Personal Branding in The Context of Network Economy: Chiara Ferragni’s Case

Abstract

Some individuals achieved so much fame and notoriety to establish themselves as crucial reference points for consumers, fundamental spaces for “the production and circulation of fashion discourse”. This exponentially growing phenomenon revolutionized the marketing industry and the concept of fashion industry itself: fashion bloggers have been included in the institutional system of fashion, beside the traditional media industry and considered together with the fashion journalism (Pedroni, 2014).

Introduction

Interpersonal and virtual communication through social networks today play a fundamental role for one's personal and professional success. We live in an age in which we are in continuous communication with others and relationships have increasingly become online connections. Knowing how to interact effectively with others and being able to interact with everyone are the keys to professional success and personnel well-being.

Today we want to improve and expand communication skills through strategic communication in order to facilitate the achievement of our goals, as it becomes increasingly necessary to do marketing of oneself by differentiating ourselves from others.

Personal branding is therefore the reputation we create on the web, all that we do with the Internet, on social networks, on forums and the values ​​we communicate through the web that help us portray a beautiful image of us online.

In the first part of this paper I will try to explain what Personal Branding is and what advantages it allows to reach; in the second part I will briefly introduce the case study of effective use of social media of one particular Italian woman who has put herself in a short time on the international scene: Chiara Ferragni.

Chiara Ferragni is widely confirmed in the online world as in offline life and has had success with her personal Brand. Her story can make us think that if we respect the Network laws, any business can be successfully affirmed.

Personal Branding: How to Become “Someone”

Personal Branding is an activity that, consciously or not, all of us have been doing for a long time. Entrepreneur Tom Peters, CEO of FastCompany and author of the article 'The brand called YOU' coined the term Personal Branding for the first time in 1997 meaning, with this terminology, the art in knowing how to build your own personal Brand. It is therefore possible to define the Personal Branding phenomenon as the capacity of each of us to do marketing of himself, in a context where the word Brand is no more intended as corporate brand but personal. Doing Personal Branding means you must therefore be able to positively influence people with respect to the perception of the Personal Brand.

Building your own online identity starts with choosing a name: of imagination or easily attributable to us. In this sense, 'Real name' policies promoted by Facebook and Google push towards the continuity between online and offline identity. The name with which you make yourself known online is also the first step towards building one's personal reputation.

The first examples of self-presentation were the chats and blogs which used textual communication. To these the SNS are added today, that take advantage of the interactive features of 2.0Web. Personal home pages are the first method of online presentation of the Self, described as 'carefully controlled performances through which the presentation of Self occurs in optimal conditions'.

Social networking means rebuilding and developing a business, an online social network, using digital tools such as social media by adding friends, clients or colleagues and sharing with them various types of information. A user can fill out a personal profile, add multimedia content and decide what to share and how to interact with other participants in the network, especially in view of a possible job opportunity, in many social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn that give the possibility to 'become friend” with agencies and companies that otherwise would not have been known in offline life.

The strategy of Personal Branding in social networks is based precisely on the definition of our strengths and successfully and effectively communicating them to others by answering to these questions: Who am I? What can I do? How can I do it? What are my strengths and what do I offer? Why am I better or different than my competitors? In this sense, “Personal Branding is not self-promotion, understood in the negative form of the term, instead it means increasing the value of what you do”3. Branding is intended to differentiate products, services, companies and people; based on the concept of singularity, it has the goal of creating in the minds of consumers the idea that nothing similar exists on the market.

The multiple opportunities currently available, both for the transmission of information and for the intermediation and interaction, gave birth to the 2.0 Web era, a state of continuous evolution of the World Wide Web. That’s why the use of social media for work and reputation is now a necessity which is no longer reserved only for companies but is primarily intended for individuals: the real protagonists of the web and of our interconnected era. In the digital economy of the modern web, the interconnections between people are endless, the information available is global and comes with a very wide assortment, but at the same time they are poorly controlled or controllable. “Internet today offers many possibilities to optimize and make known our brand: it allows us to control the dissemination of our image online, thanks to special instruments; to protect our image and our brand identity and to obtain working contacts.”

It is essential to turn to market niches because in this way there are greater chances that the Brand will be known by the public, but not only, in this way the Brander has more time to learn how to manage the own business and prepare for the mass market by gradually affirming its own presence. An equally important element to stimulate awareness of the brand is through networking and talking to people both in the offline context, for example using the workplace, as in the online chat with the members of the Network.

