The New Rules for Effective Marketing

Today’s fashion and beauty marketing teams face mounting pressure to deliver growth in a slow market.

Inflation and years of significant price hikes have reshaped shopping behaviour, with 73 percent of US Gen-Z consumers reporting shifts in spending habits because of increased prices, according to The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company’s The State of Fashion 2025 report — making value-driven storytelling vital to marketing strategies.

To this end, creative is a powerful asset for marketing teams, yet measuring its impact often feels complex and opaque. According to Cannes Lions, brands that embrace creative risk are 33 percent more likely to achieve long-term revenue growth. However, research from Ekimetrics and YouTube shows that 81 percent of creative campaigns still fail to follow best practices — underscoring the gap between creative ambition and execution.

Meanwhile, media channels continue to evolve and proliferate, making an effective cross-channel strategy increasingly complex to execute — particularly as many are still emerging, underutilised or harder to measure.

In September, BoF published a knowledge report entitled The CMO Brief: What’s Driving Results in Fashion and Beauty Marketing, in partnership with Ekimetrics — a leading tech-enabled data science firm which has supported over 50 fashion and beauty brands to pioneer the use of advanced analytics and AI to improve marketing effectiveness.

The report shared insights from CMOs at Calvin Klein, Tod’s Group, American Eagle, Rare Beauty and Merit, alongside experts and analysts from WGSN and Merkle, to unpack the greatest challenges and opportunities facing the marketing function across the fashion and beauty industries today — and how to leverage Ekimetrics’ success measurement frameworks for best practice.

To add further strategic advice for marketeers looking to optimise their creative, channel and pricing strategies, BoF’s senior content strategy associate Annabel Bolton was joined by Ekimetrics partner Sona Abaryan, J. Crew CMO Julia Collier, and BoF’s director of content strategy, Alice Gividen.

Below, BoF shares key takeaways and actionable advice from the discussion.

Experiment With Untapped Channels to Stand Out

As media channels are expanding and fragmenting consumer attention, brands have no choice but to experiment to cut through the noise. For Abaryan, when choosing a new channel to practice, standard marketing principles still apply. Each new platform should fit the brand, its audience and the brand’s objective with that platform.

The common challenge, she said, is that brands often don’t have the measurement set up to say “Yes, that campaign did its job” and track its success in terms of sales. She advises brands to allocate a dedicated budget to experimentation once they know where the majority of their marketing spend will deliver results.

That experimentation budget can also be leveraged for businesses as they scale investment, Abaryan added. “Let’s say you’re spending 5 percent of your investment in YouTube and it has a really strong ROI,” she said. “The way you might experiment next is to say, let me increase that by another 20 percent and see if the ROI is holding until you get to a moment where the marginal return is better used elsewhere and you know that’s the optimal level for that channel.”

Keeping some consistency in creative is really valuable. We see the ROI hit its optimal the second or even the third time it [a campaign] is run.

—  Sona Abaryan, Partner at Ekimetrics

Gividen, the report’s co-author, noted that in addition to sports sponsorship and retail media networks, marketers should also consider influencer marketing’s expansion into new channels. “Reddit, Discord or Substack are places where consumers gather for feedback and where brands’ relationships with their customers thrive,” she said. “There is so much opportunity here for brands.”

In-person events should also be considered effective “channels” for engagement — and viewed as an opportunity to bring communities together, according to Collier. “I truly believe that customers, audiences, people want in-person connections,” she said. “They want to be able to live in a brand.”

Speaking about J. Crew’s immersive experience at 190 Bowery in New York in September 2025, Collier was equally focused on the physical experience and the content and storytelling around it. “Is it interesting to someone who lives in Dallas — or anywhere else in the world? Are we providing entertainment?”

Embrace an Entertainment Mentality

As featured in the report, consumers are still seeking the thrill of the unexpected — they want brands to deliver a sense of surprise and delight. To achieve this, marketers must operate at the edge of their comfort zone and take calculated risks.

Alice Gividen cited Calvin Klein and Jacquemus as strategic case studies that other brands can learn from. Jonathan Bottomley, Calvin Klein’s CMO, told BoF that the brand had adopted an entertainment mentality as a strategic approach. To break through a culture and media landscape flattened by algorithms, he said brands must ask themselves how they can truly stand out in an oversaturated space.

“He looks through the lens of Calvin Klein and works with people who were moving through culture quickly, even before they had a huge moment,” said Gividen. This included working with Jeremy Allen White of the hit TV show The Bear before his meteoric rise in Hollywood.

