Our plan to publicize our fashion survey will focus on targeting individuals with knowledge and/or a background in fashion. Since the aim of the survey is to collect data that will aid the company in predicting future fashion trends, we realized that the survey only works if we can find out what trend influencers (bloggers, public figures, etc.) are willing to buy and publicize through blogs and social media. As $100 was too little to pursue current famous individuals, we wanted to target the next generation of trendsetters by pulling from those interested in a career in fashion. In order to do this, we will imbed the survey within an application for an unpaid fashion internship. The company would likely need interns to begin with, so our process combines these searches to kill two birds with one stone. At first we’ll be marketing to individuals enrolled in design and fashion schools.
The fashion industry is notoriously tough to enter, and since students at fashion schools are are constantly exposed to the competitive nature of the industry, we expect that our opportunity will be well-received. We’ll begin our marketing by sending out information to career services at different fashion schools and programs throughout the country who will pass it on to their students. Additionally, we will use the $100 to post jobs on databases and ads on specialized facebook pages or websites. Since the success of the survey relies on the specialization of our participants, we decided against advertizing it to the nation. The marketing itself will take place a few weeks or months before the actual survey portion will begin. Because students seeking employment in fashion are aware that they need to seek out internships and research opportunities, we believe that getting the word out there, into the right hands, will not be an issue. The opportunity will also be posted on our website and additionally be spread by word of mouth. Interested students will begin the first step of the application process, involving the submission of a resume, basic information, and a style portfolio by a certain date, with explicit instructions that if they make it to the next round, they will receive a challenge on a specific date that will be due in a week. The challenge will involve applicants taking the survey as well as getting five individuals that they consider the most fashionable within their network to complete it as well. This way, we generate a survey pool that has knowledge of fashion and the potential to create widespread trends.
TARGET AUDIENCE
By targeting individuals who are interested in and committed to the fashion industry, sample we will make optimal use of the survey. In this case, the relevance of the individual is far more important than the number of participants that will take the survey. Getting a random pool of young individuals will likely produce inconclusive information and prevent the survey from predicting anything. Trends are set when the masses copy influential individuals, so the opinion of the masses is not the information we are looking for. In addition, because we are incentivizing our audience with such a valuable opportunity, they’ll take it much more seriously than your average millennial scrolling through a social media site. In terms of actual numbers of survey participants, we expect to get around 200 or so initial applicants. We’ll cut this number down to 50 by the first challenge to the most competitive applicants. This process will further filter through applicants in order to find the best among the best to take the survey. In order to keep the applicants accountable, the survey will require each participant to name the person that referred them and completion of this task is necessary to make it to the next round. Since the survey requires the applicant to collect 6 total surveys, including themselves, we’re hoping to have nearly 300 completed surveys to base our analysis off of.
ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY
Although we believe the original plan we proposed to be the most effective, an alternative way to publicize the survey would to forgo the first challenge and instead combine the first two steps. When individuals go to apply for the internship, they would submit their application materials as well as complete the survey. From there we would pick the intern and use the raw data to come up with an analysis for the company.
The flyer that we will post online to market the internship opportunity:
