H&M’s Cross-Marketing Strategies

A great idea of Marketing is what we call “Cross-Marketing”.

Cross-Marketing in Fashion is a really common marketing approach of companies to promote their products or brands and it’s really simple. Cross Marketing is a collaboration of two or more companies of the same or different kind for the same purpose.

A great example of Cross-Marketing in Fashion is H&M. The company since 2004 has started to collaborate with several high-selling Fashion Houses and Designers, Pop-Stars or even Game Companies.

Let’s go through those years and see what they have done.

November 2004: H&M collaborates with Karl Lagerfeld to create an exclusive collection only for selected stores

November 2005: new collection with Stella McCartney

November 2006: collection with the avant-garde designers Victor & Rolf

March 2007: collection designed by the pop-star Madonna

June 2007: collaboration with game developers Maxis to create a H&M Fashion Stuff Pack for the game The Sims 2

November 2007: new collection with Roberto Cavalli

Also in 2007: new collection only for China with Kylie Minogue

Fall 2008: collaboration with Comme des Garçons

SS 2009: collaboration with Matthew Williamson for two exclusive ranges of womenswear and menswear only in selected stores

November 2009: limited-edition diffusion collection by Jimmy Choo featuring shoes and handbags

December 2009: ladies knitwear and lingerie range by Sonia Rykiel

Fall 2010: collaboration with Lanvin

SS 2011: collaboration with the blogger Ellin Kling only for selected stores

Few days ago H&M announced their new collaboration with Versace for a new autumn ‘11 collection designed by Donatella Versace.

As it seems H&M has noticed that this kind of Marketing and those collaborations has increased its revenues. We couldn’t notice that some of the collections were sold only in one hour in larger cities.

Should other companies think about the same Marketing approach for their brands?
If we take H&M as an example the answer is definitely YES.

Source: H&M – Wikipedia page