Marketing Communication Mix: A Study of H&M Communication Strategy

Brands talk!

Have you ever thought how brands choose specific voices, tones and tools to talk about themselves, their products and services, values and purpose? I have! And somehow subconsciously I have always felt that it is a result of deliberate planning and decision-making.

To learn more, I decided to look at communication strategies used by H&M to see how they “speak” with their audience.

H&M Communication Strategy

Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), a multinational fast-fashion company which was founded in Sweden in 1947 and operates today in 75 countries. H&M uses a variety of communication tools which would be interesting to analyze.

H&M Communication tools include:

Advertising

Advertising is a marketing tactic that involves paying for a space to promote a product or service. Advertising lets businesses reach broader audiences by delivering controlled messages, but is characterized by low credibility. Before H&M as any other retailer focused a lot on traditional ads. But a H&M advertising strategy has changed a lot since then.

In 2021, H&M closed its store on the Aleksanterinkatu street in the center of Helsinki. In total during the same year the brand planned to close 215 brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. The company’s move to online can be explained by increased digitalization and changing customer behavior. Therefore, it was hard for me to find H&M’s traditional advertisements on TV, print, radio or ambient as most of their activities are largely online today.

However, I found one ad on the tram stop in Helsinki next to the Stockmann store. It was a so-called transit shelter display. With such a central location, H&M tries to reach as many as possible passers-by and show off the brand’s latest collection. However, it is hard to measure if such ads have an influence on sales and if consumers pay attention and believe them.

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion can be defined as an incentive to encourage consumers to buy now instead of at some point in the future. The goal of sales promotion is to generate an immediate sale by offering buyers some additional value. Sales promotions can be value-increasing and value-adding and H&M uses both.

Value-increasing promotions change the quantity of the product or lower the price. In the H&M store I took a picture of a sales promotion where consumers were encouraged to buy three pieces of clothing and pay only for two. Other value-increasing promotions used by the brand include money-off coupons (buy for 200 € and get 4 € discount on the next purchase); interest-credit (shop now-pay later in cooperation with Klarna); multipacks and others.

Value-adding promotions offer something extra, but the product and its price remain unchanged. One of the examples could be collaborations that H&M has with high-end fashion designers. In 2021, the brand released a collection with Simone Rocha. It took place in H&M stores and online and sold out quickly as any other H&M’s collection with famous designers. Customers are happy to buy clothing from luxury designers with fast-fashion price tags.

Personal Selling

We all know what personal selling means and that it can have a huge impact on our buying decisions. For me it is one of the trickiest communication tools as you never know and cannot be for 100% sure that communication with a salesperson ends in purchase. There are too many unknowns in the equation.

HubSpot defines personal selling is a direct communication between a salesperson and a potential customer that typically takes place in person, over email, phone or video.

When I visited H&M store for the sake of the research, I was approached by a sales assistant that asked if she could be of any help. But I said that I was just “browsing”. It made me realize that I did not remember when I needed help from salespeople in stores. On the contrary, I would prefer if they did not approach me, and we met only at the cashier desk or even never if they had a self-service checkout. I think that today customers know better what they want and often make some research before buying anything.

In addition to that I personally do not understand the concept of selling over phone. Especially today when there are so many phone scams and fraud. But energy and newspaper companies still do a lot of selling over phone.

As for H&M’s approach to personal selling, I would say that sales assistants are always present at the store but give customers time and space to do shopping. I think this formula works as they do not bother independent buyers but are ready to help if needed.

Public Relations

Businesses do not exist alone, but on the contrary in constant interactions with individuals, organizations and media. To develop and maintain these relationships, companies make use of public relations known shortly as PR. In other words, with the help of PR businesses are trying to convince an audience to promote their idea, purchase their product, support their position, or recognize their accomplishments.

While reading the Marketing Communication book by Fill and Turnbull, I have come to the conclusion that PR has a lot in common with word-of-mouth marketing. They are both highly credible, but brands have little control over them.

H&M uses PR for various purposes. One of them is to create narratives to build their reputation. As H&M is a fast-fashion brand and fast-fashion is often blamed for being bad for the planet, the brand regularly publishes their initiatives to create a more sustainable fashion future. One of the H&M environmental-friendly projects is transforming plastic bottle waste from Indonesian islands into recycled polyester.

