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Intro: brief history and target market

Tommy Hilfiger is one of the world’s leading designer lifestyle brands, and is globally known for celebrating the essence of classic American cool style, featuring preppy styles with a twist (Global, 2020). Established in 1985, under the Tommy Hilfiger and Tommy Jeans brands, Tommy Hilfiger offers luxury styling, quality and value to customers worldwide, with a variety of collections like Hilfiger Collection, Tommy Hilfiger Tailored, men’s, women’s and children’s sportswear, denim, accessories, and footwear (Tommy Hilfiger, n.d.). Moreover, a variety of items, including fragrances, eyewear, watches and home furnishings, are approved by the brand. Creator Tommy Hilfiger remains the Principal Designer of the company and provides leadership and direction for the process of design. Tommy Hilfiger, which PVH Corp. bought, is a multinational clothing and retail company with more than 15,000 partners worldwide in 2010 (Tommy Hilfiger, n.d.). Tommy Hilfiger has established a comprehensive distribution network in over 100 countries and more than 2,000 retail stores in North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region with the help of strong global market awareness. In 2018, the Tommy Hilfiger brand’s worldwide retail revenues was $8.5 billion US worldwide (Tommy Hilfiger Marketing Report, 2018). The brand targets a wide demographic and targets and attracts younger customers. It has a children’s line and also clothes designed for older customers. According to Hilfiger, “he wants to keep the brand younger and keep it cool” (Bhasin, 2019). Through observing their social media platforms it can be seen that the brand primarily targets their products to the 25 to 40 year demographic (Bhasin, 2019).  

Tommy Hilfiger’s website and in-store layout:

According to (Creative, n.d.) the purpose of a website is to represent a company, sell the goods of the company, draw more customers, create more market leads, encourage more sales of the products and services of the company and ultimately, help obtain more investment return, and this is exactly what Tommy Hilfiger achieves. The accessibility of everything is maybe the best feature of Tommy’s layout. You’re able to recognise everything from new items to promotions and fashion trends right from the first page. The site is very easy to access and a simple overview of the products is given by all links. Their navigation is stylish but easy to use as well. The links are clean and easy. Hover impacts are visible but not too flamboyant (Rocheleau, 2015). Furthermore, it enables all products in the shop to be arranged on a grid system by creating a spacious shopping space via the brand. This ensures that objects are shown an equal distance between each other, providing for each product a level playing field (Rocheleau, 2015). Naturally, the eyes gravitate towards asymmetry or objects that stand out from the crowd in particular. The design by Tommy Hilfiger is intended to draw focus on all products (Creative, n.d.). The shopping cart itself also provides a sleek arrangement with 2 columns. With an emphasis on the goods themselves, the left column is far broader. The right column is where a number for all items can be found and you can move on to the checkout. Font options assist a lot while also incorporating colour variations. For clients of all ages, fonts, colours, and white space create a pleasant shopping experience (Rocheleau, 2015). In addition, you are given the option to check out the information in a fast linear popup window while viewing any product page. Instead of dragging you on to several different sites without excuse, this will save a lot of time. The thumbnails serve as selling points, where you can check out small details or view feedback and features of the entire product. You will get to use a full-screen zoom preview with the magnifying glass effect on the product page. You can also switch between product colours and change them in real-time. Dynamic effects often add to the experience of shopping and create more trust in new customers who have never used the website before (Rocheleau, 2015). Inter-woven branding can be seen throughout the website. Tommy Hilfiger uses occasionally in the style their usual red white & blue colours. The footer turns dark blue with crisp white text, a great example. No matter what page you are on, the header remains set at the end. The Tommy logo that gives a simple reference to the brand at all times is included in this header. Branding, which means that it can be quite cruel, is like marketing. Without being inherently obnoxious or repetitive, this brand does an outstanding job of working their colours into the web (Rocheleau, 2015).

With Tommy Hilfiger producing an impressive website, the brand needs to be portrayed in the same way by their retail stores (Funk, 2018). A good shop layout serves many purposes, such as creating a seamless customer flow, avoiding shoplifting, logistics and contributing to a smooth, efficient and easy shopping experience in general (Why a good shop layout is essential for your retail business, n.d.). It had both the male and female clothing collection stocked in the store. The department’s overall presentation was elegant and neat. It was arranged in a manner in which consumers could easily find what they wanted. In addition, there were promotions in the shop, which included 25% off all styles, and another 10% off for members of Tommy Hilfiger. Special discounts and regular emails on upcoming promotions and styles are provided for members of this membership. 

