Roxy – A Leader in Women’s Surf Market

Roxy is a global lifestyle brand which offers product for every aspect of the active girl’s life, from handbag to Henley, wetsuit to tide watch; the key ingredient of the product is the inimitable Roxy spirit- Daring, confident, naturally beautiful, fun and alive. Roxy started its journey from water, it was launched initially to capture the untapped surf market in the late 1990s, and it was an overnight success. Soon enough Roxy sportswear line was launched and it saw success as well, the sales sky rocketed for over a million by 1992, further to which company went to a spree of expansion and stuffed its product offering to denim wear and key snow wear pieces.

 It was one fine evening when the team of Roxy was relaxing on the beach; a light bulb idea hit them, which changed the women surf market for the good. The year 1994 market another major milestone in the journey of Roxy, Lisa Anderson, then reigning ASP female world champion became the first member of the Roxy team. Lisa went on to win three more titles and earned a lot of mass fame. She is one of the most influential surfers in the entire history of women’s surfing and her contribution to the brand of Roxy is immensely huge. Roxy was smart to understand the growing pulse of the market and as its popularity grew, the brand expanded its product offering to shoes, eyewear, and fitness products, surfing and snowing accessories. Roxy now has a very strong retail presence in many parts of the world and all its stores are based on the foundation of: Fun, bold, daring, athletic and classy.

The purpose of the report is to make an integrated marketing plan for Roxy, which will cover its Brand positioning, KPI, success measure and metrics, participants and personas, social and digital marketing, content and conversation around the brand and on-going monitoring of the plan.  The focus will on the brand positioning and the digital media strategy for Roxy.

A brand can be understood as unique design, sign or symbol or combination of these employed to create an image which identifies with the product and differentiates from its competitors (Neumann, Dixon & Nordvall, 2014) Roxy was the market innovator in the women surf market and it was after him that the other companies followed Roxy, heart shaped crest adopted logo of Roxy is recognized worldwide and people see it as a symbol of fun, caring, daring & Bold (Rosethorn, 2016)

Roxy Brand Statement

Brand statement is the core component of brand development, and brand statements are often referred to as brand proposition (Mumby, 2016). A brand proposition clearly identifies the benefits a consumer drives for the brand, and the brand proposition is focussed on the benefits that the brand offers. It is highly advisable for brand proposition to include the Unique selling proposition which is the unique benefit the company offers which no other brand provides(Vallas & Cummins, 2015)

Roxy is on a mission to provide clothing for a girl in every aspect of her life; it has moved more being a swimwear line to a global lifestyle brand in a short span of time. Women identify with Roxy because of its unique offering in clothing, accessories, swimwear, shoes, fitness, surf and snow. Each product of Roxy makes the women feel that they are being Bold, daring, caring, and fun, classing and athletic.

People across the globe recognize Roxy as the premium brand for providing clothes for women who surf. Although the company has been successful with its other merchandize as well, but the positioning still remains that of a brand which provides surfing outfits. It is a brand which celebrates athletes and therefore people with high aspiration look forward to Roxy. As mentioned, Roxy provides other products like swimwear, kids wear, accessories and so on, but people still closely associate with Roxy as one of the finest players for providing surfing clothes.

People strongly associate with the brand because of its cool and trendy product offering, and they strongly feel that the brand means more than just clothes; it is much more than that. It is a symbol people relate with and look forward to associating in order to become fun loving, bold and daring in their lives. The brand although has earned a reputation for itself in the ecosystem of providing swimwear and its boardshort, but the company aims to aspire more than that and want to be recognized as a global lifestyle brand catering to the needs of girl at every stage of her life. Based on the futuristic vision the company wants to be famously known for:

• Fragrance line
• Leader in snowboards
• Celebrating female athletes

Roxy wants its audience to have a mind map of all the things mentioned above and reach the mountains of success while sticking with its values. The above mentioned points are SMART goals set by the management and are realizable in reality, the reason being the brand has already crafted a success story for itself and is well aware of its competencies. It believes in gaining customer loyalty and listening to its audience and hence the above mentioned points are the reflection of its Target audience.

Roxy’s Unique Selling Proposition

Roxy wants to promote its services on a combination of web 2.0 and traditional media, one of the drawbacks of traditional media is its unavailability to have simultaneous conversation and poor analytics. Hence, web 2.0 plays the major role in measuring the KPI analytics. The digital properties for the branding, promotion and selling of products at Roxy are a combination of social platforms and the internet.

