Fashion Week Live, IMG Fashion‘s first foray into the world of social gaming in partnership with FunCom and 505 Games, is the first proper fashion-focused role-play app available on Facebook‘s gaming platform. As a former Sims obsessive, and now fashion industry devotee, Making a Marque was intrigued to find out more.
Never having embraced the Farmville/Cityville/Mafia Wars craze, before the launch of FWL I was yet to be drawn into social gaming – could this be the one? I’ve never quite understood how people spend real dollars purchasing virtual products – how individuals became millionaires from the likes of Second Life still astounds me. This was about to change.
FWL, the brain-child of world-leading make-up artist Pat McGrath, is a virtual fashion styling platform, offering users the opportunity to style their way to the top of the industry, from intern to fashion icon, through a combination of budget-savvy buying, responding to styling briefs & career opportunities from clients, and social rating of other users’ style portfolios.
Here’s Pat discussing the concept in its earlier incarnation as Fashion World Live – as she sees it, an opportunity for youngsters to figure out which part of the industry they might want to pursue as a career:
In terms of gameplay, its similarity to The Sims is limited (it is a Facebook app after all) but as a concept, and in consideration of its target market, it would not be unfair to paint them with the same brush: life management simulations with a strong female bias, with a central theme of self-development; career progression and its just rewards enabling the purchase of goods that in turn contribute to successful gameplay progression.
But this is fashion – a world where many have to start by working for free and the motivation to succeed is driven by desire to engage with the most aspirational brands and learn from those at the very top of their game. Fashion marketing heaven. So who is engaged? And how?
DKNY has been the first mainstream brand to sign up, with Ethical Goods also a partner at launch. Both companies have placed their products in the game’s Store to be bought at an increased cost compared to other basic (unbranded) lines. This is not a virtual cost either. Whilst you can earn virtual dollars from successful styling jobs, rating friends’ portfolios and daily check-ins, at the earlier levels, all DKNY pieces require Facebook credits to purchase. £1.95 for a DKNY red cashmere cozy may seem like a bargain until you remember – it’s not real, it’s made out of pixels and you won’t get to wear it.
However, for this nominal investment, your door will be opened to DKNY styling jobs – such as merchandising their flagship store window – for which you gain immense industry kudos, career experience and effectively progress through the game. Managing your DKNY career experience is that beacon of savvy social media, DKNY PR Girl herself, Aliza Licht, of whom a remarkably realistic avatar has been created to brief you on jobs and assess your talent. Backgrounds to your own styling shoots can also be purchased – one of which is the New York skyline from Ashley Greene’s recent DKNY ad campaign. And of course, the products are all faithful replicas of real collections, which when placed in the gameplay as the most aspirational, the hardest to obtain and the most valuable, gain significant brand kudos in the process.
For the game-makers, the challenge may come when, inevitably, other fashion brands want to play ball (which, even from a week’s trial in Beta stage, I think they would be foolish not to). Due consideration will need to be given to the relative value of each piece and the placement in the Store catalogue. At present, Ethical Goods and DKNY are mixed in with standard unbranded pieces – would luxury fashion houses settle for the same kind of placement? Probably not. Will they open the door to category ownership, avoiding any claims of copyright or IP infringement between designer and high street stores? Difficult, and not a faithful representation of the real competitive marketplace.
What is most interesting to me at this stage is the opportunity for real-world, offline engagement. Already within your model’s apartment is there the opportunity to browse the fashion headlines (on a – currently unbranded – tablet, natch), which are fed from FWL’s own fashion news stream, largely penned by blogger Liberty London Girl (a.k.a. Sascha Wilkins). So the lines between virtual/reality are already blurring.
Can we see top scoring ‘Interns’ from the Runway Styling Challenge gain a real-life internship styling the next DKNY show? Following the EA/H&M Fashion Runway Contest of a few years ago, can FWL users have the chance to see their looks replicated in retail stores and real Fashion Week runways? The inference, after all, is that this experience is Fashion Week Live – so what better brand immersion than to make users’ dreams become a reality?
