Fashion brands are continuously reinventing themselves to adapt their business strategies to emerging markets. In this paradigm, digital marketing becomes an essential tool for communication to the target audiences online. In digital ecosystems, a new way of sharing information is taking place in which brands interact with users to increase engagement and brand awareness. Accordantly, the objective of the present study is to explore what is the evolution of digital marketing and how it has affected the strategies applied by fashion brands on digital ecosystems after the COVID-19 pandemic. The research develops a Delphi method with the participation of seven fashion digital marketing experts, whose conclusions and analysis of results will allow future research to be linked to the objectives of the research. The results propose and discuss nine future directions and four research proposals focused on digital marketing in the fashion industry. In the future, these proposals may be used by research or fashion marketers as a starting point for future research studies and practice.
TopIntroduction
Society is aware, one way or another, that the digital age has come to stay, and that even if we want to stay out of its evolution, it is inevitable. In this way, authors such as Pedrajas Trucharte (2020) indicate that digitization refers to the process of including new digital technologies and their complementary tools.
For this reason, Chica, and González (2020), pose another challenge. How to design the customer's marketing strategy, if the market no longer has a physical location, referring to the presence of a virtual market, where products, services and information are exchanged through existing technological networks, which grow rapidly detached from time and space.
According to Pedrajas Trucharte (2020) it is possible to state with propieding that the main economic effects of digitization on the marketing of the environment are: (i)innovate its structures and function, (ii)increase productivity, (iii)expand markets and (iv) improve yields. In addition, the digitization of trade makes available to customers or consumers a wider range of products and services that they can access more quickly and information, also favoring competition between their suppliers (Chica and González, 2019).
From the above it can be indicated that the Digital Age, the marketing areas, are being forced to rethink strategies, functions and operations within a company (Saura, 2020; Saura, Palacios-Marqués and Iturricha-Fernández, 2021). On the other hand, companies must take advantage of the technological tools available, so that by analyzing the information provided by customers, they allow them to make sound decisions, in the identification of new businesses or development of products and services, whose characteristics are attached to the needs, trends and tastes of consumers (Alcaide, 2015).
As Pérez-Curiel, Clavijo-Ferreira, Luque-Ortiz, and Pedroni, (2017) claim, fashion is communication. Fashion is intrinsically related to social habits and is the most accurate indicator of time and time. This way of understanding fashion has not changed since its birth, what it has done is the way to communicate it (Pérez-Curiel et al., 2017).
The recent most social and interactive scenario has generated the emergence of new agents and strategies, ending the one-way conception that dominated communication in the business world (Pérez-Curiel et al., 2017).
Therefore, the main objective of this research is to explore what will be the evolution of digital marketing and its strategies in the fashion sector following the economic crisis arising from covid-19. This is intended to identify the most relevant aspects of digital marketing and changes to a virtual environment as presented by Ribeiro-Navarrete, Saura and Palacios-Marqués (2021). As a result of the problem raised, this research proposes the following research question: RQ1: What are the main digital marketing techniques used in the fashion sector? If so, RQ2: What is the influence of Digital Marketing on the evolution of the fashion sector in the development of digital business models?
The methodology used in this research is that of the Delphi Method, a method of decision analysis proposed by Rand Corporation in 1948. Delphi is characterized by being a method for structuring an effective communication process that allows a group of individuals to reach a group consensus. The originality of this research is that as companies in the fashion sector must understand the changes that are taking place in digital marketing today as well as the new ways of consuming customers.