Website	· The goal here is to get more traffic on the websites (Increase the traffic by 20% in comparison to 2017) · Monitor the sales of each category in the product line. · Increase the revenue of the Fragrance, snowboards & surfing products.
Facebook	Facebook is the social media platform with the highest audience, and hence the platform becomes extremely important for the brands. The goals set for Facebook are: · Increase the likes on the Facebook page by 1 million · Increase the engagement and conversation on the Facebook posts. · Show 100,000 impressions of the products in a duration of 6 months
Twitter	Twitter is another channel which has gained its popularity in the last decade and is one of the most important social media tool at the hands of the markets, at Roxy the goal set with Twitter are: · Focus on influencer marketing, getting female athlete on board with Roxy and make them tweet about products of Roxy · Increase the retweets and tweets of the influencers · Increase the number of followers by 20% on the twitter page.

Measuring conversation on web 2.0 is extremely important as it helps to analyse how the users interact with the content of the brand and what action they are taking while interacting with the content (Heinz, Fletcher & Rashid, 2016) Micro conversion is extremely important as it can tell the brand what visitors are doing before completing the primary macro conversion.

Micro conversion: It can be understood as a small path which a visitor takes once he reaches onto the website before getting into primary conversion goal (Fraga, 2016). Types of micro conversion focussed by Roxy are:

Process Milestones: These are the conversion which shows linear movement after landing on the website towards a much soughed primary conversion goal. Process milestones help to improve the user interface on the website and help the brand to simply its user journey (Van Laer & Lurie, 2017)

Secondary actions: These can be understood as the actions which are not the primary goal, but at the same time lays the ground for future macro conversions (Hakkarainen, 2016)

• Reading the RSS feed: RSS feed helps the brand to reach with the content to its target audience. Popular blogging platforms like Word press and Jekyll helps the brand to get the information about the target audience.
• Subscribing to the monthly newsletter: This is a very important conversion metric, if a user subscribes the newsletter it definitely means he is interested in the content of the company but hasn’t quite decided on making a purchase. Newsletter helps in building a relationship which may lead to sale in the future.
• Creating an account on the website: Creation of an account on the website is that indication that the client has shown some interest in the product of the website and will soon or less makes a purchase.
• Each step in the funnel: This is the most important conversion metric which brands are interested in, it analyses the influence of an experience on the entire checkout funnel, and the brand wants to measure each process milestone separately. For example by learning that many people add a lot of items in the cart tab but only a small percentage of them makes a checkout, this will help the brand it identify that there is some bug with the shopping cart and it has to be fixed. Hence, identifying the individual steps in the funnel, which trace down the journey of user on the website, helps to identify how to maximize the experience of the user on the website(Batra & Kennel, 2016)

Hence analysing the micro conversion is important as it gives important information on the customer behaviour, his interaction points, touch points in the user journey and so on, thus it makes sense to analyse the process milestones and secondary actions to yield better results for the brands. Roxy is really active in measuring the micro conversion.

Macro conversion:  Macro conversion are the events which actually matter to the brand, this in case of Roxy is making a purchase. Tracking of Macro conversion is important to analyse the products are being sold on the website and what is the demographic of the customers who are making the purchase. It basically helps to track down the customers who are buying products on the website.

For the purpose of the study, 4 participants are taken from different age group which falls into the target group of the brand.

Miss Dawson	Age: 22 Country: Australia Gender : Female Marital status: Unmarried Education: Pursuing Masters Lifestyle: A shopper, a swimmer and traveller Goals: Want to be a professional working with a consulting firm
Mrs Robertson	Age : 32 Country: USA Gender : Female Marital Status: Married Children: 2 (6 and 4 year old girl and boy) Lifestyle: Homemaker and interior designed Goals: Robertson wants to make a full-fledged career in interior designing and motivate the daughter to get into aerobics/ swimming
Miss Mohita	Age: 27 Country: India Gender: Female Education: MBA in finance Marital Status: Unmarried Lifestyle: Shopaholic, athlete, dancer and a swimmers Goals: Wants to do at least a marathon each month and be a professional dancer.
Miss Penelope	Age: 40 Country: Australia Education: Surgeon Marital Status : Separated Lifestyle: A strong independent female, swimmer, surfer and blogger Goals: Be one of the best surgeons of Australia and get back to her surfing appetite and focus on her health and improving the stamina.

It can be seen that the personas of the females are to become bold, strong, daring and fill their lives with fun, and all the products of Roxy strongly claims to provide the same feeling to its audience, thus it seems to be a perfect match.

