Fashion Brand - FCUK Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Fashion Brand - FCUK - Assignment ExampleThe paper Fashion Brand - FCUK discusses the cause of FCUKs authentic financial crisis and propose methods that can help the company re-strategise their branding and market position. French Connection or universally known as FCUK is a fashion-led habit retailer and wholesaler business that was primeed and based in the United Kingdom. Its retail and wholesale business operates mainly in the UK, in other parts of Europe, in the U.S., and other licensed stores around the world carrying several products such as its own French Connection/FCUK brand, a designer label called Nicole Farhi, a popular UK whole sale brand called Great Plains, and the mail-order business known as Toast. Aside from their clothing lines, French Connection has also expanded its product flap by producing what they call complimentary products to their fashion collections. These complimentary products are in the form of eyewears and various fragrances. The company was foun ded in 1972 by its current chairman and antique executive Stephen Marks. FCUK had eventually made its mark in the fashion industry by introducing fashionable clothes at very affordable prices catering primarily to the middle-market customers with ages ranging from 18 to 35 years old (News, 2006). For so many years, FCUK have managed to put up a competitive brand against its High alley counterparts however, undecomposed recently, FCUK had been continuously incurring noticeable decline in its sales and net profit. There were actually several reasons. behind this high turnover for the companys revenues, primarily it is due to the soar up of its prices which seems to have become quite expensive for their High Street target market to afford another reason would be the companys effort of ever-changing its image - trying to level it with competitors of bigger labels in an attempt to improve its market share and position thus resulting to pricing themselves out of the High Street comp etition and finally, the recent advertising tactics of the company simply did not made an impact to its target market, not only in Europe hardly in other parts of the world as well which even contributed to driving its customers away from the brand.FCUK Current SituationSince 2002, FCUKs annual reports on its sales and profits all over the world have been progressing positively it only means that the company has been performing well on the High Street market competition. However, due to recent events, it would really be alarming to know that the company this year has been continuously issuing warnings to investors that profits would surely be lower than expected (News, 2006). French Connection has reported a substantial pre-tax liberation of 3.6 million in the first half of the year which ended on the 31st of July 2006 compared with the 5.1 million pre-tax loss it incurred the previous year group revenues had also fallen by 6% from the previous year to 112.2 million (Interim State ment French Connection Group PLC, 2006).The enigma of these declining figures originated mainly from a range of smaller problems that the company must resolve in order to hopefully gain back its losses in the future. It was found that one of the problems is that the company gravely needs to rethink of the prices it is setting on the range of their clothing lines in relation to their target market - which is