Spread the word, fast.

Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) is an American retailer that focuses on upscale casual wear for young consumers, its headquarters are in New Albany, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. The company operates two other offshoot brands: Abercrombie Kids & Hollister Co.  The company operates 1,049 stores across all four brands. (Wikipedia, 2017)

Once known for its sexy ad campaigns, the company has toned down its imagery and no longer displays nearly nude models in their advertisements. According to Chairman Arthur Martinez, Abercrombie and Fitch is now targeting an older consumer, from ages 18–25. These changes provide the hopes that the audience will see the company is evolving along with its consumers, and boost sales. (Wikipedia, 2017)

The field of digital content marketing is maturing, and companies need to make sure that their content campaigns and strategies are keeping up (James, 2017) and being published on time. Gone are the days of free publishing tools, paid third party platforms are paving the path for content publishing. Spredfast can assist many companies including Fortune 500 companies succeed with publishing their content, listening and responding. Thus making social media marketing, real, more human like receiving more engagement and having ads that stand out.

Spredfast is a U.S.-based social marketing software company that provides community management, content management, social care, and social analytics tools to brands and agencies. Spredfast was able to assist with Abercrombie & Fitch with publishing and finding those crutial conversations online, and knowing exacting when to take a stab at a conversation, and know when to monitor it, chime in and provide customer support.

 

Since 2015, Abercrombie & Fitch has used “Spredfast”, a Social Media Management Platform that has allowed the company to grow exponentially through the use of modern analytical tools and dashboards. With this platform, A&F has access to all social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. It allows them to intimately interact with followers, thus gaining new followers everyday and allowing thousands of Internet users to see their brand. Instagram is Abercrombie’s most prominent Social Media site with 2.5 million followers and counting; They post pictures of their brand multiple times a day as well as interacting with their followers with the hash tag “#AFstyle”. Overall Abercrombie has done a successful job with their use of social media. If they continue to use Social Media Platforms, like Spredfast, their company will continue to grow by using new and modern methods of connecting to their fans through social media. (Fowler, 2017)

Spredfast is able to create dashboards for businesses and assist them with reporting, viewing the metrics from their digital campaigns. The platform can allow you to view what people are saying about your particular product or campaign. You are able to gain valuable insight to knowing who, what and where people are having these conversations. These metrics will assist businesses to spend their ad dollars in a more effective and intuitive manner by knowing exactly who their customers are, where they talk to share content. Being able to attract the right customer at the right time, Spredfast enables this in real time.

More recently Abercrombie and Fitch has been able to stay out of the social media spotlight, however their past is plagued with multiple controversies. Many of these controversies involve their former CEO, Mike Jeffries. For example, in a 2006 interview he claimed they only market to “cool kids”  and refused to stock plus-size clothing in their stores (Denizet-Lewis, 2006). On the international level they were featured on laborrights.org 2010 Sweatshop Hall of Fame. Compared to competitors such as Aeropostale and American Eagle, posts on social media sites, such as Facebook are fairly similar. Although recently their Facebook posts are being attacked by comments demanding for action to be taken on their policies that affect deforestation and human rights abuses. (Gilmore, 2017)

Lessons for Others

Abercrombie and Fitch has had trouble in the past with their social media presence, but they have been able to overcome it with the use of Spredfast. They are working towards increasing their diversity and giving back to the community. They are highly active on all platforms and interact with their followers. Their past still haunts them with negative comments swarming a few of their social media profiles. Although this activity has been occurring, if Abercrombie continues to move in a positive direction, they will surely improve their image. (Gimore, 2017)

Using a social media platform like Spredfast will enable Abercrombie & Fitch to stay on top of good and bad comments, know how to listen and respond to their customers and also deliver relevant content. Being able to respond in real time without a prolonged delay shows how customer focused they are. Spredfast enables companies like Abercrombie & Fitch to pay attention, deliver, acquire new fans, retain old ones as well as spot influencers within the platform. If there is one lesson to be learned, it’s to have your business purchase a well built, value propositioned tool to deliver on your strategy.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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