EA’s successful partnership with H&M in creating a virtual-to-real-life Fashion Runway Contest in The Sims 2
It’s an interesting format, certainly, and it has me hooked (a nice touch was a cash bonus handed out for checking in and changing a daily outfit for 5 or 14 days in a row, essentially free money in return for repeat visits). I’m not yet parting with real-life cash, but I can see why many do. Most frustrating was the limited number of pages in your portfolio which, naturally you can expand for a price – that’s the closest I’ve come so far.
For fashion retail brands, the collaboration opportunity is intriguing. The game is still in Beta stage, so some major players are doubtless biding their time to assess early adoption and penetration rates before signing up – but sign up they will. The options for engagement are many and varied and the connection to real-life e-commerce is strong.
The platform also has huge potential to engage non-fashion brands who want to play in the fashion arena:
- The ‘Salon’ beautification area currently remains unbranded, begging for a MAC or a L’Oreal Professionel to step up and own that space
- The right tech company could supply the fashion news tablet and the career hub laptop and there is a gap wide open for the camera functionality – a central thread of the whole game – to be supported by a Canon, Nikon or Olympus-type
- As your model’s career develops and the money starts coming in, you even have the potential to upgrade apartments, throwing open to door to Real Estate and Home Furnishings categories (see IKEA Home Stuff for The Sims 2)
- While the background music track seems inoffensive at first, repeat visits will have you hitting mute – why not reach out to record companies and have some music collaborations thrown into the mix?
Due to the power outage in the States over the weekend affecting a number of social sites, the game unfortunately took some downtime – leaving me to catch up on some blogging and, well, getting my social life back. One element it undoubtedly shares with The Sims franchise – concerning ease of addiction.
The Sims: expanding brand market share
When I was working for EA (creators of The Sims and all its infinite expansions packs) as a student brand ambassador I was intrigued to learn of the strategic success of The Sims creation.
Consider EA’s enviable marketplace position at the time – that of near total domination – and its need to sustain growth. Once you reach a point of market saturation, what are your options? Brand stretch into a different virtical or brand extension within your existing category? But what if you grew the whole market itself?
At a time when something like 80-90% of gaming consumption was male, imagine the infinite growth potential in selling to girls – essentially doubling the potential audience. Which is what they did (albeit unintentionally, as EA have in the past gone on the record denying that Will Wright created the game with girls in mind.)
Playing straight into the gender stereotypes first formed in the infant school playground – an accessible role-play game that more or less centres around a unique combination of playing house, interior decorating, shopping, happy families, career progression and self-improvement – The Sims was born with an unheralded 65% female player skew.
The Sims has, since its birth in 2000, become the most successful PC franchise of all time – by May 2011, it had shifted 150 million units worldwide, with The Sims 3 selling 3.7 million copies in its first month of release last year. The franchise has attracted collaborations from top music artists such as Katy Perry, Pixie Lott and The Black Eyed Peas, all of whom have re-recorded top hits in Simlish, the language of the game, to be integrated into the gameplay of various expansion packs.
No stranger themselves to fashion brand partnerships, an expansion pack for The Sims 2 launched in 2007 – H&M Fashion Stuff – which, with the help of a catalogue of H&M product lines and in-store retail store designs, allowed users to create their own stores, retail and purchase H&M collections and put on virtual H&M runway shows. And then, they made it a reality.
*An interesting piece of further reading around the cultural relevance of such gaming can be found in Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto – Chapter 2, ‘Billy Sim’. Klosterman focuses his theories from experiencing Sims gameplay, but its relevance extends to Fashion Week Live especially when, unlike The Sims, you add FWL‘s real-live products & brands into an otherwise unreal consumption-obsessed existence. Have a read.
Tagged: DKNY, Ethical Goods