With this PR activity, the brand wants to show off their efforts in battling marine pollution as well as decreasing the footprint of their products. But the main goal is to change the attitude of consumers towards the brand from “bad” to “caring” about the planet.

Another situation when PR is widely used is responding to some bad news related with the brand. The famous story when H&M was widely criticized for an image where a black child model was wearing a hoodie with the text “coolest monkey in the jungle”.

H&M faced backlash for lack of awareness and racism. They released a statement which said that “We are deeply sorry that the picture was taken, and we also regret the actual print” and “Therefore, we have not only removed the image from our channels, but also the garment from our product offering globally.” So, H&M tried to formulate the best response and mitigate any possible damage.

Digital Marketing

When people search for some information on Google, the result page that they see is called the search engine result page (SERP). SERP can be divided into two main categories: organic search results and paid search results.

To rank higher in the organic search result and appear on the first page, businesses use several tools and techniques to optimize their website. This is search engine optimization or SEO shortly. On the other hand, there is paid search results when ranking depends on bidding on specific keywords. Search engine marketing includes both SEO and paid search.

When I tried to use Google to find blue jeans, on the first SERP there was not any results from clothing companies at all. In the ad section, there was advertisement from the BlueJeans company, a virtual event host business. It followed by the song Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey. The first organic search result came again from the same online hosting company BlueJeans. And only at the bottom of the page there was a link to the company Bubbleroom selling jeans.

I think the result can be explained by the fact that I am located in Finland and clothing brands adjust their SEO and Google Ads in a way so that Finnish is the language they use for SEM. And I think it is reasonable as Finnish is principal language in Finland.

It was interesting to look at SERP in Finnish as well and I searched for “siniset farkut”. In the paid ads sections, I did not see any results from H&M. It means that either H&M does not bid for this keyword or does not bid enough in comparison to their competitors.

For some it might be a problem, but in my opinion paid ads are good only in the short run: they bring traffic while you pay. When you stop paying, traffic goes to zero. However, it is surprising that such a big company with a huge marketing department does not appear in paid ads. I do not know if it is done on purpose, but it is definitely not what I expected.

To improve PPC, I would first of all to check what is the ultimate goal. I would also suggest looking at keywords and their relevance. I am sure that H&M has tools to check what keywords their competitors use. After that they could come up with a new list of keywords they want to bid. Then I would probably check copies and make small changes in texts. And generally, I believe in constant experimentation with a clear goal in mind. I would do constant testing to see if my PPC is improving.

In the organic search, the brand came second which means they get visitors from that link every day. However, SEO might seem to be a better and cheaper solution, but it requires a lot of effort and money to get high ranking which includes building authority, search for right keywords, content writing, design, coding etc.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is a personalized communication with a consumer with the intention to deliver them a personal message and build relationships based on responses to those direct messages. Direct marketing could happen over phone, in a letter or email.

Retargeting is marketing to those consumers who have already shown interest in your business. For example, if a user checks your website but does not buy anything, after some time while browsing on some other sites he/she could be offered an ad that reminds them about your business.

H&M uses remarketing and after I started my assignment and interacted with their website and social media, I received an email that showcased their new bathroom collection.

Besides, as I regularly buy something from them, H&M sent me an email and offered an early access to their seasonal sale.

As ads are blocked on my browser, so I was not served any ads from H&M or their competitors.

However, I searched for some remarketing examples and found that H&M uses Facebook remarketing. They also show YouTube ads and send follow-up email for abandoned carts.

Communication is essential for any business. Communication is used not only to sell products and services, but also raise awareness, solve disputes and issues, stimulate word-of-mouth and build long-term relationships.

To communicate with consumers, organizations and media, companies use numerous tools that vary in the ability to reach a broader audience and deliver a personalized message, in credibility, costs and the scope of control.

The research about H&M let me see how big businesses utilize communication tools. And I have come to the conclusion that to succeed on the market businesses need to adapt their communication to the new marketing landscape and changing buying behavior.

Digital marketing communication is predominant today, but traditional communication tools are also important as they all work to improve engagement and interaction with the audience.

Thank you for reading. Leave a comment or contact me to talk more about the article or any topic that is interesting to you!