THE MASS MARKET ; SUSTAINABILITY AND ETHICS EDITION 2016 1

Fig. 26 Fig. 25 THE MASS MARKET ; NOV 2016 According to Forbes (2016), it is said that 92% of consumers trust influencers more than advertising or traditional celebrities. This alone suggests that the current demographic for the mass market feed into influencers opinions rather than that of the retail companies themselves. As a result of this, commonly known retailers such as Missguided, Boohoo, New Look and ASOS make up a percentage of 60 who now have an ‘influencer marketing strategy’ in place whilst a further 21% of retailers plan to invest in their strategy over the next 12 months. All of this data contributes to the fact that customers buy their clothing based on if they see a public figure wearing that product. Retailers now partake in what is called ‘influencer marketing’ (Marketing Schools, n.d.) which is the method of marketing in which focus is placed on key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. (Tapinfluence, n.d.) This basically means that influencer marketing is a partnership between an influencer and retailer which is set up to drive sales in a product. So an influencer might post a picture of them wearing a product onto a social media platform for their following to see, but the influencer might not like the garment they are wearing and are purely making the social media post stating a false opinion about the product for money. This in turn doesn’t really let consumers form their own opinion about the product before they purchase it. There are many aspects that contribute to influencer marketing, (eg. social media, fast fashion, reality television as well as social trends). All of this suggests that the brand alignment and partnership between the influencer and retailer is far from genuine and isn’t to genuinely encourage the customer to make a decision, and that it is only to drive sales which can be seen by some as unethical. 18 THE MASS MARKET ; NOV 2016 Garment from H&M’s Conscious Collection, 2015 19

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