Topic > Personal Branding in the context of the network economy: the case of Chiara Ferragni

IndexAbstractIntroductionPersonal Branding: how to become "someone"An 11 million dollar saladConclusionsReferencesAbstractSome individuals have achieved so much fame and notoriety that they have established themselves as points of reference crucial for consumers, fundamental spaces for "the production and circulation of discourse on fashion". This exponentially growing phenomenon has revolutionized the marketing industry and the very concept of the fashion industry: fashion bloggers have been included in the institutional fashion system, alongside the traditional media industry and considered together with fashion journalism (Pedroni, 2014). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay IntroductionInterpersonal and virtual communication through social networks today plays a fundamental role in one's personal and professional success. We live in an age where we are in constant communication with others and relationships have increasingly become online connections. Knowing how to interact effectively with others and knowing how to interact with everyone are the keys to professional success and staff well-being. Today we want to improve and expand communication skills through strategic communication in order to facilitate the achievement of our objectives, just as it is becoming increasingly necessary to market ourselves by differentiating ourselves from others. Personal branding is therefore the reputation we create on the web, everything we do with the Internet, on social networks, on forums and the values ​​we communicate through the web that help us portray a beautiful image of ourselves online. In the first part of this article I will try to explain what Personal Branding is and what advantages it allows to achieve; in the second part I will briefly introduce the case study of effective use of social media by a particular Italian woman who quickly established herself on the international scene: Chiara Ferragni. Chiara Ferragni is widely confirmed in the online world as well as in offline life and has been successful with her personal brand. His story can make us think that by respecting the laws of the Internet any business can establish itself successfully. Personal Branding: how to become "someone" Personal Branding is an activity that, consciously or not, we have all been doing for a long time. The entrepreneur Tom Peters, CEO of FastCompany and author of the article 'The brand called YOU' coined the term Personal Branding for the first time in 1997, meaning, with this terminology, the art of knowing how to build your own personal brand. It is therefore possible to define the phenomenon of Personal Branding as the ability of each of us to market ourselves, in a context in which the word Brand is no longer understood as a corporate brand but a personal one. Doing Personal Branding therefore means having to be able to positively influence people regarding the perception of the Personal Brand. Building your online identity starts with choosing a name: imaginative or easily traceable to us. In this sense, the 'Real name' policies promoted by Facebook and Google push towards continuity between online and offline identities. The name with which to make yourself known online is also the first step in building your personal reputation. The first examples of self-presentation were chats and blogs that used text communication. Added to these today are SNSs, which exploit the interactive features of 2.0Web. Personal home pages are the first method of online presentation of the Self, described as "carefully controlled performances through which the presentation of the Self occurs under optimal conditions". Social networking means rebuilding and developing abusiness, an online social network, using digital tools such as social media by adding friends, clients or colleagues and sharing various types of information with them. A user can fill out a personal profile, add multimedia content and decide what to share and how to interact with other participants in the network, especially in view of a possible job opportunity, in many social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn which give the possibility to "become friend” of agencies and companies that otherwise would not have been known in offline life. The Personal Branding strategy in social networks is based precisely on defining our strengths and communicating them successfully and effectively to others by answering these questions: Who am I? What can I do? How can I do it? What are my strengths and what do I offer? Why am I better or different from my competitors? In this sense "Personal Branding is not self-promotion, understood in the negative form of the term, it instead means valorisation of what one does"3. Branding aims to differentiate products, services, companies and people; based on the concept of singularity, it aims to create in the minds of consumers the idea that nothing similar exists on the market. The multiple opportunities currently available, both for the transmission of information and for intermediation and interaction, have given rise to the era of Web 2.0, a state of continuous evolution of the World Wide Web. This is why the use of social media for work and reputation is now a necessity no longer reserved only for companies but aimed above all at private individuals: the true protagonists of the web and of our interconnected era. In the digital economy of the modern web, the interconnections between people are infinite, the information available is global and very assorted, but at the same time it is poorly controlled or controllable. “The Internet today offers many possibilities for optimizing and making our brand known: it allows us to control the diffusion of our image online, thanks to specific tools; to protect our image and brand identity and to obtain business contacts”. It is essential to target market niches because in this way there is a greater chance that the Brand will be known by the public, but not only that, in this way the Brander has more time to learn how to manage his business and prepare for the mass market by gradually establishing your presence. An equally important element to stimulate brand awareness is through networking and dialogue with people both in the offline context, for example using the workplace, as in online chats with members of the Network. Through social networks we have become accustomed to sharing information with friends and relatives, pushing away the initial idea of ​​the internet as a 'non-place'. We have represented ourselves online with the same credentials we have offline, highlighting many aspects of our private life, even if we represent multiple aspects of our identity or social face. In 2014 Facebook launched a new app called Rooms, a discussion forum where relationships, contacts, names no longer matter: people exist because their interests exist and not their physical characteristics. The purpose of these rooms is to get back to sharing your thoughts with people who have the same interests as you. A return to anonymity therefore, which represents a decisive step back towards the past. Chats accessible via nickname are back and cannot be limited or controlled in any way. A system which, in the days of Facebook profiles anchored to names and individuals, seemed to have fallen into disuse. According to Facebook's explanation of Rooms