Lakme Fashion Week: Promotion or Platform?

Lakme Fashion Week has been conceived and created with a vision to “Redefine the future of fashion and Integrate India into the global fashion world”. Glittery lights, haute couture and what not, LFW has been one platform that has always added immense value for the models, designers and the brands. The passion for fashion has gone beyond boundaries. Every brand wants to get associated with LFW. What is it that is making older brands stick to LFW and new brands getting associated with it?

Taking this point further, we at Adgully spoke to different brands such as DHL, Aircel and Zovi with a thought to learn their point of view  on this prestigious event year on year.
When asked how the association with LFW helped their  brand in terms of sales and promotion, Monappa Nalyanda - Marketing Head of Zovi.com said, “This is our first association with the LFW. The impact on sales will be evident once the Zovi Gen Next line by the Zovi Gen Next designers is made available for sale on the website. But the expectations are huge and high. We believe in simplifying fashion online. With acquiring new and young talent we would surely be able to complete and achieve our mission.”

Chandrashekar Pitre, Senior Director Marketing, DHL Express here said, “The reason why we associate with fashion is because fashion is one of our most important industry verticals, it’s a large part of our business. It is important to understand the business of fashion, its customer, trends and the various elements that go in the making of fashion business successful. The mileage that one can get from any association cannot be quantified as easily as stating in monetary terms.”

Renuka Jaypal, National Brand Head, Aircel, said, “We have been associated with LFW for almost 3-4 years now. How we look at this platform is that we are here to engage with new and more young audience and this time, for the first time actually, we are using a prestigious platform like LFW to engage audiences with our prestigious initiative: Save Our Tigers. So we have put a cause behind fashion.”

“We at Aircel, always try to communicate with our customers in various innovative ways. Being a youth focused brand, we try to reach out to our target audience through initiatives which make sense to them, fashion being one of them. We are extremely happy to be on this platform and would like to thank all the designers who have spent their time and effort to create such awe inspiring designs helping in contributing to the cause,” added Jaypal.

Speaking of the benefits their brand would get online Mr. Nalyanda said, “Well this association would also help a brand like ours to mature as a successful online fashion brand.”
Sharing his views on a platform like LFW,Mr. Pitre said, “It is difficult to say why brands would leave a platform like LFW ever. The entire thought depends on how one brand is looking at Lakme fashion Week. With LFW we have tried a lot of stuff may it be buyer’s lounge, supporting designers and now we conducted our own show with Masaba and Shivan-Narresh. What we do is have our own fashion shows, as a part of our customer engagement program, build customer loyalty, which obviously helps in generating revenue.” 

Speaking about what brand value does once this association gets on the table, Monappa Nalyanda said, “Zovi.com's mission is to simplify fashion to enable people to fulfill their aspirations, online.”

He also informed us about the benefits their association with the LFW offers to them . Some of them include : Enhancing the fashion quotient of brand Zovi, establishing Zovi.com as platform for promising design talent, starting with the Zovi Gen Next designers to showcase their talent to millions of online shoppers and establishing Zovi.com as a platform for fashion conscious consumers to access to ramp fashion in a convenient and affordable manner.

Speaking about brand value, Renuka Jaypal said, “With Aircel ‘Save Our Tigers’ – Fashion for a Cause, we are taking this initiative to another level by making it reach out to a larger target audience. With this what our brand will get is not the concern, the point is how to engage young audiences with our initiative. ”

Well, looking at the entire buzz and glory of Lakme Fashion Week and its brand associations it is quite evident that every brand has its own way of looking at it. It totally depends on how a non-fashion brand is looking at using a totally prestigious fashion platform for their objective and mission. Also it is highly commendable to see how Aircel engaged its CSR initiative ‘Save Our tigers’ with Lakme Fashion Week. From this we can conclude that every brand has its own strategy to promote its product on different platforms.