Branding in Creative Industries: Iran's Fashion Clothing Industry

Fashion is a subset of creative industries and has roots in the culture of a region. In Iran, despite the long history of the textile industry and clothing production, a limited number of brands in the fashion industry have been able to get promoted to strong brands at home or abroad. Most foreign fashion products find their way into Iran through either official or smuggling imports. Unfortunately, there are also domestic manufacturers who, despite the good quality of their products, sell them domestically with foreign Hem Tags, the act that can be translated as a sign of the lack of strong domestic brands in the Iranian garment industry. What are the problems of fashion branding in Iran? What factors have weakened branding in this country? What are the steps of the branding process in this industry, how should the branding of mass and luxury fashion styles be done in this industry, and what are the differences in branding details? The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive model of branding.

The present study tries to provide a comprehensive model for the Iranian fashion industry by reviewing the existing literature and theories, as well as conducting semi-structured interviews with the country’s experts and specialists, and also adopting the method of Multi-Grounding Theory. The researchers adopted Snowball sampling methods and carried out interviews until reaching a theoretical saturation.

The data was analyzed by MAQXDA software and 744 codes, 255 concepts, and 10 categories were extracted. Also, 88 articles, books, reports and etc were reviewed. The required data for this study were gathered via conducting interviews.

According to the achieved results, branding in the fashion industry includes three major stages of pre-branding, branding, and post-branding, while this study explored eight steps of branding, including 1) branding requirements, 2) branding opportunities, 3) branding challenges, 4) brand identity, 5) brand positioning, 6) application of appropriate marketing tools and blends, 7) brand evaluation, and 8) growth. The remaining two categories are about the difference between luxury fashion branding, mass branding, and the order of branding steps.