at launch, the feature is different from group chats because it focuses on chatting aboutspecific topics with people you may or may not know. Group chats, however, are generally only attended by family members and friends you know. Now, judging by how little is known about the “new” application, despite it being launched five years ago, and the fact that it is currently running only in a few English-speaking countries and not globally, we can assume that “the face” is more important than ever in our society. That's why social media is dominated by apps that allow you to show your identity through images. People predominantly show rather than tell on social networking sites. Indeed, one of the reasons why Instagram has become so popular is the fact that “image highlighting predicts users' preference for showing their lifestyle rather than explaining its characteristics” (Zhao, Grasmuck, and Martin 2008 ), reinforcing norms and habits that are only known to insiders. An 11 million dollar salad Chiara Ferragni's identity was born with the blog The Blonde Salad (in 2009) which, initially, was configured as a diary orchestrated around to a precise 'essence', namely the passion for fashion, which affects Ferragni's 'mediatized' daily life. Already in 2015 Chiara became a Harvard case study at the Harvard Business School, entered the FORBES 30 under 30 list and in 2017 the same institution nominated her as the most powerful influencer in the world. Today, his net worth stands at $11 million. The image has a predominant role precisely due to the nature of the blog which offers fashion products appreciated by a person who does not limit himself to presenting clothes and accessories in static poses, typical of fashion magazines, but who almost proposes an implementation, in which attitude and the experiential dimension play an essential role. Starting from 2013, the company TBS Crew Srl (today a team of 28 people), founded in 2011 by Chiara Ferragni with Riccardo Pozzoli, co-founder and CEO, evolves with the entry of Alessio Sonzogni. The team begins a careful selection process for collaborations with well-known brands, all studied with a long-term perspective. To strengthen the bond between them and Chiara, who is becoming more and more famous, they create limited edition garments and accessories for some of them, sold in the e-commerce section of their site. We are therefore progressively witnessing a rethinking of the blog concept which over time is transformed into a lifestyle magazine (which touches on topics such as fashion, trends, celebrity looks and beauty): "an inspirational platform (integrated by an e-commerce service) whose social media marketing is aimed at promoting partner companies following a strategy that we define as camouflage marketing, i.e. the camouflage of the advertising message in the daily life of influencers' (Terracciano, 2017, p.32) This renewal is also reflected in the logo of the blog which it is no longer identified by the photo of Chiara immersed in a tub full of salad, to visually represent the content 'blonde salad' (which according to Ferragni means that the blog is 'a salad of me). The ingredients will be those that have always distinguished me: fashion, photography, travel and lifestyle'), but with a neon pink writing that evokes an American-style logo. A choice that reflects the new path undertaken by the platform which is the result of teamwork in which Ferragni has the role of creative director. Moreover, as Pozzoli notes, "today outfit blogs are outdated, thanks to Instagram, which allowed the phenomenon of microblogging and the birth of influencers. Blogging on the platform still exists, but the content needs to be much more complex than a simple photo of a look.' The Chiara Ferragni brand gives its name, starting from 2010, to a line of footwear, and then expands to clothing itemsand accessories (which you can find in the first flagship store opened in Milan in 2017, in a strategic position in the heart of Porta Nuova, an area with a high density of important fashion brands). Unlike television, new media are an arena for discussion and participation, for creativity that comes from everyone. Among these there are smartphones which, being 'Mobile', allow users to immortalize/save every moment of their life, while it is happening, thus producing a visible memory made up of moments, isolated fragments captured by the constantly moving camera. Meanwhile, "personal photographs contained in albums in the past were rare and therefore precious, but today digital photographs are seen simply as tools for sharing emotions with others." Instagram is configured as a sort of community constellation. In which the community built by Chiara Ferragni has almost seventeen million followers. Its success can undoubtedly be attributed to the independence it expresses compared to official trends, which come from the fashion industry, and therefore makes it closer to the public. Chiara Ferragni's 'attainable fashion' (Terracciano, 2017) becomes the commercial product around which the narrative transmitted by Instagram revolves. Ferragni subjectivises the garments she wears by giving them her own emotions, thanks also to the captions in which she frequently expresses euphoric moods such as: 'I'm excited', 'I'm happy', 'I love that top', 'I look cute', “I'm so proud of”, “what an amazing collection”; help in this also by facial expressions that convey joy and genuine satisfaction. The models in fashion magazines are beautiful, but most of them seem to remain distant, ethereal, and flaunt an icy beauty while Chiara calls together her followers with a friendly 'hi guys', almost inviting them to take part in her life private. This call, among other things, causes a mobilization of the sensitivity of followers expressed through "likes". As Chiara explains: “I combined Chanel bags with clothes from Zara or H&M. My followers always liked it because they could see how great a cheap sweater can look when you wear it well. It was something they could really identify with” (Keinan et al. 2015). As she suggests, it is very important for a follower to be able to identify with her personal style which shows her as a wearer of both high-end and high-fashion labels. By showing his audience typical results, he gave his followers the tools to recognize his personal style and thus create a relationship with them. As Ferragni says: “Instagram became the most used tool in the fashion industry almost overnight” (Keinan et al. 2015) and consequently he could no longer express himself on the blog with photos of his daily life. Indeed, when he used Instagram for these types of snapshots, “everyone got used to seeing food photos, 'what I just bought' photos, and 'I should buy this' photos” (Keinan et al. 2015). Ferragni thus became known worldwide for her personal style and her typical lifestyle content. As fashion bloggers become successful, like Ferragni with her blog “The Blonde Salad,” they will choose their identity over the focus of the narrative and thus choose to cater to their audience. needs. Ferragni, therefore, has outgrown her blog as an individual. This shows that being authentic, and having the. a palpable sense of authentic self-expression, ii. a connection and responsiveness to the public, iii. honest engagement with underlying goods and brands (Marwick 2015) is indeed crucial. However, “measuring authenticity is difficult because being authentic is a construct.