Fashion Marketing: Back to School Shopping in a Web 2.0 World

Fashion Marketing news: If you’re an online retailer, or you have a child in school, you inevitably have noticed how different back to school shopping is now, as opposed to just a few years ago. In the Web 2.0 world, with social networking all the rage, it’s no wonder that the larger retailers have tapped in to these groups to help spread the word about what they offer and have created online dressing rooms and virtual spaces for consumers to design their own dorm rooms.

This year, Sears partnered with Meez and Virtual Model to give its customers the option of creating a virtual closet called “e-Me.”  Here you can create a virtual you, and choose from clothing that Sears is targeting as “back-to-school” lines like The Cheeta Girls Line and their own signature line, Canyon River Blues.  A fully interactive community, it even allows you to look at other e-Me’s creations and closets and rate their selections.  Sears is hoping to add other pieces like games and other “user interaction” options in the future so as to continue their customers use.

Other retailers, like American Eagle and JCPenny used the every popular You Tube to create short films, also called Webisodes, that would air on their websites each week.  The thought behind these films is that customers would return each week to see a new episode, and thus, view marketing of the retailer’s products on a consistent basis.  American Eagle actually went a step further and created a MySpace page where they currently have over 46,000 friends with a variety of discussion topics raging on.

It seems that these online retailers might be on to something.  An article published in the Wall Street Journal on August 18, 2007 cited a study released earlier in the month by the National School Boards Association and Grunwald Associates found that “96 percent of students with online access use social-networking technologies, including chatting, text messaging and blogging, and visit such online communities as Facebook, MySpace and Webkinz.  Teens who use these sites spend……9 hours per week online.”   

With statistics like that, it’s hard to argue that spending the time developing an online presence, outside of your webpage, is not a good idea.  Who knows what the future holds when it comes to back to school shopping.  If the current trend continues though, as an online retailer, you’d better get on the social networking bandwagon or you may find yourself being labeled a “dinosaur” in the eyes of your customers.