To celebrate the Year of the Tiger, streetwear brand Superdry is unveiling its annual Lunar New Year collection via social media platforms Weibo, WeChat and Little Red Book (LRB). The fashion brand is marketing its 11th Lunar New Year collection directly to Asian-Australians this year through partnerships with popular local influencers, or key opinion leaders, who are creating dedicated content to showcase the brand in a way that feels authentic to each platform. The plan is to approach each pla
ch platform in an “organic” way, rather than putting the same message across multiple channels to create greater brand trust and uptake on each platform, said marketing manager Matt Iozzi.
“We wish to have genuine and authentic conversations with our customers and see these ‘emerging’ social media platforms are yet another avenue for us to do just that,” he said.
Specifically, these key opinion leaders will promote the Lunar New Year inspired promotion to celebrate the launch, offering Superdry customers a saving of $88 – an auspicious number in Chinese culture – when they spend $300.
Marketing on these platforms does require a different approach to their Western counterparts, however.
WeChat is a messenger platform with mobile payments built in, Weibo is a Chinese microblogging tool that functions similar to Twitter, while LRB is somewhere between “Instagram and Pinterest, sprinkled with a dose of Taobao”, according to Linkfluence – and is one of China’s biggest social shopping platforms.
LRB allows users to ‘like’ product pages, as well as leave detailed reviews to share their experiences with a product, making it easier for potential customers to see the reality of how a particular product could fit into their day to day lives.
“There’s a bit more of a community aspect to these platforms. We knew if we came in guns blazing with a western approach, it wouldn’t translate,” Iozzi told Inside Retail.
“Through our work with TikTok, we’ve learned that we need to engage with an audience before we push out advertising, and know that we need to embed ourselves in that community through content and conversation before we try to convert them.”
However, while Facebook saw 17 million active monthly users in Australia as of December last year, WeChat landed at 2.9 million, Weibo 35,000, and LRB didn’t register on the chart, according to socialmedianews.com.au.
LRB’s audience may be smaller, but users do tend to spend big on the platform. In 2017, more than 75 million LRB users spent more than $100 a month through the platform, Iozzi said, as the site tends to act as a social shopping platform first, and a content aggregator second.
“We want to have genuine conversations with our customers, and these emerging social media platforms are yet another avenue for us to do just that,” Iozzi said.
“I think that there’s a significant opportunity here [in Australia] to reach this audience, and it’s not being taken up by the retail industry.”
It’s a more intricate system of content, Iozzi said, but one which the brand hopes will resonate with an Asian-Australian audience.