The applicable elements of H&M’s retail image include customer service, positioning, target market, merchandise attributes, pricing, shopping experience, community service, and promotional tools.
H&M has a no-frills approach to customer service. They have certain services such as free returns for online members in the US, contact information on their websites, privacy policies, terms and conditions of their website, and store locations also available on their websites.
H&M is targeted towards individuals who enjoy shopping, want to keep up to date on current fashion trends, being affordable, and targeted towards a younger audience. The shopping experience is relaxed and no-frills with a positioning of no-frills and affordable fashion. They are selection leaders as they offer a wide variety of product lines that are continuously being rotated in order to stay up to date with the latest fashion trends. The pricing of H&M products is affordable; however, some merchandise is of higher quality and is priced accordingly such as their dresses and some of their jackets.
H&M classifies their store offerings online as purchase motivation product groupings through promotions/ sales and market segment product groupings through the ‘style with’ suggestions.
H&M is a socially aware company that is involved in helping the community. One project they are involved in is ‘close the loop’ or ‘Garment Collecting Programme’ where customers who turn in unused clothing get a coupon for their next H&M purchase. The clothing is then recycled into new clothing that H&M resells.
The attribute of the merchandise H&M sells is fast fashion. They use a top-down approach to fashion forecasting using fashion forecasting companies and designers in order to determine what clothing will be fashionable in the future opposed to Zara who have a bottom-up approach where they use customer feedback and sales analytics to determine the next up and coming fashion trends. Danziger from The Robin Report says “Zara includes the customer in the decision-making process, whereas H&M dictates the decisions down to the customer” (Danziger 2018) showing how Zara’s method of operating on the 4Es model and focusing on the customer is what makes Zara more successful than H&M.
Some promotional tools that H&M uses include outdoor advertising, SEO/SEM, website banner advertisements, email newsletters, and constantly having products on sale. After visiting their website, visitors are exposed to H&M website banner ads while browsing other websites and are targeted using cookies.
H&M’s website is consistent between the UK and US store; however, the Australian store is more of a brochure than an online store. The UK and US stores prominently show the company name, is inviting, are easy to navigate, shows their product lines, uses plenty of images, has a unique look, includes contact information, links to social media, and is easy to find through Google.
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