Miss Dawson	Digital Habits: Dawson belonging to the millennial age has typical characteristic and the same can be seen in her digital habits. Dawson is present on mostly all the social media sites and spend the most of her time on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. She is also focussed on staying fit and thus follows many blogs of bloggers who writes blogs on fitness and health. Dawson uses her mobile for all her digital engagements and allows almost all the apps to send her notification. She also download shopping applications, fitness app, workout apps and a surfing app.
Mrs Robertson	Robertson used to be highly active on social media and the internet but since the birth of her child, her focus is mostly on raising her kid’s right and her interior designing work. This leaves her with a little time to spend on internet. Of all the time she spends on internet, most of her time goes on Facebook and Instagram. She likes to visit lifestyle blogs and brands on the internet, and also loves to watch sports tournament of swimming and athletics.
Miss Mohita	Mohita is a great fan of marathons and keep on going for marathon every month and is also brushing her skills in dancing. She is mostly on YouTube, looking for dance videos. At the same time she follows different firms which conduct marathons. Her digital behaviour includes accessing Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and twitter. She is very active on twitter and tweets about her marathon. She consumes content on Laptop and mobile phone. She also follows pages related to health and fitness.
Miss Penelope	Miss Penelope is a surgeon and a busy person, But her athletic body makes her an occasional surfer and a daily swimmer. She has already brought products from Roxy and attaches herself very strongly with the brand. She uses mobile, tablet and laptop to consume content. She uses digital platforms in her free hours and it basically comprise of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Mrs Robertson	Challenge: Busy with her kids and has less time to go on social Participation: Interacting with the content of Roxy she will use it for her daughter, for herself and will spread a positive word of mouth about the product with her peers.
Miss Mohita	Challenges: Too many things to do with too little time at hand. Participation: Mohita can benefit from the marketing as she is a strong independent female and products of Roxy are bold, daring and fun. She is a big fan of handbags and sportswear, she will be an ideal candidate for the marketing efforts and will definitely be a loyal customer for Roxy
Miss Penelope	Challenge: Being separated and surgeon works aptly for her, she gets good time to pursue her hobbies. Participation: Penelope was an ex surfer and has already used many products of Roxy, she is a loyal customers and a big influencer. She can be used to target the age group of females falling in the range of 40-45 and make them pursue their hobbies.
Miss Dawson	Challenges: Busy with study and use social media for fun and interaction with her online friends. Participation: Dawson is a perfect example of an audience which has to be tapped by following the AIDA model. The marketing can benefit her first to create awareness about the brand, make her interested in the product offering, generate a desire by repeated showing of products and at the end provide her with an action to call to make a purchase.

Roxy’s Product Offering

Web 2.0 is the most effective way for e-commerce companies to sell its products, Web 2.0 provides good amount of data to the brands about its users and the visitors on the website, and hence the message can be extremely targeted and content can be curated according to the profiling of its audience.

All the participants between the age group of 22-40 years and the demographic are a perfect match with Roxy’s brand image and its product lining. Hence, the digital media strategy for Roxy is to portray a brand image of Daring, Bold, Fun and caring all at the same time, a characteristic which every female related with. The message will be promoted on almost all the social media platforms where the users are and it will show curated content to the participants. The content which Roxy will promote to the users will be extremely rich on information, providing tips on fitness and health, promotion of its product line, story of athlete etc.; this will pull the participants to interact with the content. Engaging with the content will drive conversation around it and Roxy can also be a part of the conversation and assist the participant then and there on the social media platforms. Once the audience realizes that the brand is listening to their concerns and query, and when they see brands are paying attention to their needs, audience becomes vulnerable and brands can take leverage of the same to promote its products and make them interested.

Traditional media campaign will be curated to a larger audience and will have sports celebrity, the purpose of the commercial will be to ask women to come out of the closet and move in the real world. Drop there inhibitions and be a part of change, a change which will make them bold, daring, fun and caring. The sports celeb will inspire girls in the demographic of 14-24 to work towards their fitness/ health and take part in some sport. Hence, the message of both the media vehicles is same, but the process of delivering the message is different. The advertisement will also promote the website, mobile application, social pages, in this way a co-ordinated message can be delivered to the audience.

Rolling calendar for the entire marketing campaign will begin from 1^st February and the marketing KPI’s will be seen for the entire financial year. A review will be conducted every quarter to understand the present marketing strategy, identify gap in the current strategy and come up with a more effective strategy.

Brand Positioning and Vision for the Future

Content is king when it comes to promoting products or services on the internet. Hence brands have to really focus on providing good quality of content which is rich in information and can drive conversation and engagement in and around a health, fitness and Roxy’s products.

