A luxury ethical accessories start-up commissioned 181st Street for audience targeting, social media strategy, messaging, PR and media relations to launch and grow their brand.
We built them a target audience profile based on detailed demographic and psychographic data, which helped them identify their position in the market and highlighted several competitive advantages and unique selling points, which formed the basis of their core messaging.
To avoid triggering the attitude/behaviour gap that comes with ethical and sustainable products, we supported them to position their values messaging in a hierarchy that predominantly focused on heritage skills and high quality craftsmanship – themes which the data showed would resonate with their audience and behaviourally make them willing to spend more.
Our behavioural branding experts then leveraged the ‘peak-end rule’ to further showcase the company’s ethical values, sustainability credentials and charity give-backs without triggering the attitude/behaviour gap.
This psychological concept shows that we remember a memory or judge an experience based on how we felt at peak moments, as well as how we felt at the end.
For ethical brands, featuring values-focused messaging with impact-driven storytelling in post-purchase email sequences and order confirmation pages anchors the experience of purchasing as a positive one, leaves the customer feeling good and opens up the opportunity for social sharing and virtue signalling, which can be harnessed for referral marketing and word-of-mouth.
With this in place, we were able to create a photographic style that reflected their high-end luxury brand status and heritage style, creating assets for social media, lifestyle imagery for the website, and a lookbook to send to key media contacts.
Once the brand was successfully positioned and optimised for the target audience, we successfully nominated them for a prestigious Independent Designer Award. Their victory opened up new international markets in the USA and Asia, gave them the opportunity to exhibit at trade shows in New York, and came with mentoring from industry experts, which led to a feature at London Fashion Week.
Media coverage included: Vanity Fair, Forbes and The Telegraph, and thanks to this momentum, the brand were able to secure a listing in Selfridges and several other high end retailers.
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