Oscar de la Renta – Social Media Innovators

Oscar de la Renta is maybe not a brand you would expect to see interacting on social media because they are a luxury brand. Maybe social media would be beneath the creators of thousand-dollar clothing pieces? On the contrary, Oscar de le Renta utilizes social media and has been at the forefront of strategy and presence on social media platforms. At the beginning of their social media ventures they utilized live streaming, a dedicated social media persona account (OscarPR girl), sample giveaways, and crowd sourced photo coverage of events (Inkvik, 2011).

Oscar de la Renta realized that they needed to utilize social media to keep up with the changing times and trends. At first they did not believe that they would sell their products online. Once they realized that it would be a necessity they knew their marketing would also have to take to the online world. They were one of the first companies to live stream a fashion collection reveal. This was in 2011 and they also took questions live from Facebook and Twitter. Their main goal with this tactic was engagement. It wasn’t clear whether or not the live streaming led to sales but they could clearly see that interested consumers were highly engaged with their brand through their participation in the live streams (Inkvik, 2011).

The OscarPRgirl campaign gave a face and personality to the brand. Oscar PR girl, Erika Bearman, gathered over 300,000 followers and made them feel like insiders to the brand. She brought the followers backstage at fashion shows, introduced them to models, took them on celebrity press tours, and to Mr. de la Renta’s home. For a while, this campaign led a ‘character tweet’ trend in the fashion world, where a single person would use their voice to represent a brand (So Long, 2015).   

One of the main challenges for Oscar de la Renta was learning about ecommerce itself so that they could in turn learn how to best use social media to market. Originally they were treating ecommerce as an extension of their brick and mortar stores. They soon realized that ecommerce played by different rules and quickly reacted to form an ecommerce branch in their marketing department. One of the successful campaigns this branch ran was the launching of a new perfume through sample giveaways to their Facebook followers. They were surprised by the success and sales it led to. Engagement has been the main thing they are pursuing. Making the consumer feel like an important asset to the brand is a way they breed loyalty, like when they ask their fans to send in photos from events to use as official brand coverage (Inkvik, 2011). The hope is this loyalty will convert to sales.

In 2011, Oscar de la Renta was already realizing that the conversation they were having with consumers through social media would be changing their product offering (Inkvik, 2011). They used many innovative strategies to enter the social media landscape, meeting with their successes and challenges. Nine years have passed since the writing of their entry into the world of social media and I would be interested to learn more about the evolution of their tactics to respond to consumer interactions and feedback. Also I’d like to learn more about how they gauge if a social media campaign was successful and if their brand is still valuing in-print marketing more than digital (Inkvik, 2011).

Works Cited