In the current economic environment, workwear should convey more than just its value of warmth to the market; it should express a value system that resonates with the finer details of customers' lives. This value system should be more about intangible values, spiritual recognition, and emotional resonance. This is why the market is gradually entering a phase where channels and brands reign supreme. The path towards brand development for China's workwear industry has not been smooth. Many workwear companies pursue superficial "brand name" titles while ignoring the true essence of a brand, leading to a one-sided understanding of brand strategy across the entire industry. Small and medium-sized workwear enterprises should avoid being influenced by erroneous concepts and fundamentally understand the true meaning of brand strategy.
For small and medium-sized workwear enterprises implementing a brand strategy, efforts should be made in establishing brand personality, enriching brand connotation, and cultivating brand culture. First is the establishment of brand personality. Product positioning may be relatively easy to establish. For example, under market segmentation, small and medium-sized workwear enterprises can determine which age group markets they are suited to enter based on their own conditions. They can avoid highly competitive market areas by choosing specialized production in children's wear (many manufacturers but few distinctive brands), middle-aged and elderly workwear, maternity wear (few manufacturers and lack of brand planning) etc., filling gaps in the market. However, the establishment of brand personality cannot stop here. It requires an in-depth analysis of the values and lifestyle of consumers in the target market. What are their behavioral characteristics? What is their most universal desire? After a series of realistic inquiries and research, one can establish what kind of brand personality can achieve the greatest emotional resonance, thereby ensuring that the company reasonably conveys widely recognized values to the target market during the design of workwear and brand communication. For instance, the well-known women's clothing brand "White-collar" initially established a concept lifestyle close to white-collar women by acutely capturing their consumption psychology and trends. Through the layout of ten concept lifestyle stores, the brand integrated its personality with the values of the target audience, gradually achieving success.
Secondly, the construction of brand connotation is necessary. A brand needs grounding. A name or a logo does not equate to a brand. After small and medium-sized workwear enterprises establish their brand personality, they need to build a brand identity system around this personality, including brand philosophy, brand visual identity, brand stories, etc. Only then can a workwear brand truly take root. Among domestic workwear brands, Seven Wolves is worth promoting for enriching brand connotation. Through Seven Wolves advertisements, we can see that Seven Wolves focuses not only on workwear but also on men. Precisely through the appreciation of men’s taste, Seven Wolves has not only clearly presented itself but also enriched its connotation, making it likable. Small and medium-sized workwear enterprises building a brand cannot blindly engage in slogan-based communication but need to learn how to tell brand stories and package their brands to avoid excessive fund consumption and improve the efficiency of brand construction.
Simultaneously, it is important to focus on the accumulation of brand culture. Culture always requires accumulation, and so does brand culture. Importantly, how do small and medium-sized workwear enterprises effectively sort out the history and culture of their enterprises and incorporate them into the brand culture? Enterprises can use elements with general cultural recognition to make the brand culture gradually become substantial and rich in taste.
Finally, in brand communication, small and medium-sized enterprises particularly need to pay attention to the reasonable allocation of funds. Small and medium-sized enterprises need to consider how to allocate time between cognition and goodwill during media promotion. In the promotion process, there needs to be a judgment on consumers. Consumers need to repeatedly accept something within a relative period to remember it. Goodwill, however, differs as it is influenced by social recognition and emotional factors. Therefore, for small and medium-sized workwear enterprises, they should specifically let the market recognize their brand within a short period. This requires utilizing a reasonable media mix strategy. To make consumers have goodwill, they need to design emotional intersection points in the communication process between the brand and consumers, allowing them to produce emotional resonance. This is achieved through numerous behavioral expressions in marketing activities, but the main form also needs to utilize media evenly over time to gradually penetrate and achieve results. Regional (advertising) penetration and catalog marketing often suit small and medium-sized workwear enterprises better. Designing corresponding marketing communication plans under the principle of brand touchpoints can achieve the goal of building a brand at low cost and high efficiency.
In summary, small and medium-sized workwear enterprises, in fierce market competition, to break through their own development bottlenecks, cannot rely on imitation or following trends. Instead, they need to shed the identity of market followers, elevate enterprise development and branding to a strategic height for overall planning and design of development strategies, avoid cognitive pitfalls, seek new market spaces, integrate limited resources, and effectively implement brand strategies to truly emerge from their cocoon and gain new life.
Related thematic articles: Removing decoration pollution and odors with herbs and plants – Indoor pollution control is a long and arduous task - Experience report on new products for indoor pollution control.