Fashion industry and its gender focus

Fashion industry is the combination of Technology, creativity, designing, manufacturing, exploring etc. The known market space for fashion items is highly competitive and every link in the chain tries to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, sales share & profits spiral downwards, profits become commodity & the cutthroat competition gives space to differentiate the product to categorize the channels, the segments. This leads to further dissection of the market into toddler  segment, kids segment, teen segment, adult segment & the rich plus size segment. This classification provides a systematic approach to break out of the competition by reconstructing market boundaries to create a leap in the value for the designer & the consumer. It is market creating strategy in an uncontested market arena, that the marketers do to create segments but technically the structure & market boundaries are only in sellers minds & limited to timelines. The extra demand is always there but largely untapped & smart marketers always take it as an opportunity to explore avenues to reach the goal of acquiring market share. Segmentation is just to outplace competition in the existing dissected, categorised channelized, distinctive cost or demographical differentiation of street smart market. All differentiation processes are focused on competing to targeting value innovation.

The demand side takes care of size and composition of the target audience, whereas the supply side factors are product differentiation & cost leadership (niche segment –high cost, mass market –low cost) though segmentation is a narrow market scope based on variables.

The new differentiation in demand side is Gender based. Today cars, scooter, mobile phones, laptops, cigarettes, liquor (Vodka), jeans, T shirts, cosmetics, hair gels, shampoos are  targeting women & men as different composition. So a new demographic “WOMEN SPECIAL” consumer needs is being  researched & products being introduced with tag lines, “why women should not enjoy the comfort of exclusivity”. Now women in advertisement are represented as superwomen who manage to do all the work at home & at place of work with the help of products & not with the guidance of her husband, children or male counterpart & further makes women owe her independence and self esteem to the products she uses as women exclusive range.