Building on the insight that ‘Fashion Week’ is usually an event reserved for industry insiders and celebrities, London fashion Week principal sponsor ran a January/February campaign offering lucky consumers a pair of tickets (plus champagne hospitality) to go to their first ever catwalk show.
The emphasis on the ‘first’ show ever, reflects the mobile telecoms giant’s new global engagement strategy – ‘Firsts’ – which sees it shift its marketing away from blockbuster event sponsorship towards celebrating and supporting individual’s doing ‘remarkable things for the first time’.
Fashion fans simply needed to enter through the Vodafone UK Twitter channel by retweeting our post when prompted, or apply through the Vodafone UK Facebook page by commenting on the brand’s post and tagging the friend each contestant wants to take with them if they win.
The ‘first’ London Fashion Week catwalk tickets were for shows at the event’s Somerset House hub, where the brand once again also leverages its rights in the ‘Vodafone Lounge’ within the British fashion Council’s Courtyard Show Space at Somerset House – a hospitality venue that offers exclusive guests unrivalled access to shows and enabling them to get closer to the forefront of fashion.
February’s Autumn/Winter 14 event marks Vodafone’s fifth season as Principal Sponsor and eighth as Official Communications Partner of London Fashion Week.
The title sponsor continues to support the UK fashion industry by providing seamless and innovative tech solutions onsite at Somerset House – focused around its ‘front row charging benches’ and ‘venue charging stations’ which ensure telecoms fully charged connectivity at the shows throughout fashion week.
Vodafone also employs its GPS tracking technology to help the shows run to time, as well as working with the property owner, the British Fashion Council, to boost mobile phone signal onsite.
A further strand of Vodafone’s LFW work included working with fashion blogging phenomenon Poppy Dinsey to explore how technology is making a major difference at today’s catwalk shows.
Dinsey, founder of clothing social network What I Wore Today who effectively operates as a Vodafone brand ambassador through LFW, shared her insights with thee telecoms brand’s fashion blog on the increasingly blurred lines between fashion and technology and discussed her thoughts on how the mobile phones in our pockets are now almost as important as the clothes on our backs.
‘The power of social media within the LFW shows is huge now,’ she says, discussing the frantic lineup of up to eight shows per day. ‘I see everyone from editors to buyers, and the whole room is always full of people taking photos on their phones, Instagramming and Tweeting. Social networking and mobile phones have a big impact on how events like LFW run,’ Poppy explains.
Comment
A fairly vanilla activation using standard mechanics suggests that this year’s Vodafone LFW activation feels a little less fully fuelled than last year’s work (see previous case study).
Indeed, one wonders how its LFW rights will continue to fit into its new umbrella ‘Firsts’ strategy – especially considering the decreasing focus on big event traditional sponsorship.
Links
Vodafone Fashion Blog
Vodafone Twitter
https://twitter.com/vodafoneuk
Vodafone Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/vodafoneUK
London Fashion Week Website
