London Fashion Week & Social Media: marketing match made in heaven

From Friday 12 until Tuesday 16 February London played host to some of the biggest names in fashion, arts and culture for London Fashion Week. The public experienced this through a range of social media campaigns, perfectly targeting fashion-savvy Londoners. There was a skirt made of Nokia phones, an instabooth at Somerset House and hashtags and videos galore.

Burberry has been named the social media victor with almost 300,000 mentions and Topshop Unique and Marks & Spencers close runners-up receiving a great amount of attention. We found a nifty infographic from Wired Magazine that breaks down London Fashion Week in Social Media.

Marketing and social media were used in unison to enable the kind of attention that allows us to call London Fashion Week a success with the public. Some of the most successful brands used mutually beneficial partnerships to boost their success; Burberry teamed up with the Apple iPhone 5s and Topshop Unique partnered with mobile app Chirp; both included a live stream as part of their cross-promotion. Clearly the fashion world, early adopters of such marketing tactics, understands the importance of social media to enable awareness and boost popularity, as shown by the figures.

Burberry’s solid success is certainly due to a strong marketing campaign which pushed promotion across several different mediums. There was the Burberry live stream of their Fall/Winter 2013-2014 runway show through Burberry.com, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram. Clients could also buy a special selection of coats and purses through a new Runway Made to Order personalisation service. Then there was the Burberry Beauty Booth that allowed people to follow all the backstage beauty action through Twitter and Pinterest with exclusive photos and messages from the models at the show. Finally, and most effectively, Burberry teamed with Apple to capture and share their Spring/Summer 2014 runway show on the iPhone 5S. With practically every social media base covered, success was practically guaranteed for this English fashion powerhouse.

This year’s London Fashion Week clearly demonstrated the significance of marketing through social media and we are intrigued to see how future years keep building upon this. Certainly it would appear that London Fashion Week is no longer only for a select few, social media has brought it to us all in full colour and, judging by those twitter numbers, we’re loving it.

Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team bd@curzonpr.com