Week 2

07/10/13 - Roles in Fashion Marketing
As Chris was on paternity leave, Matt took the lecture for him. It was on Roles in Fashion Marketing, In the first week we were given a survey to fill in about which jobs to do with Fashion Communication we would want to go into and the results came out as;

1. Buyer
2. Journalist
3. Stylist
4. Advertising
5. PR
6. Marketing
7. Art Director
8. Visual Merchandiser
9. Trend Forecaster

Then the lecture continued to talk about what jobs are in each sector of the fashion industry including media, retail, creative/art director and marketing communications. There were some jobs mentioned that I had never really considered or known that much about

08/10/13 - Introduction to Adobe Photoshop
On the Tuesday morning we had a lecture introducing us to Adobe photoshop, we went over the basic tools, from my graphics A-level this was just a recap to me but was still helpful as it has been a little while since I last used it.
Then in our seminar we played around with different images with the theme Ornate on photoshop, resizing, changing the shape & changing the colours of the images.

10/10/13 - Semiotics
We watched a documentary called 'The Eye Has To Travel' which is about Diana Vreeland who was a noted columnist and editor in the field of fashion. She worked for fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and as a special consultant at the Costume Institute of the Metropoliton Museum of Art.
It was really interesting in how she got into the world of fashion, it's a shame that it isn't possible for that to still happen now! I love the quote from the daily mail which is 'The original devil wears Prada' because after watching the documentary I would have to agree!

In the seminar later on we finished watching the last 20mins of the film and then we got into our seminar task which was about semiotics. We were asked to bring an image that was related to the brand we had been given, my brand is Maharishi so I had an image of urban artwork. We had a few different exercises to do, the main words I brought out from this image were urban, graffiti, busy, complex, urban lifestyle, city landscape and architecture. 

11/10/13 - What is a brand?

In our lecture Si talked about what is a brand? I liked the quote featured in the lecture which says; 

'Products are made in the factory, brands are made in the mind'

He talked about the purpose of branding, good branding, consumers first look priorities and the 6 W's which are what, who, why, when, where, (w) how.

Then in our seminar we had a pub quiz on brands, our group came 3rd overall. It was interesting as he got us to guess brands from colours they use, music in their adverts, quotes and more! It showed how well some brands advertise and how others don't do it as successfully.  

Week 1

30/09/13 - Introduction/Pre-arrival Task

Now that freshers week is over I have officially started my course 'Fashion Communication and Promotion' at Nottingham Trent University.

The first lecture we had was an overall briefing of our first module which is called 'Visual Awareness' and for this my module leader is Angi Fletcher, we were also introduced to all the other staff that we will have in the duration of the entire course. We were also told many facts and figures about the current fashion world, for example how much it is bringing into the economy. 

Then for our seminar later that day we presented our pre-arrival tasks to smaller groups where we discussed about our 3 favourite fashion communicators in each of these categories; retail, digital and print form. I noted down many twitter and blog accounts that people found particularly good that I had never heard of, so once I got back I could follow them too.

For retail my favourites were Harrods shop windows, Jack Wills interiors and Ted Baker's shop windows. For printed my favourites were Company magazine, Urban Outfitters A/W 2013 lookbook and Topshop's student discount ad card. Then finally for digital my favourites were Marmalade, Wonderful You and Fashion Rocks My Socks.

1/10/13 - Pinterest/Street Style

On the Tuesday we had a lovely presentation about Pinterest by Tim. I already occasionally used Pinterest but I still learnt a bunch of ideas and other ways of using the website. Since then I have been using Pinterest more often looking at images for inspiration but am yet to use this website to the maximum. 

During freshers week we had been assigned a Street Style task in groups where we went around Nottingham taking photos of people who had a unique style and then edit these photos and put them onto a specific Pinterest page. In our seminar we had to present our Board - which you can find here - we were asked questions about how we found going around taking the photos as well as if we noticed any particular trends, which we had. There was a lot of plaid patterns being used in many different garments and we also noticed a beauty trend of dark dyed hair with a full fringe. 

I personally really enjoyed this task, I have no problem approaching people, I enjoy photography and of course love style! 

3/10/13 - Visual Research Methods

The lecture we had this day was about Visual Research Methods, the main focus was on using and creating moodboards. They mentioned the key elements of a moodboard which included colour palette, theme of research, materials & media, design equation, key words & text, market and styling. The powerpoint also included telling us the best places to go to collect inspiration from to create moodboards and also talked about the best ways to layout and compose our moodboards, for example there is no need to cover the entire page 'less is more', using varied scales of images and make it visually stimulating. At the end we were simply shown many moodboards all in different themes, styles and formats.

For our seminar that day we created our own moodboards which represented our favourite brand or designer. I chose Elie Saab and used materials from magazines, I went with the colour red as in his recent collection he had a collection of red dresses. I also used words and other images that to me represent his designs without using any images of his actual work.

4/10/13 - What Is Fashion Marketing?

We had a lecture with Si about fashion marketing, we went over the basics about how it's analytical, targeted, personal, persuasive, conversational, timely, immediate, responsive and human. He also talked about the 7 P's which are;

• Product - market, competition, style, colour, trend
• Price - value, expectation, availability
• Place - location, distribution, service
• Promotion - brand DNA, consumer, location
• People - 3rd parties, media, employees
• Process - system, research, purchase
• Physical Evidence - experience, reassurance, trial, attitude, innovation

In the lecture there was a specific quote that I liked which said

Fashion is a factory that manufactures desire - Bruno Remaury

Then in the seminar in groups we chose a brand, one unrelated to fashion and discussed how they use the 7 P's, our group chose MAC the cosmetic company and then after discussing each groups chosen brand together we then chose a fashion brand and did the same process, our group chose Vivienne Westwood. We noticed that there were cross overs of using similar techniques of marketing between the different brands yet being in different markets.