Uniqlo's Brand Marketing

As our textbook says, "[t]he most fundamental change to the landscape of advertising and marketing has been the role of the Web as a form of entertainment media and a central medium fro social networking" (297). The media technology has developed, like Tivo, Ipods, DVRs, and Hulu, so that the viewers that advertisers want are now scattered over many media platforms. Now advertisers need "strategies" to gain the viewers' eyeballs. Even on the Internet, which enables them to reach the massive audience, they have to be creative to place their ads in order not to be ignored by the viewers.

I found the UNIQLO's interesting strategy to spread their brand's awareness all over the world. UNIQLO intended to create world-wide buzz through blog users. They came up with the idea that they could promote their brand awareness with a blog utility which would make the blog users feel like using and which does not look ads-like.
Based on this idea, they made the fusion of UNIQLO and clock: UNIQLOCK



The UNIQLOCK repeats a 5-second animation of clock and 5-second dance performance by the girls wearing UNIQLO's clothes. The images of dance performance randomly changes ( at night, even the image of the girls sleeping is shown!). Even if you think you have seen all images already, it might suddenly show a new image you have never seen. Whenever blog users and viewers see this UNIQLOCK, they can find something new in it. UNIQLOCK has times for a lot of countries, even for the countries where they do not have their branch stores. And it is not only for blog, but also it can be set in facebooks, iphones, igoogles. After UNIQLO produced the Uniqlock, many people started to using it on their blogs. It was downloaded across 93 countries； their site has been viewed more than three hundred million times across 214 countries; and more than seventy-four thousand for blogs and ninety-eight thousand for iphones and ipods are downloaded by the last summer.

UNIQLO succeeded in creating buzz internationally using this unique advertising strategy.
The textbook says" [t]he attribute of "cool" is usually seen as unique, distinct, an uninfluenced by the marketplace" (293). The unique image of the Uniqlock and its creative way of advertising their products must have gained the world-wide awareness of their brand and promoted their cutting-edge "coolness" across a number of countries.


Uniqlo released a new type of blog utility called UNIQLO CALENDAR last year. Using a miniaturizing visual effect, viewers can see the everyday lifestyle of Japan and its culture filmed in 32 locations in 7 different cities, such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Okinawa. It does not only include the calender but also the weather information from the location the user chose, and besides, if you click on the image, the image turns into a mosaic of small boxes, and you can see their products. How many eyeballs in front of the computers are caught on those images? How many people have got to know about UNIQLO and become interested in their brand through this advertising?
I just cannot stop watching them.......


The sounds are off. Turn them on if you want to see the images with sounds;)