COMPANY PROFILE OF HENNES MAURITZ MARKETING ESSAY

5490 WORDS

Let us imagine that we have gone back a decade in time. There is a woman in some part of the world flipping through the pages of a high-fashion magazine. The minute she opens the magazine she is bombarded by images of luxury goods. Luxury brand names like Versace, Chanel, Gucci and Christian Louboutin shout out to her. All she desires is to own at least one piece from these luxury fashion goods. Unfortunately, the woman earns a middling income and can only dream about owning a Versace dress or a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Luckily for her, in 2004 Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) came up with a brilliant collaboration which made all her dreams come true.

For a long time access to luxury fashion goods had been limited to the elite classes. Since the 1990s there has been a boom in the luxury market because as times progressed traditional luxury brands such as Christian Dior started facing competition from emerging new luxury brands like Jimmy Choo. These new luxury brands brought in new branding and positioning strategies (Truong et al., 2009). The result of these strategies was the materialisation of ‘masstige brands’. Even though masstige brands are priced lower than super premium or traditional luxury brands, they still hold a place above conventional products and enjoy a high level of prestige (Silverstein et al, 2005).

In order to tackle competition faced from these masstige brands, certain traditional luxury brands took an unconventional step. In June 2004 Hennes & Mauritz (hereafter referred to as H&M) announced that they would be releasing a limited edition collection designed by none other than Karl Lagerfeld, chief designer of Chanel (H&M, 2004). With this step, H&M began a fresh trend of ‘co-branding’ in the fashion industry between high-street and luxury fashion brands. Since then H&M have undergone an annual collaboration project with some of the biggest names of luxury fashion, the latest being French label, Maison Martin Margiela. With H&M making continuous headlines in the fashion industry for its collaborations with luxury fashion brands, the need to study the science of co-branding, especially in fashion, is becoming vital. Thus, this dissertation aims at exploring and investigating the term ‘co-branding’ and the role it plays between high-street fashion and luxury fashion brands. As H&M are the contemporary of this trend in the fashion industry, the issues discussed in this dissertation will be mainly based on them.