Marketing professionals are right to see brands as a lot more than a name and a logo, and to emphasise the importance of brand in terms of communicating a clear message to the market.  It is, after all, part of the culture.  All of us are brand-aware, and we can tell an M&S woman from a Joseph woman; an Agnes B from a Bon Marche.

 

Yet brands are not like magic dust that confers advantage on all it touches.  An obvious example would be M&S, where many customers are proud to eat its food, but wouldn't set foot in the menswear department.  Brands, in other words are divisible.  Enter the petite sub-brand.

 

Whether marketing is in-house or outsourced, most retailers with petite sub-brands treat petites as though they can be wholly subsumed within the main brand identity.  Yet there is no evidence base to support this assumption.

 

For one thing, petite sub-brands are usually differentiated from the main brand not solely by size, but by styling, detailing and, crucially, quantity, i.e. fewer garments are available in the petite sub-brand, where the main brand may have 5 coat styles, the petite one may have 1 or 2.  They may all be sold under the same roof, but in terms of the alchemy of branding, the petite sub-brand remains base metal.  How?  Because the dialogue between retailer and customer - which is what brand is all about - is conducted through advertising, or product placement, or celebrity endorsement.  The standard size customer sees these images and can literally buy into the brand.  The petite customer sees images of things she can't buy.  This is a profound dissonance.

 

Let's take an example.  One of the most successful brands in fashion retail is Topshop.  Topshop's image is one of fast-changing, fashion-forward, celeb-endorsed credibility.  Clever collaborations, such as Celia Birtwell's recent highly-acclaimed collection, generate column inches in the fashion press and further ratchet up the brand's desirability to fashionistas.  Yet Topshop's petite sub-brand is excluded from all this.  The petite customer cannot buy into the core values of the brand - because they don't sell them in her size.

 

The result is brand alienation.  The brand isn't talking to the petite customer.  It's talking to the others, over her head.  She's not included in the conversation.  In other words, the sub-brand is not subsumed by the main brand image; it exists outside it, a proto-brand, not yet formed, or informed by a marketing strategy.

 

There's a moral to this story.  Retailers, don't blithely assume that the petite sub-brand is subsumed by the brand, because it isn't.  Talk to your petite customers directly, in language and images that have meaning.  Because when you don't, we stop listening.