Building Strong Customer Relations: A Love, Bonito Marketing Case Study
Love, Bonito doesn’t just sell clothes, Love, Bonito sells empowerment, confidence, and a sense of community. Started as a small blogshop back in 2010, this homegrown fashion label has grown into a multimillion-dollar brand, also operating in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Hong Kong.
In a saturated market of homegrown fashion labels, how did Love, Bonito differentiate themselves and grow to become an international brand?
Diving deeper into Love, Bonito’s marketing strategies, we found that their core lies in one thing — the emphasis on connecting with their customers. Love, Bonito is especially adept in building strong customer relationships, which gives them a strong competitive advantage that competitors cannot take away. So what are some strategies that allowed them to achieve this? Here are some lessons we can learn from Love, Bonito.
1. Market your products as part of a big idea and be consistent with it
Using a big idea to position your brand or product can offer a competitive advantage and provide customers with unique value when they engage with your brand.
Love, Bonito believes in empowering women through fashion to discover, embrace, and be the best version of themselves. This idea is apparent throughout all its customer touchpoints and manifested through their community talks, workshops, and even 1-on-1 styling sessions that strive to inspire and empower their customers in embracing themselves and being more confident.
Hence, to better position your brand, remember that it is important to attach a bigger value or idea behind what you do!
2. Be truly interested in engaging with your customers
Stronger customer relations are established when customers feel the genuine desire of the brand to connect with them.
Customers should not be treated as sales leads but valued as partners who help the brand flourish. It is important to engage frequently with your customers to understand them and their needs and wants at a deeper level.
For example, Love, Bonito has an engaged community on social media that often shares their feedback and experiences with Love, Bonito and each other. Love, Bonito also features customers decked up in LB in their OOTD pictures on their accounts, showing their styles that act as inspiration for other LB customers too.
Love, Bonito also runs various community events for talks and discussions on topics such as motherhood. Customers are also engaged through styling workshops that help women translate their LB clothes into confidence and style.
3. Build an omnichannel to target customers at different touch-points
An omnichannel strategy enhances customers’ experience by providing a seamless shopping experience, regardless of their preferred shopping method.
Despite starting out as an e-commerce label, Love, Bonito has since opened four physical stores in Singapore, with many other stores in other countries. No matter how much physical retail has dwindled over the years due to the exponential rise of e-commerce, Love, Bonito recognises that brick-and-mortar stores are still integral to the shopping experience as nothing can replace the feeling of actually touching and experiencing the product in person. Having a physical presence can also help increase brand exposure to potential customers.
To reach customers, Love, Bonito also uses many online channels, such as social media, website, email, and even chat-commerce in Indonesia. Integrating these channels together, that are updated and targeted according to a customer’s engagement with the brand throughout all channels, forms a seamless shopping experience across all channels.
For example, Love, Bonito makes it possible for customers to shop in their physical stores, on their website, and even on social media. On Instagram, customers can browse their products, get recommended related products and even add products to their wishlist. Customers can also view the product on their website to make purchases or view more information with the click of a button, making their channels connected for optimal customer convenience.
Therefore, the brand experience should be consistent across all channels, which should be integrated to enhance the overall customer experience.
We hope that you have taken away some tips on how to build strong customer relationships from Love, Bonito. With that, there are still many different marketing strategies that you can adopt! Feel free to follow us on social media @socreate.sg to discover more marketing tips, and email us at socreate.sg@gmail.com to engage our services to better market your social enterprise!