스, 等地의 經營學史에 關한 小考

Fischer, Wolfram 연세대학교 경영대학원 1968 經營論叢 Vol.2 No.1

Learning about Enforcement : A Model of Dumping

Fischer, Ronald D.,Mirman, Leonard J. 세종대학교 국제경제연구소 1994 Journal of Economic Integration Vol.9 No.2

We study the effects of uncertainty about the intensity of enforcement of antidumping regulation. The desire to avoid penalties alters the foreign firm's behavior. In the first period of a two period model. domestic and foreign firms have common beliefs that the government is a strong enforcer of antidumping regulations. After observing whether a penalty has occurred, firms update their subjective probabilities and adjust their behavior. In the first period firms act strategically to manipulate the information received by the foreign firm. The effect of this information on the choice variables depends on second order properties of the second period value function.

CFC 냉매 사용금지가 에너지 이용에 미치는 영향 - 장기적 영향에 대한 평가와 대체 기술의 개발 -

Fischer F.K.,Creswick F.A. 대한설비공학회 1989 설비저널 Vol.18 No.4

New mechanism producing axions in the AQN model and how the CAST can discover them

Fischer, H.,Liang, X.,Zhitnitsky, A.,Semertzidis, Y.,Zioutas, K. American Physical Society 2018 Physical Review D Vol.98 No.4

Clustering Social Media Services and Messengers by Functionality

Fischer, Julia,Knapp, Daniel,Nguyen, Bich Chau,Richter, Daniel,Shutsko, Aliaksandra,Stoppe, Melanie,Williams, Kelly,Ilhan, Aylin,Stock, Wolfgang G. Korea Institute of Science and Technology Informat 2020 Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice Vol.8 No.4

The objective of this research is to analyze which functions make up web-based as well as mobile social media services and messengers. Services are clustered by their functionality. A total of 640 individual functions were identified, while investigating altogether 44 selected services in their web and mobile versions. Applying content analysis, functions were assigned to the services. The services were ranked by the number of implemented functions, and the functions were ranked by their occurrence in the services. Cluster analysis was applied to classify the services according to their functionality. Facebook and VKontakte were found to be the ones with the most functions; the most frequently implemented functions are support, profile, and account-related. Cluster analysis revealed six classes for mobile and seven classes for web applications. There is a noteworthy difference regarding the functionality scope between web and mobile applications of the same services. An example for this is Mendeley with 38 functions in the mobile and 91 functions in the web version. This is the first empirical attempt at clustering social media services based on their functionality.