Do High Street Fashion Brands All Share the Same Types of Customers?

It is widely thought that different brands appeal to different types of consumers and therefore countless segmentation studies are carried out. In practice however, little is known about who the customers for most brands actually are. Now, after a decade of research in FMCG categories has shown that in general the consumer profiles in developed competitive market categories differ little between brands, this study extends this research to examine consumer profiles in the high street fashion industry to see whether there are notable differences between brands in terms of the customers who buy them. Using Kantar Fashiontrack data (n=15,000) we compared the user profiles of fashion brands in the UK along demographic and psychographic dimensions. The data were categorized as ‘retail brands’ and we concentrate on the most popular category of retailing, women’s outerwear, purchased by women for themselves. The results are that the customers of most brands are little different from the customers of other brands at the high street retailer level. However, some brands do attain a level of customer differentiation, particularly those that differentiated by age. The brands that achieve this type of segmentation are those that are part of a brand portfolio owned by a company that uses individual brands to target different user groups. The key implication for marketing practitioners is that market segmentation using consumer characteristics will unnecessarily limit the vast potential that markets offer. Most brands would be better off with strategies that are not too narrowly focused, but that emphasize reaching as many category buyers as possible.