Growth Trade-off Variables in Luxury Brand Management

According to brand management expert Kevin Keller (2009), “the most fundamental challenge of marketing and brand management for all brands including luxury brands is how to reconcile or address the many potential trade-offs that exist in making marketing decisions” (p. 293). Three notable trade-offs in the luxury goods industry are (a) classic vs. contemporary image, (b) exclusivity vs. accessibility, and (c) retention vs. acquisition. These are all interrelated and pose a dilemma for luxury marketers in that strategies emphasizing heritage, exclusivity, and retention are not useful in managing contemporariness, accessibility, and acquisition

Two Buildings and Two Towns: Comparison of Abandoned and Repurposed Plants

At the height of apparel manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s, approximately 24,500 establishments were operating within the country (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1987). With massive closings since the 70s, current counts enumerate slightly more than 7,000 U.S. plants in operation. A noticeable number of closings also ensued in textile mills and textile product plants (Borneman, 2011). Two decades later, a similar pattern occurred in U.S. furniture manufacturing (Furniture, 2007). As these establishments tended to be clustered in the U.S. southeast in the 20th century, the burden of abandoned plant buildings looms large in many southeastern states

Is Copying Acceptable in Product Development? What to Tell our Students?

When we were in first grade, we learned to write letters and words by coping the alphabet from the board onto lined tablets. The better we copied the higher the praise we received. The pedagogy of copying continues into college. According to student feedback, after encouraging copying in early product development classes, we suddenly ask for originality. To bring academic perspective to this, we investigated our university\u27s policy on plagiarism and other legal definitions as well as sought industry input. With our findings, we are now frank in class discussions about when copying is correctly used and when copying is wrong, as when the purpose is to represent someone\u27s work as your own. After class discussions, our students are more aware of copying issues and are more open to being creative when needed and to use copying when appropriate

Selling your Design Ideas: 45 Seconds or Less

Fashion companies are using social media and other quick communication tools to promote merchandise, share ideas and create a following among customers. With the rapid means to share ideas and visuals considered to be normal and expected, we need to help our students learn to promote their ideas and themselves this way. To help students train for using the quick promotion technique, we reduced their product line presentation time from the traditional three to five minute presentations using Prezi©, or PowerPoint© to 30 to 45 second sound bites. When the assignment was first given several students did not think it was possible to get across all the information they wanted to in such a short time, and felt they needed more time to share about their work. During the in-class presentation times, we listened, learned, and were informed through short stories, poems, and several radio-like short \u27jingles.\u2

A morphology of quick response strategies for the apparel industry

The purpose of this study was to obtain demographic information about apparel manufacturers and to correlate this information with their Quick Response operational procedures. A stratified random sample was drawn from the North Carolina apparel manufacturers. The sample which was stratified by size by number of employees and target consumer type. Members of the sample were sent a mailed questionnaire resulting in a 47.5% adjusted return rate. Principle Components Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation extracted five factors from the list of Quick Response operational procedures. Analysis of variance was performed to determine the influence of four demographic characteristics on the apparel manufacturer's use of the five Quick Response factors. The five factors were further analyzed with coefficients of correlation to determine the direction and strength of their relationship with the amount of perceived change in the augmented product