What does the Brand Magic Index of BoF says about the fashion brands?

What's the Brand Magic Index and why it's important to analyse the fashion campaigns that brands run online?

BoF has created the Brand Magic Index which in their words is “Brand Magic is a novel, quantifiable and trackable metric to evaluate a brand’s marketing efforts by measuring the distance between brands and their customers.” and I read the full analysis so you won’t have to.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled, already from the first days of this season’s fashion week, with many writers debating the crowd of fashion week and how this crowd did change, if it did, the core of NYFW. We read a lot of opinions about the first seats with my personal favourite being

THE LOVE LIST

one: “Gatekeepers, Influencers, Writers and Snobs”. There are many opinions as well about who deserves to be there and why the fashion weeks are flooded with influencers. We probably all have heard about the fashion show in the rooftop of Anna Delvey’s West Village apartment. What does that all mean about a brand though?

As BoF mentions brands’ marketing spends are increasing, their communication outlets are increasing as well, but on the same time, the customers have a higher share of voices through all the marketing channels with the main ones being social media. Since influencing became an actual profession, we saw most of the brands investing a big share of their communication budget on advertisement through influencers on social media. When the influencers was a niche profession the selection for the brands was easier and it was merely based on the followership. But we see a strong shift in the dynamic of influencing since the TikTok influencers enter the game. Much more influencers have a huge community and the tiers are not three anymore but probably we have around five different tiers between nano influencers to mega influencers. How does that affect the marketing campaigns of a brand and the online appearance though? Why is not that simple anymore to choose an influencer to collaborate?

The ranking of Magic Index on the first semester of 2023. Credit: BoF

A TikToker that now is invited to a fashion week might have tens of millions of followers, however the interest of the followers might vary extremely. It’s hard to build a community on TikTok and the ones that have successfully made it were barely based on only one type of content. Why do we talk about this though and how is that relevant to a brand? The marketing team of a brand wants a higher reach, so the team collaborates with an influencer that has a bigger community than the brand itself, the influencer is posting for the brand but just a small percentile of this community will be interested in this content. And that’s exactly how the Brand Magic Index is relevant in this conversation. Basically, the index tells us how much the brand’s marketing efforts aligns with what customers think of the brand. The most aligned the brand is with the customers the biggest the Index is and the winner of this ranking is Miu Miu.

Miu Miu and Giorgio Armani online appearance compared to their community. Credits: BoF

Since this ranking was made public by BoF I went into this rabbit-hole of trend searching for the last 6 months and especially during the weeks of the previous fashion week season. The data speak by themselves and the ranking does make sense in terms of how much people were searching the brand online. Miu Miu was the winner because they stay loyal on their values as a brand thus their clientship. The online identity of the brand is in line with the online identity of the customers and that’s why we expect Miu Miu to have yet another good season.

Gucci and Michael Koss online appearance compared to their community. Credits: BoF

Already the Google searches has been giving away the truth of how relevant the brands are staying and of course that doesn’t mean that design wise the brands are bad but the fact that they cannot talk to their community makes them stay in a limbo or quite stable on their sales. Even if the low ranked brands they have a long term stability in their searches online the high ranked brands they become viral during their shows because being relevant it probably makes them stand out. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Long story short and without wanting to be the prophet of Milan Fashion Week that approaches, I do expect big things from Miu Miu and Giorgio Armani this season.