Calvin Klein also collaborated with singer Bad Bunny ahead of the success of his Puerto Rico concert residency and his appointment as the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show headliner. The underwear campaign featuring the Latin singer generated $8.4 million in media impact value (MIV) in just eight hours, according to Launchmetrics.

However, creating value and delivering “surprise and delight” doesn’t always require huge budgets or high-profile celebrity talent. Notably, Jacquemus partnered with British TikTok creator Bemi Orojuogun — also known as Bus Aunty — to announce the opening of its London store in November 2024.

“They dressed her and gave her complete creative freedom in her usual style,” Gividen explained. “It was hyperlocal and achieved 11 million views in 48 hours. This was about responding to the zeitgeist and moving quickly.”

Following the Jacquemus collaboration, Orojuogun went on to front a campaign for Burberry and created similar sponsored content for H&M, Maybelline and MAC Cosmetics throughout 2025.

Echoing this mentality, Collier explained how localised relevance is critical to meaningful connection and entertainment. This includes tailoring store activations in Georgetown or Boston to engage the college community and nearby campuses, and finding the right local content creators.

“I see it at J. Crew and I saw it at Skims. The small, hyperlocal influencers are the ones who own their market. We might never have heard of them, they might not have many followers on TikTok but they receive millions of views,” she said.

However, when taking the approach of an entertainment mechanism, underscoring your creative approach with an effective execution plan is vital, Abaryan added.

“If you have a good creative and an excellent execution plan, you have good performance. If you have a great creative with an excellent execution, you will knock it out of the park, but if you have great creative and a poor execution plan you will have poor performance,” she shared. Such an execution plan can also instil confidence in marketers’ creative risks.

Meanwhile, brands who are consistent in the execution of their creative approach will see the best results: “Marketers can sometimes over-innovate with creative - keeping some consistency in creative is really valuable. We see the ROI hit its optimal the second or even the third time it [a campaign] is run,” Abaryan shared.

Involve the CMO in Your Pricing Strategy

Over 70 percent of consumers say that sudden or excessive price increases negatively affect their perception of a brand, while according to Abaryan, pricing and promotion drives between 20 to 40 percent of incremental sales. She went on to explain that pricing is a complex matter that requires brands to deeply understand cost, brand perception and competitive positioning, product quality and customer experience. “The voice that is missing is that of the customer in pricing decisions,” she said.

When working with clients, Ekimetrics breaks down organisational siloes and brings cross-functional teams together to discuss both promotion and pricing collaboratively, before emphasising the importance of price elasticity.

“Elasticity itself is a KPI of success for a CMO, because if you manage — through your brand value, through your storytelling, through the acquisition of higher value customers — to decrease your price elasticity, the long-term impact of that on your business is huge because you’re building resilience for your brands to be able to absorb shocks in the future,” she said.

BoF’s Gividen confirms that, after interviewing several CMOs for this report, their role “is to be the voice of the customer.” She explained: “They have a positive impact on pricing decisions. It speaks to their role as marketers — communicating value clearly and consistently across channels. The brands that show why the price is what it is, and communicate this value effectively, will win in 2026.”

The small, hyperlocal influencers are the ones who own their market. [...] They might not have many followers on TikTok but they receive millions of views.

—  Julia Collier, CMO at J. Crew

Collier added that customers have become the new creators — and the CMO’s closeness to the brand’s community allows them to advocate for their mindset around pricing.

“In retail, some of the most successful influencer content we’ve seen at J. Crew and Skims came from people in fitting rooms giving their honest opinion on something,” Collier said. Often, these creators don’t expect their video to reach beyond their 200 followers. “Then you see one style suddenly soar in your weekly sales,” she added.

Merge Brand Marketing with Product Marketing

As savvy consumers become increasingly value-driven, J. Crew’s CMO delved into the brand’s approach to demonstrating value without explicitly stating it. Its September 2025 campaign spotlighting the iconic rollneck sweater enabled the brand to communicate value while generating a 900 percent increase in Google searches for “J. Crew rollneck” over the course of a week, according to Collier.

“It was an experiment in product marketing through a brand marketing lens,” she said. The campaign featured celebrity talent aligned with the cultural zeitgeist, including actor and creator Benito Skinner, actress Lukita Maxwell, and singer Maggie Rogers, among others.

Collier added: “When you apply this 360-degree brand marketing lens to product marketing, you get everything — the searches, the traffic, the buzz, the storytelling, the press and the headlines. It creates a halo.”

The campaign’s impact has endured, with new rollneck colours continuing to sell out “without any new marketing at all,” according to the brand’s CMO.

Discover the BoF LIVE on demand here.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Ekimetrics as part of a BoF partnership.