Through social networks we have become accustomed to sharing information with friends and relatives, removing the initial idea of ​​the internet as 'not place'. We have represented ourselves on the Net with the same credentials we have offline, by putting out many aspects of our private life, although we represent multiple aspects of our social identity or face.

In 2014 Facebook has launched a new app called Rooms, a forum of discussion where relationships, contacts, names are no longer important: people exist because their interests exist and not their physical characteristics. The purpose of these rooms is to return to share your thoughts with people who have the same interests as you. A return to anonymity therefore, which represents a decisive step back towards the past. The chats accessed by nickname are back, and they can’t be restricted or controlled in any way. A system that, at the time of the Facebook profiles anchored to names and individuals, seemed to have gone out of use. According to Facebook’s explanation of Rooms at launch, the feature is different from group chats because it’s focused on chatting around specific topics with people you may or may not know. Group chats, meanwhile, are only generally joined by family and friends you do know.

Now judging by how little the “new” application is known, even though it has been launched five years ago, and by the fact that is currently running only in a few English speaker countries and not globally, we can assume that “the face” matters more than ever in our society. That’s why social media is being dominated by apps that allow the display of user’s identity with images. People predominantly show rather than tell on Social Networking Sites. One of the reasons why Instagram has become so popular is indeed the fact that “image prominence provides for the users’ preference of showing their lifestyle rather than explaining its characteristics” (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin 2008), reinforcing norms and habits that are only known to insiders.

A Salad Worth $11 Million

The identity of Chiara Ferragni was born with the blog The Blonde Salad (in 2009) which, initially, it was configured as a diary orchestrated around a precise 'essence', namely the passion for fashion, which invests Ferragni’s 'mediatized' everyday life. Already in 2015, Chiara becomes a Harvard case study at Harvard Business School, enters the FORBES list 30 under 30 and in 2017 the same institution nominates her as the most powerful influencer of the world. Today her net worth is $11 Million.

Image has a predominant role precisely because of the nature of the blog which proposes fashion products valued by a person who does not just present clothes and accessories in static poses, typical of fashion magazines, but which proposes almost an enactment, in which the attitude and experiential dimensions play an essential role.

Starting from 2013, TBS Crew Srl company (nowadays a team of 28 people), built in 2011 by Chiara Ferragni with Riccardo Pozzoli, co-founder and CEO, evolves with the entry of Alessio Sonzogni. The team starts a careful selection process of collaborations with well-known brands, all studied in a long-term perspective. In order to enhance the bond between them and Chiara, who becomes more and more famous, they do for some of them garments and accessories in limited edition, sold in the e-commerce section of their website.

We therefore gradually witness a rethinking of the blog that over time turns into a lifestyle magazine (which touches topics such as fashion, trends, celebrity's looks and beauty): “an inspirational platform (integrated by an e-commerce service) whose social media marketing is aimed at promoting partner companies following a strategy that we define camouflage marketing, or the camouflage of the advertising message in the everyday life of influencers '(Terracciano, 2017, p.32)

This renewal is also reflected in the blog logo that is no longer identified by the photo of Chiara immersed in a bathtub full of salad, to visually represent the content 'blonde salad' (which, according to Ferragni means that the blog is 'a salad of me. The ingredients will be those that always have me distinguished: fashion, photography, travel and lifestyle '), but with a neon pink writing that evokes an American style logo. A choice that reflects the new path undertaken by the platform that is the result of a teamwork in which Ferragni has the role of creative director. Moreover, as Pozzoli notes, “today the outfits blogs are outdated, thanks to Instagram, which allowed the phenomenon of micro-blogging and the birth of influencers. The blogging on the platform still exists, but the contents must be much more complex than a simple photo of a look'.

The Chiara Ferragni brand gives its name, starting in 2010, to a line of footwear, and then expands to items of clothing and accessories (which you can find in the first flagship store opened in Milan, in 2017 in a strategic position in the heart of Porta Nuova, an area with a high density of important fashion brands).

Unlike broadcast television, the new media are an arena of confrontation and participation, of creativity that comes from everyone. Among these are the smartphones that, being 'Mobile', allow users to immortalize / save every moment of their life, while they are happening, thus producing a visible memory consisting of instants, isolated fragments captured by the camera in constant motion. Meanwhile 'personal photographs contained in past albums were rare and therefore precious, today instead, digital photographs are simply experienced as tools for sharing emotions with others'. Instagram is configured as a sort of constellation of communities. In which the community built by Chiara Ferragni, has nearly seventeen million followers. Its success is undoubtedly attributable to the independence it expresses with respect to official trends, which they come from the fashion industry, and therefore makes it closer to the public.

