Off-White: A Best Practice Guide for an Iconic Fashion Brand
When American designer Virgil Abloh founded Off-White in 2013, he wanted to incorporate everything he loved into a high-end fashion brand. He combined ideas of streetwear, luxury, art, music, and travel, defining the brand simply as, “the grey area between black and white as the color Off-White” (Yotka, 2018). Streetwear loves collaborations, and Abloh’s Off-White label is most widely known for working with many popular brands and designers such as Nike, IKEA, and Jimmy Choo.
From a marketing perspective, if a brand is not optimizing their social strategy, their efforts are going to show limited success. Off-White realizes that a large portion of their customers are found on social media. Therefore, they have extended their social strategy across major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This strategy has helped Off-White to establish an identity across all platforms. In order to evaluate Off-White’s social strategy on Twitter, let’s review some best practices:
Humanize Your Brand
Although Off-White has a strong social media presence, they struggle with establishing personality among its audience. While creating tweets that provide product information, they neglect to interact with customers. The overall goal of social media is to encourage conversation. Interaction creates a sense of trust, which is highly advantageous to a brand’s social strategy. Conversely, Off-White excels with maintaining a theme. Their tweets highlight pieces using stylish models and stunning photography. Off-White’s regular use of highly visual images helps to boost reliability.
Consistency Is Essential
After recognizing theme as a strength, further analysis uncovered another downside to Off-White’s approach. Aside from tweeting sales-heavy content, Off-White retweets posts from Abloh, fashion blogs, and various shops that sell their products. While this strategy is paramount, Off-White fails to drive engagement by tweeting consistently. On Twitter, they have posted only a dozen times in 2020. The coronavirus pandemic negatively affected retailers globally, but brands were expected to continue providing quality customer service. Off-White has ignored the need to be customer-centric, leaving them with a reputation for inconsistency. Along with this weakness, their tweets are often missing captions and hashtags. Even if this is done intentionally, adding relevant hashtags is an essential social monitoring tool. Off-White should use social monitoring tools as much as possible as a means to communicate and expand their business reach.
There’s no denying Off-White’s status as one the most influential fashion brands today. Their unique designs have graced runways and resold for massive amounts all over the world. Despite Off-White’s success, developing a strategic social plan is a necessity. Conducting a content audit will help to identify strengths and weaknesses within their social strategy. The goal is to create a voice and tone for the Off-White brand. A consistent brand voice can do a lot to support the image they need to portray. It can also have a positive impact on the types of conversations Off-White has with their audience (Tsimis Sandehl, 2018).
Sources:
Hodge, K. (2017, August 31). Here Are Virgil Abloh’s 10 Best Collaborations Ever. Highsnobiety. Retrieved from https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/virgil-abloh-best-collabs/
Tsimis Sandehl, A. (2018, June 3). If You Want To Humanize Your Brand On Social Media, Try These 10 Tactics. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/06/03/if-you-want-to-humanize-your-brand-on-social-media-try-these-10-tactics/#196cf8d24d2e
York, A. (2017, April 24). 5 Social Media Best Practices Every Marketer Must Follow. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-best-practices/
Yotka, S. (2018, March 28). A Brief History of Virgil Abloh’s Meteoric Rise. Vogue. Retrieved from https://www.vogue.com/article/virgil-abloh-biography-career-timeline
