Social Listening: Chrome Hearts

The brand I chose for my social listening post is Chrome Hearts. Chrome Hearts is a luxury fashion brand that started in Hollywood California. The brand makes high class clothing, jewelry, furniture, and other accessories. 

The brand has been gaining recent popularity in the fashion community due to the quality of the materials and the craftsmanship of the pieces. Nowadays the brand is popular among fashion influencers with the punk and rock aesthetic due to the leathers, crosses, and spikes involved in the garments and accessories. One of the main appeals of Chrome Hearts is the limited stock aspect of the products. The way the brand makes pieces is by coming out with seasonal collections with limited stock to increase the desire for the product due to the limited quantity. The company is also a popular resale brand. Since so much of the brands catalog is such limited quantity people will buy products and then resell them for much more. 

The value proposition of this brand is that it is a high quality fashion brand that handmakes all of the garments. The brand offers the highest quality clothes and accessories to the subculture of people that are into the punk side of the fashion world. 

The marketing strategy of the brand is only earned media. The brand started out in a garage and eventually musicians and celebrities saw the quality of their leatherwork so they all went to Chrome Hearts and then would wear the brand at shows or events and this is how the brand got to be seen. The brand has never done any ad campaigns or anything, it has all been earned media. They do have social media but use it in a unique way that you will see below. 

This is the company's Instagram page. All the posts on their page contribute to the aesthetic of the brand. The Instagram page of the brand symbolizes their entire marketing strategy in a way because they don't do any advertising and this is their only presence online. This could be seen as their biggest downfall, however it is the opposite. The brand's identity is that it appeals to those who want high fashion however don't want the association of a large name brand with overbranded clothing. 

When looking through the comments on their Instagram posts, people are just talking about how good the last collection was and how they want information on the next collection and here we can see just how well the antimarketing approach of the brand is working. 

Moving on to the company's twitter, they apply almost the same approach just with even less posts and engagement. 

Again the whole point of the posts seems to just be promoting the aesthetic of the brand. One could see the low engagement numbers on the posts and think that the brand just has bad online marketing but again this just contributes to their mystery. 

                                                                                            

                                       

Here are some of the very few comments we see on the company Instagram just showing that even though they barely do anything on the Instagram people are still hooked and wanting more. To add to their brand identity and style with marketing they don't respond to any comments or anything. A lot of brands rely on customer interaction but again this brand just does things different and doesn't need to respond or interact with customers to keep them attached to their brand. 

If I were the brand manager I would not change a thing. What they have done is revolutionary and is so unique to them that it can almost not be mimicked by other companies trying to get in on what they have going on. The beauty is that they are doing so well only off of earned media making this brand a very interesting case study. 

From this assignment I learned that sometimes the common ways to market with social media aren't the only ways to market a business and sometimes doing the opposite works better for the company.