A FASHION-FORWARD QUESTIONNAIRE

While searching for credible research regarding the use of social media in the fashion industry, I stumbled across a Cal Poly research article entitled, “Examining Social Media Use in Fashion: The Need for Industry Standards.” Hillary Preece, a Bachelor of Science student at California Polytechnic State University, composed this research in December of 2012. The purpose of this post is to further understand the use of social media in the fashion industry through deep evaluation and questionnaire. The focus of the article’s survey is to evaluate the reasons and recent uses of social media in the fashion industry. In this assignment, I hope to further understand who relies on social media the most and which platforms are most effective.

After all questions were answered, the author came to the conclusion that social media should be used as much as possible for advertising fashion. The main reason companies use social media is to show their customers what they have to offer, so they should update their site each day. Also, companies can learn from each other about how they should be using social media sites.

For this November 2012 study, four interviewees were chosen based on their related career fields and experience. Sloane Granite (Assistant Account Executive and Director of Social Media for Magenta Stripe Public Relations), Kannyn Opal (Manager of a San Louis Obispo fashion boutique, Aura), Alison Diamond (Senior Account Director at PR firm, Indigo Public Relations) and Alex Topaz (The College Special’s National Sales Manager) are all experts speaking on social media’s role in their careers. Only three of the four provided their college graduation information. Since the study participants are located in California, New York City and the UK, a face-to-face interview was only possible with Kannyn Opal; as for the rest, twenty to thirty minute personal, recorded phone call interviews were held. The specifics of how these four were picked, their ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds were not clearly stated.

This study did an excellent job in clearly defining the sample traits and altering questions where necessary. For example, each expert was administered the same five questions. However, considering Alex Topaz was less familiar with the fashion industry and more knowledgeable about marketing, the one question specifically about the fashion industry was swapped with a social media-marketing question. This survey has been very useful because it touches on many aspects of the effects social media has on consumerism, especially in the fashion industry.

In order to cater to each professional’s knowledge, two versions of the questionnaire were proposed: fashion-industry centered and public relation and marketing based. Given that there were only five questions asked, the interviewer gave each participant no boundaries on how they could answer.

One question on the fashion industry survey was: “Does the fashion industry generally embrace social media as a means to promote brand and trends and as a platform for consumer exploration and interactivity?” Kannyn Opal responded saying, “The fashion industry definitely embraces social media in every aspect of its rising. Brands and designers follow us, follow our customers, chime in on our discussion boards, retweet things, are tweeted at, post questions, get personable… We’re all about it because social media is helping the industry grow and prosper. Vendors are even more likely to want to put there stuff in here because of the time we spend marketing it and attracting customers to the store via our social networking pages.”

For the marketing based survey: “What are the challenges in expanding the audience of social media users?” Alex Topaz responded by saying, “The challenges are mainly to do with the short attention span of users. An individual user can like over one thousand pages, so what’s going to get them to actually pay attention to one page or brand or promotion over the thousands on their news feeds? The bottom line is that we have to captivate the users.”

In general, I believe this survey was very useful because it provided real life examples of how professionals used social media to better their industry. As promised, the questions and answers correlated to what the goal of this survey was. I do not think there was room for misinterpretation but I do think having set answers for them to choose from would have been good for comparing.

​In dissecting this survey and overall study, I would say that this is a credible source. First of all, the survey’s purpose is backed-up with a plethora of research information. Also, every interviewee has legitimate ties to the fashion industry, social media and/or public relations. Finally, the author of this study provided credible citations for everything she researched.

x,

Kyrie