Chiara Ferragni's 'reachable fashion' (Terracciano, 2017) becomes the commercial product around whom revolves the narrative conveyed by Instagram. Ferragni subjectivizes the garments she wears giving them their own emotions, thanks also to the captions in which she frequently expresses euphoric moods such as: 'so excited', 'so happy ',' love that top ',' such a cute look ',' so proud of ',' what an awesome collection'; helped in this also by the facial expressions that convey joy and genuine satisfaction.

Fashion magazine models are beautiful, but most of them seem to remain distant, ethereal, and display an icy beauty while Chiara summons her followers with a friendly 'hi guys', almost inviting them to take part in her private life. This convocation, among other things, provokes a mobilization of the sensitivity of the followers expressed through the “like”.

As Chiara explains: “I used to mix and match Chanel bags with Zara or H&M clothes. My followers always liked this because they could see how cool a cheap sweater can look when you wear it well. It was something they could really relate to” (Keinan et al. 2015). As she suggests, it is very important for a follower to be able to relate to her personal style which shows her as a wearer of both high end and high street labels. By showing her audience typical outputs, she gave her followers tools to recognize her personal style and thus create a relationship with them. As Ferragni says: “Instagram became the most used instrument in the fashion industry almost overnight” (Keinan et al. 2015) and as a result she could not express herself on the blog anymore with pictures of her daily life. Indeed, when she used Instagram for these kinds of snapshots, “everyone got used to seeing food pictures, ‘what I just bought’ pictures, and ‘should I buy this’ pictures” (Keinan et al. 2015). Ferragni thus became globally known for her personal style and typical lifestyle content.

As fashion bloggers become successful, like Ferragni with her blog ‘The Blonde Salad’, they will choose their own identity over the objective of storytelling and thus choose to provide for their audience’s needs. Ferragni, therefore, has outgrown her blog as an individual. This shows that being authentic, e.a. having i. a palpable sense of truthful self-expression, ii. a connection with and responsiveness to the audience, iii. an honest engagement with commodity goods and brands (Marwick 2015) is indeed crucial. Still, “measuring authenticity is difficult as being authentic is a social construct which is relative and context-dependent” (Grazian 2003, Marwick 2015). And thus, the fashion blogger identity as such only exists to a certain extent. Instagram accounts of fashion bloggers such as Chiara Ferragni show that there are rules for becoming a successful fashion blogger. But more important than these rules is the personal relationship a fashion blogger has with his/her audience. Chiara Ferragni from ‘The Blonde Salad’ shows that by being an authentic fashion blogger she has not only created a successful blog but also that she, as an individual, has exceeded it.

Conclusions

Personal marketing is the process by which one person can be positioned in a distinctive way on the market within his profession and career, so it must be based on values (idealism, interior strength, courage, perseverance, trust and determination) and must have determined personal characteristics (self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, innovation collaboration, openness and systemic thinking).

Personal Branding represents a change of perspective from what you perceive of yourself to what others perceive about you: a sort of humanization of us on the web. Each of us is the owner of our own name and surname: some, through use of new technologies, succeed in transforming their own into a Brand to be exhibited on the market. Therefor Personal Branding is accessible to everyone, from freelancers, subjects with the desire to develop their own professional activity, subjects wishing to change profession or those who are in search of employment, to subjects satisfied with their professional activity, but eager to improve it.

The best Personal Brand is born when the subject decides to get out from his comfort zone, carry out a SWOT analysis identifying in this way his strengths and weaknesses (fundamental for being able to define the identity), the opportunities for growth and the threats of the sector in which he/she has the pleasure of affirming his/her own brand: Ferragni’s reported case is the perfect example.

It is of course essential to be competent in the field in which we want to affirm the Brand but not only, reputation also affects the business, which is why it is important that the Personal Brander tries to work on personal awareness, on expression of himself and on the creation of relationships.

The most complex phases of Personal Branding are not so much those of identification and development but of maintenance over time. In this regard it is essential to be always up to date and try to continually increase the skills. If we think that each of us only through our personal name and surname is in possession of a potential Brand, our very own brand, we can already imagine the amount of competition that we have to face in order to affirm ours, but it is precisely in this case that nonconformity is the key to success because if you are able to stand out and therefore to diversify from the mass specializing on a topic and offering original content, the success of your personal brand is assured.

References

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