Marketing Plan for L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Week - Term Paper Example

Marketing Plan for an Event Marketing Plan for L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Week Executive Summary The L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival requires significant marketing strategies in order to be successful and keep growing as it has been doing in the past sixteen years. These marketing strategies are based on the objectives of the event, and aim at both informing the exhibitors and participants of the events, in an attempt to draw more audience. This marketing strategy gives the various strategies that will be adopted to market the event, their suitability, timeline and how to determine their achievement and usefulness. The types of marketing strategies involved include online marketing, print media, visual electronic media and exhibition in similar events. Event Information The L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival (LMFF) is an annual weeklong event that is held to celebrate fashion, design, business and creative endeavour in Australia (Huntington 2010). The occasion has been held yearly since 1996, and is organized by The Melbourne Fashion Festival. It is aimed at promoting the Australian fashion business, encourage sales, and portray Melbourne as a hub of design brilliance. The one-time event brings the designers together, consumers and retailers from all over Australia, in order to keep the fashion industry of the country clearly portrayed on the world map. Since its inception, the event has become the most prestigious Australia’s consumer fashion event offering a wide variety of activities that promote fashion, the creative arts, social interaction and commercial ideas. Internal Analysis The event has several internal factors that serve to its advantage. The biggest of all these is the leading publicity that the event receives from people, not only in Australia, but from the whole world. The event receives visitors from a big number of countries, who are keen to catch up with the latest fashion trends and designs in Melbourne and the whole of Australia. Additionally, the event has been occasionally by the top models and players in the fashion industry, further serving to promote its brand name to what it is today. Based in Melbourne and with exhibitors from all over Australia, the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival has had the immense advantage of having a wide range of resources to draw from. Australia is a vast country with a wide variety of culture, talents and skills that are showcased in this event. This gives it a wide pool of resource to draw from a variety of sources. As one of the biggest city in a country with quite a substantial number of tourists all year round, Melbourne gives this event the status that it deserves, helping to propel it into publicity. In addition to that, the events boast of a wide range of different types of exhibitions and other smaller events that take place throughout the seven days that the event runs. One of the internal factors that disadvantage the event is its localization. The event is limited to fashion and design from Australia, effectively locking out the rest of the world from active participation. The event therefore lacks a wider appeal from small-scale designers from other parts world. In addition, the city of Melbourne is not the largest in Australia, hence it would greater crowds and support if it was located in a place such as Sidney. This serves to disadvantage the event. The event also currently consists of numerous mini events that are held concurrently, since it is a form of exhibition. These mini events had significantly increased over the years since when the event was held for the first time more than fifteen years ago. The main setback of this is that the smaller events end up competing against each other for the audience and sales, instead of serving to support each other. External Analysis A major strength that this event benefits from is the immense number of partners and sponsors that it attracts, which gives it a high social and economical ranking. Currently, the event has over twenty-five corporate sponsors who want to participate actively in the event. This ensures that it runs effectively and smoothly, drawing the goodwill of other organisations as well. In addition to this, the changing trends in fashion and design among the people in Australia leads to designers and users alike craving for new ideas. This gives the event a sizeable following and popularity, and the loyalty will be experience for a long time. The chances for success are increasing as the event runs every year. Being an annual event, there has been an emergence of other similar events that are regularly held and have appeared to serve the same needs on the same target market. This has caused the erosion of the dominant position that the event held since it is forced to compete for popularity with these other smaller events. Some of them have been gaining a lot of popularity of late, threatening the top position held by the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival SWOT Analysis Strengths Wide publicity High Attendance Weaknesses Concentrating on local fashion Many concurrent activities Opportunities Many partnering firms Changing trends in Fashion Threats Emerging exhibitions Target Market The event targets a wide range of consumers from across all levels, ranging from fashion enthusiasts; both designers, retailers and consumers. The fashion industry is much alive and flourishing in Melbourne and the whole of Australia, making the events attract thousands of potential consumers. The designers come to display their latest designs and exchange ideas, whereas the consumers come to have a glimpse of what is on exhibition. In general, there is an extensive variety of clients from other related industry like advertising and marketing. Objectives The occasion aims at to engaging and enthuse the public on the subject of fashion and all things trendy while stimulating information and displaying developments in design, industry and modernism. This serves to promote new ideas, talents and skills, while promoting growth and development for the industry. The marketing objectives for this event are to increase consumer awareness and bring information to the biggest possible number of people. There are a sizeable number of fashion enthusiasts in Australia and around the world, who would attend the event, if they are given more information or they are made aware of the event. This would include consumers and also designers. The aim of marketing is to bring information to these people, as well as display the importance of this event to them, thereby encouraging them to exhibit Marketing Strategies The L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival has the lead position in the fashion show industry, but the event still has a lot of unexplored potential in terms of unreached target market and prospects for growth. To promote this event, there is a need to need to do adverse marketing through various means (Scott 2008). The most important of the marketing strategies to be adopted is the use of local print media such as the magazines, and the use of Internet marketing. The fashion magazines have a wide circulation and directly reach the targeted market. By placing an advertisement in these channels, it will be possible to reach thousands of people who are potential participants. Currently, some of the leading fashion magazines in Australia have a circulation of more than a million copies, reaching a sizeable number of participants and exhibitors. The next possible mode of marketing is an online marketing. This method is purposely for reaching the international community; people who are not located in Australia. The event also draws a sizeable number of holidaymakers coming from diverse parts of the globe. Creating awareness would thus help to bring in more tourists to attend the event. Concerning this, use of Internet marketing is advantageous for two reasons. First, it allows one to target the relevant people only and secondly, use of social networks can help keep people updated about the event, requiring them to actively search for information. Use of advertisement services such as Google helps to target people from a certain location, a certain group of people like those who want to tour Australia or even those who are looking for fashion expo news. This would be extremely efficient to reach a selected audience in an extremely powerful environment (Cheverton 2005). The other marketing strategy is the use of electronic media like the television, besides the LMFF TV. Although this usually reaches fewer audiences, it has the advantage of creating awareness to almost an entire population in the specific region. This can include the use of national television channels or localised television channels in the specific geographical locations, such as in large cities like Sydney and Wellington. The fourth marketing strategy is through exhibitions in the other fashion exhibitions that are held elsewhere in Australia and in key world cities. This strategy would help to give some the event a massive relevant audience, since it would directly involve the people in a similar event elsewhere. This would involve the management of L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival to set up a stand in the selected fashion expo events. Action Plan The occasion will happen on 10th to 16th of April 2011. Some of the marketing strategies need to be adopted early enough, while some are meant for just a few months or days to the event. The following table gives an exact timeline for the event and how the different activities will be carried out. Marketing Strategy Time to be carried out Internet Two months to the event Exhibitions All round the year Print Media Three months to the event Television Two weeks to the event Marketing Budget The exact budget to be used has been determined through various estimation and approximation methods. The budget to be used in publish media and electronic media reminiscent of telly is exact and clearly outlined, since these will be done for a specific number of times (Tom, 2009). To determine the exact amount of money to be spent in each of these, the number of times that the ads would need to be displayed was determined. The total cost could easily be determined through calculating the cost per each single ad. The cost to be incurred using expos to market depends on the number of events that a promotion activity will be carried out. This would involve identifying the number of events in which to participate in, their locations and the cost that would incur from each one of them. This would therefore, help to determine the total cost involved. In such a case, a sizeable budget can be used to restrict the amount of money that will be spent. Internet marketing has a limitation in determining the amount to be spent. First, the cost is charged not on the number of advertisements that are placed on the Internet, but on the number of times that an ad is clicked (Gay, Alan & Esen, 2007). The most crucial step here is to ensure that every click translates into a customer. If this were so, it would be sensible to spend a lot of money on this form of advertisement. The limiting factor would be the allocated budget. The following table gives the budget allocation. Media Budget allocation (AUD) Internet Exhibitions Print Media Television Monitoring and Evaluation Several ways can be used to monitor the effectiveness of each of these methods. Each one has to be monitored differently, especially of the method targets a particular type of audience. However, some methods are a little bit more complicated to assess due to their complexity. Use online advertising is the easiest to evaluate. This is because the advertisement that is placed is considered effective if the target person clicks the link that is provided. The link then directs the person into a specific web page for the event, known as the landing page. The easiest way to monitor this is to use a traffic counter to determine the number of people who are directed to this page from an advertisement. This will be a comprehensible sign of the effectiveness of the ad. In magazines, an advertisement can give a specific contact number that can be used to determine the number of people who visited the event or got an interest through the information provided in the advertisements. For the exhibitions, a good measurement tool is simply checking the number of visitor that the event’s stand draws. However, this would not be an effective way to determine the success or the failure of this method, since people will still flock to see the stand even when they actually do not intend to attend. Actually, it is not easy to determine precisely the success of these methods. Works Cited ‘WWD.’ (2010). Calvin's Costa Opens Up Down Under. Women's Wear Daily; 199 (63):10-16. “L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival 2011.” (2011). LMFF 2011. Retrieved 13th April 2011, from http://www.lmff.com.au/ Cheverton, P. (2005). Key marketing skills: strategies, tools, and techniques for marketing success. London: Kogan Page Publishers. Gay, R., Alan,C. & Esen, R. (2007). Online marketing: a customer-led approach. London: Oxford University Press Huntington, P. (2010). Another Side of Aussie Fashion.Women's Wear Daily; 179 (84), 23-31 Scott, M. (2008). Marketing communications in tourism and hospitality: concepts, strategies and cases. London: Butterworth-Heinemann Tom, R. (2009). The end of marketing. Christian Science Monitor. 92 (143), 14-18. Read More