Content needed

· Blogs on health · Blogs on fitness · Post on Facebook and Instagram about the product line · Post on Facebook and Instagram with a discussion on the usefulness of surfboards, the flexibility clothes of Roxy provide. · Trivia on athletes · A you tube video of a sports celebrity promoting Roxy’s line of clothes, fitness bras and other inventory. · A fanfare contest every month after conducting a quiz every week, where the audience will have to answer question about the brand. Top 3% of the correct answer givers will be given a gift hamper by Roxy · An interactive mask head on you tube home page of Roxy. · A game will be created for Facebook by Roxy, an athlete will be undergoing through various sports like surfing, skiing, swimming and running. The entire game interface will promote Roxy’s brand and the athletes will be shown running in Roxy’s collection · A lot of trivia will be provided around the sporting activities (Surfing, Snowboarding)

On Going information

· This will be in the form of press releases and newsletter every months · Generic information and stories on Instagram and Snapchat with either a celebrity promoting the product/ just the product

The source of all the information will be coming from the content team at Roxy and freelance bloggers who will write highly curated content on the topics provided to them. The freshness of the information is must and should to be maintained by Roxy, as if the content gets repeated, the audience quickly loses focus and gets bored. Thus each social media platform has to be used judiciously, the content shown on Facebook and Instagram on one day can be showed on Snapchat the other day. Remarketing to the audience and using bloggers to create brand focussed content will help Roxy in maintaining freshness of the content.

Roxy brand has been a promoter or sponsor of many sporting event, it determines the leverage a sporting event can provide to it and further uses the sporting event as a part of its Marketing plan. The event are shown in the light that Roxy promotes sports and fitness and is becoming a part of change, a change which focuses on the every aspect of a girl’s life in making her Strong, bold, daring and fun.

Display advertising is another component in digital marketing and is a very effective tool; the display advertising will show the product line, its celebrity endorsement, and promotion of game application, promotion of application, website promotion and GIF on Roxy’s history. The display advertisement will run on you tube, affiliate websites, gaming website, e-commerce websites, blogs of lifestyle, health and fitness. The entire audience of Roxy resides on these platforms and hence it will be an effective utilization of the digital spends money.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Best swimwear line, best board shorts, surfing clothes, skiing clothes, sporting accessories, fitness bras, accessories, beautiful handbags, swimwear for kids, fragrance, Snow jackets, snow pants, dresses and rompers, best bikinis in Australia, best bikini clothes (The point of SEO is that when the users types on the search bar, the website should have the keywords which he might use to search and the same has to be incorporated in the website so that Roxy can appear in the search

Search engine marketing(SEM)

This is inorganic and paid advertising. One brilliant strategy for it is to topple one of its competitors, for ex: If somebody types in quicksilver sports bras, the ad should pop up saying, Roxy topples quicksilver. Comfortable and flexible swimwear Need snowboards for skiing Clothes for kids Sports merchandize for athletes Running shoes Scarves and glasses for all seasons.

Brands focus on analytics and keeps a track of all of its marketing campaign, the success of the campaign is monitored with the goals set for the campaign and the impression delivered on different channels. The content will be changing on a weekly basis and efforts will be done to not show the same post on a platform after seven days. A combination of useful facts, blogs, celeb tweet and promotions, promotion of products, deal promotion, sale offer, discount, celebrity endorsement and event participation will fall under the scope of work of the digital campaign.

Roxy’s Digital Media Strategy

In order to maintain the fresh content flow, having an in-house team of digital marketing is essential. But as digital marketing is not the USP of the brand, it is advised for Roxy to have a digital marketing team for Social, Internet, Mobile and offline. The entire department will have a team of 2 members and they will be in coordination with Maxus group for the execution and implementation of the campaign. The team will be responsible to track the success of the campaigns, send out the reports to the marketing department and the management and micro manage the media agency whenever possible. The team at Roxy will also suggest campaigns to run the media platforms.

It is a natural phenomenon that the participant after interacting with the content will do either of the following things:

• Go to website and make purchase
• Gather more information on the product line
• Speak with peer about the product range and discuss the options
• Unsubscribe or follow the page.
• Move over from affiliate website to the parent website by clicking the advertisement.

In order to manage the strategy of the competitors, an online reputation management team will be created, its only purpose will be to do effective social listening and visit the websites, social pages of the competitors. The market in the case of Roxy brand is niche and they would also use high targeted content to interact with its audience. Roxy can take advantage by closely following the social pages.

Emerging media like AR, VR and Internet of things are already in news everywhere. An internal R&D team of two will be only focussing on innovation and how to integrate the emerging media tools to increase the effectiveness of the campaign. As mentioned earlier, influencer marketing is a strong digital trend and brands are using it effectively for their brand promotions. Roxy can easily benefit from this by signing new sports celebrity, endorsing their outfits in competition and then leverage the same for increasing the awareness about Roxy.

In a nutshell it can be said that Web 2.0 is a great promotional tool for the marketers, and the smartphone penetration has made social and digital media extremely vulnerable and open for the brands to advertise. Roxy can leverage from its image of being Bold, strong, daring and fun and can replicate and translate the same message easily on the Internet.

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