Zara competes with the leading high street retailers of the United Kingdom like John Lewis, H&M, ASOS, Marks and Spencer and the Debenhams. These stores are focusing their business on expanding their online presence. These organizations are capitalizing on clothing results from web searches and search engines. Zara and its competitors are among the leading online stores majoring in the fashion industry in the United Kingdom.
One of its strongest competitors is the John Lewis brand, known for its ability to improve paid online search marketing. This enabled the organization to directly optimize its consumers’ preferences throughout the entire business cycle. This organization used a traditional business approach to make a huge impact on its online presence.
The table above shows the gross sales of the main competitors of Zara for the year 2017 in the UK alone.
ASOS generated $2.48 billion in sales in 2017
H&M $1.65 billion in sales 2017
Debenhams $3.1 billion in sales 2017
John Lewis $1.5 billion in sales 2017
M&S $1.1 billion in sales 2017
Debenhams is using the marketing strategy of search engine optimization, through the use of a multitude of interlinked social websites and blogs. Some of the most common websites used by the organization are YouTube, D Blog, Twitter, and Facebook. Visitors encourage more consumers into the fold by asking for feedback, engaging in conversations and participating in social activities.
Marks and Spencer (M&S) is the pioneer in online fashion clothing videos with its famous ‘M&S TV.’ This organization is the best model of v-commerce. The organization has proven that effective online video has the ability to increase sales. The company is also recognized for its advanced online marketing approach, with a keen focus on finding new ways to grow its online presence and business while maintaining its customers.
On the other hand, Zara maintains a loyal online customer base. Incongruously, the organization has been able to expand its online presence by not concentrating on online marketing. Zara has been left with an extremely big fashion market to capture. With competitors edging towards increasing their online presence, they provide Zara with the best opportunity to implement the new marketing strategy. Therefore, Zara focuses its business on offering an exclusive and coordinated collection of the most stylish and fashionable accessories, shoes and clothes for women (Royo-Vela & Casamassima, 2011).
After assessing the market potential and understanding the practicability of their marketing strategy, Zara quickly introduced men and children clothing lines under its brand. Online consumers understand that the designs of Zara’s accessories and clothes are styles in-house, and their modest online engagement with consumers adds more to its style, consistency of quality, and their value for money.
Brand Value (from a Global Perspective)
One of the most ancient industries there are a few trusted companies that sit stop in the field of cloth manufacturing. Here is a chart of the top 10 best-selling clothing brands and their brand value.
The table above denotes that Zara is doing well on the global front in regards to the overall brand value. It is yet to catch up with Louis Vuitton however, the leading clothing brand in the world.
The fashion sector in the UK contributes $35.2 billion into the UK’s economy with over 800,000 people employed by top brands. The companies are directly involved in exports which account 6.5 billion euros every year on average. The fastest growing market is the men’s wear in the UK. This segment reached 14.1 billion euros in sales in 2015 and continues to grow at 4.1% annually . Another factor that drives the brand value is the popularity amongst female buyers. Over half of the female population in the UK purchased a handbag last year.
Majority of the big players have a strong online presence. In 2015, online shopping totalled 12.4 billion euros in sales, a figure which is projected to reach 19 billion euros by 2019.
In sum, Zara has been able to use cast out a stylish fashion edge to its online presence. Zara continues to strengthen its chain of retail stores at the expense of investing in online marketing. Even though the organization has a fully functional website, most of its latest offerings and designs are only designated to the purchasers as opposed to the public. Zara has focused more on privacy and premium offerings to a selected target market as opposed to merely increasing its online presence.
Weaknesses
One of the leading fashion clothing retailers in the world Zara also has some weaknesses in deferent parts of its business strategy. Zara has made a name for itself in producing innovative designs but these come with an increased risk of longevity. The innovation and creativity of Zara may hit a stumble in the future could spell trouble for the scalability and ambitious growth. The same goes for the cost of doing business in different countries. There are increasing doubts regarding the in-store advertisement model of Zara going forward.
