“Style model hunt X harbour city"

In our daily life, we are influencing by intensive promotion in this prosperous business district, Hong Kong. Even in every minute, we are surrounded by thousand and different kinds of advertisements when we are travelling to and from work or shopping. And we should not be unfamiliar with, especially for who have great fashion consciousness, the latest trend and products of renowned fashion brands as these kinds of fashion retailers put lots of efforts in promoting themselves via TV, magazine and newspaper ads so as to maintain a high level of visibility and reputation. We can easily recall these fashion brands in mind, they are Dior, LV, Burberry and H&M.

However, it is comparatively uncommon to see a shopping mall use promotional message to communicate with their market as successful as Harbour City does!

As a high-end shopping mall, Harbour City does lots in promotes itself as an all-rounded entertaining mall.

Early in the past one or two years, Harbour City has launched TV ads with simple, easy memorized slogan “Feel good buy shoes, feel bad buy shoes”(心情好買鞋, 心情唔好買鞋) and “One harbor, has only one Harbour City”(一個海港,只有一個海港城). We think that these two clear, direct messages have reminded us about the Harbour City not until we are in Tsim Sha Tsui but when we just laying on sofa and watching TV at home, and later on the weekend, we remember one more place for girls to do shopping with various choices of brands.

Harbour City successfully grasped the rising heat of popular young model in April, and launched new TV ads with Angela baby as the model and spokesperson of Harbour City.
Moreover, in this summer, Harbour City cooperated with a international modeling agency, STYLE and held a 2 month long modeling competition inside the shopping mall, named “Style model hunt X harbour city”. And the prize of the winner is to be the Fall/Winter promotion catalogue model of Harbour city. We would say that the prize is very attractive for teenagers who dream to be a model or fashion icon.

Throughout this competition, most of the apparel products of participants, from head to toe, are from fashion stores in Harbour City, including dinning as well. On the other hand, video recording of the shopping and purchase process was also part of the advertising via internet.

This promotional campaign is both innovative and unique as it seems that Hong Kong shopping malls do little or even have not launch modeling competition before. Very often, we can find other types of event held in malls, like drawing, photo taking, poster creating, and slogan creating competition, etc, but not in modeling. From our point of view, the distinctiveness of this campaign is able to cater not only what young adult need and want but also understand the lifestyle of this group of people. Comparing to those commercial advertisement of most of the shopping mall, others’ company traditionally focusing on what fashion products/brands consumers can be founded in their shopping mall with a page of ads showing particular products, while this competition of Harbour City was more interactive between the company and consumers. Thus, this give a fresh and youthful image towards audenice.

The type of promotion used is highly related to the target segment of the mall, who are high educated, fashion conscious and brand oriented. In this case, Harbour city did well. As we sense that, modeling is a type of professional and high-end acitivity, because high-end fashions used to present their new merchandises or concept through modeling event, like catwalk show and press conference. This idea makes Harbour city can sell its high end image when it holds a modeling competition in mall, and meet its target market at the same time. This competition made a noise last for 3 months, due to other promotions added, e.g. facebook blogging of competition, voting chance given by the shoppers of harbour city,etc.
That may create a trend of holding modeling competition in other malls in HK. And actually, in my opinion, it is also suitable for Time Square in Causeway bay holding this kind of promotional campaign.

by Man and Denise