Group project part C

“Our vision for our store was to create more than a place where people could get gear to sweat in, we wanted to create a community hub where people could learn and discuss the physical aspects of healthy living, mindfulness and living a life of possibility.” Lululemon is more than a

company that provides customers with yoga, running, training, and workout outfits. To some degree, they create a community where people are able to connect with other people and pursue an inspiring lifestyle. Unlike other potential competitors such as Peloton, Lululemon creates a trend of the combination of athletic and leisure. When Lululemon first entered the market, they used the strategy of “community building” which is to accurately target the customers by selling their outfits to yoga class students and let the products get popular within the yoga community. Aligning with the initial branding strategy, we still stick with the community-based branding and enlarge our customer base by advocating inclusiveness and diversity.

The most important point of our strategy is to let the customers feel the belongingness to a “community” either it’s yoga, workout or other. Here we plan to develop “The Mirror” by adding virtual try-on functions which also include automatic recommendations of outfits according to one’s personal preferences. To brand the product, we propose to further solidate our customers’ belongingness to the community and further advocate “inclusiveness” of our community, which echoes our corporate social responsibility - we keep striving to create a community where everyone can comfortably pursue their lifestyle, find the most suitable outfits, and achieve the best version of themselves. In order to show people our inclusiveness, we can invite models of different races, different genders, and different body shapes to use our product as our product ambassadors and show their experiences in forms of fancy videos.

Firstly, in the video, models can show that they are able to quickly and freely try on any outfits they like without worrying about whether certain sizes or colors they like are available or not. Also, unlike trying on clothes in a physical store, they can choose whatever they like to wear without concerns about privacy problems. Lululemon wants to embrace any preferences and interests the customers could have and help people in any kind of body shapes find their best outfit. Now, The Mirror would help the Lululemon achieve this.

In addition, this strategy solidates customers’ good feelings with this brand by letting them associate their own identity with our models’. Since people can feel stronger belongingness to a community when they see someone similar there, by showing how different people enjoy the experiences given by The Mirror, customers from different “groups” are more likely to embrace the value of this product and join the “community”. Our alternative strategy is to echo with the sustainability of our brand by showing that we are using environmentally friendly materials. Compared with our alternative strategy, this branding strategy can more accurately target certain groups of people and might be more powerful because it directly appeals to a certain identity of potential customers.

Further, a socially responsible brand can better gain a trustworthy reputation in society. Inclusiveness and diversity has been a significant topic. Especially, during the pandemic, the racism problems have been brought up and given a lot of attention. Compared to this strategy, our primary choice can better take advantage of the situation to facilitate our informational value such as accountability, trustworthiness and ethics.