Social media and influencer marketing:

One of the leading designer brands that are doing exceptionally well on the market is Tommy Hilfiger.  The company has a large range of products that offer extremely high exposure to the company. It facilitates instant engagement and customer input by using Social Media Marketing. Businesses may also respond right away to their customers. With more and more consumers using social media to ask questions about products or services, it is increasingly necessary to have a plan for social media marketing and customer support. With the brand recently unveiling their highest tech line, Tommy Jeans Xplore, which uses Bluetooth technology to monitor how much the product is worn by a customer and where the product is worn by the customer (Bhasin, 2019). This helps the company to gain an awareness of what items sell well and what products the brand wants to concentrate more on because of customer insights. It engages clients through numerous marketing and promotional campaigns since Tommy Hilfiger is one of the world’s leading designer brands. Comprehensive 360 ° marketing campaigns concentrate on digital marketing experiences and creative experiences (Bhasin, 2019). It has helped the brand to grow into new markets across Europe and Asia through the use of digital marketing across various social media channels and is widely available (Bhasin, 2019). It concentrates on meeting the next generation of customers. A very aggressive marketing campaign is practised by the Tommy Hilfiger brand which uses various platforms to meet the target consumers and has extremely high brand awareness. It uses advertising from newspapers, billboards, magazine ads, etc. for promotions and has celebrities like Gigi Hadid as brand ambassadors.

Tommy Hilfiger utilises the use of Instagram stories to help target and gain awareness of the brand, further allowing for communication between consumers and the brand (McCormick, 2017) For example, Hilfiger created templets for stores for their consumers to allow them to add their own imagery and text. Hilfiger’s designs included variations of the logo, as well as colourful prints exclusive to the collection (RYDZEK, 2019). Through the brand utilising Instagram Stories, it allows them to maintain visibility in their followers feeds, preserve a high-quality business profile, connect with their target audience, enhance their content and most of all allows them to create real-time marketing (McCormick, 2017). Another example of how Tommy Hilfiger uses innovation to provide a special customer experience can be the highlight in their 2018 fall TommyNow icons runway example, were the Fashion brand unveiled SideFlix, a new Facebook Messenger experience that enabled it to combine digital shoppable content with in-person social interactions (Cohen, n.d.). Influencers Jia-Ye Wu and Mia Kong take users on a trip through Shanghai when two mobile devices are put next to each other, ending on the TommyNow Icons runway in autumn 2018 (Cohen, n.d.). Applying some of the Tommy Hilfiger apparel featured in the digital content in fall 2018 will allow individuals to save products to wish lists that link to the company website’s relevant product description pages . Through this, by merging digital and physical interactions, Hilfiger aimed to change conventional social-shopping encounters with friends. In addition, Tommy Hilfiger uses social media to its advantage. The channels that are most used by the brand are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Although Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are used for images, YouTube is mostly video-based. The posted material consists mostly of photos of the campaign, brand ambassadors, and photos of events with the occasional video of the campaign (Tommy Hilfiger Marketing Report, 2018).  Hilfiger has a hashtag campaign on Instagram and Twitter to further associate the main profile and help spread the brand to a broader audience (Tommy Hilfiger Marketing Report, 2018). It shows just how popular the brand has expanded thanks to social media, with the brand getting 13.6 million followers on Instagram, 13 million on Facebook, 1.5 million on Twitter and 83.9 thousand subscribers on YouTube. Social networking is used to guide and inspire customers, generating more sales, to go to the website. It is often used to educate customers about recent brand-related activities. Since it helps them to create awareness, demonstrate authenticity, consumer loyalty and customer service, Tommy Hilfiger utilises social media to promote their brand.

Although Tommy Hilfiger uses all these channels to promote its products, it is clear that the main emphasis is centrally put on creative growth. The Visual Merchandising (VM) centre generates rules that are then sent to the shops (Armfield, n.d.). The shop and online are meeting these guidelines. The VM, it would seem, as a centrally generated term, is initially pushed towards the online market. It is therefore important that the store VMs represent what clients see on the various web-based platforms. Before seeing them in-store, consumers would also view items online, meaning that they will want to see continuity between online products and those viewed in stores (Armfield, n.d.). We can therefore see that Tommy Hilfiger uses different creative ways of using social media to help them promote their clothing lines.

Brand ambassadors such as Gigi Hadid show that the brand is highly celebrity-driven (Tommy Hilfiger Marketing Report, 2018) are the most engaging content. To maintain the major global momentum that the company is experiencing, Tommy Hilfiger continues to evolve its marketing strategies. Beginning in Spring 2018, Tommy Hilfiger entered into a multi-year collaboration for Tommy Hilfiger menswear with five-time Formula One World Champion Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport and five-time FIA Formula One World Driver Champion Lewis Hamilton (Tommy Hilfiger, n.d.). Another main ambassador for Tommy Hilfiger’s men is Shawn Yue. After a popular men’s brand ambassadorship for Spring 2018 in Greater China, the actor again joined the Tommy Hilfiger family for Spring 2019. (Tommy Hilfiger, n.d.). Further, Gigi Hadid’s successful Spring 2018 collaboration, which marked her final season as a brand ambassador and designer of the TommyXGigi capsule line (Tommy Hilfiger Marketing Report, 2018). As the year progressed, the company enlisted Hailey Bieber and Winnie Harlow models, as well as Chinese actress Maggie Jiang, as the newest Tommy. Hilfiger family members, with the celebrities posing as Tommy Hilfiger women’s new global brand ambassadors for Fall 2018. In early Spring 2019, Tommy Hilfiger named American actress Zendaya as the female ambassador of the brand (Tommy Hilfiger, n.d.). It makes the brand possible through Tommy Hilfiger using influencers to sell their products to amplify their brand recognition, meet their targeted target audience, strengthen their reputation and morale, raise customer engagement, and help redesign their content strategy.

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