ASOS ‘As Seen On U’ Brand and Campaign Concept

This project produced a brand guide and an accompanying campaign concept for ASOS, the online fashion retailer. The brief ran in two halves: articulate who the brand is and how it should look and sound, then propose a campaign idea that puts that positioning to work.

The campaign the team landed on, ‘As Seen On U’, is not an advertising flight. It is a product concept — an avatar feature inside the ASOS app — which made the brand argument something a customer could actually use.

Scope

Brand guide and campaign concept

Deliverables

Existence story, positioning, brand system, campaign concept and concept visuals

Brand archetype

Rebirth — brand personality: The Rebel

Context

Five-person team, DCM 1020 Digital Advertising, Branding and Campaigning

This was a five-person collaborative project (Hunter, Mardhiah, Fatin, Carmen and Lakshmi). I worked across the brand guide and the campaign concept; the existence story, positioning and the avatar feature were developed collectively.

ASOS began as ‘As Seen On Screen’, selling shoppers the clothes they had noticed on television and in film. That origin gives the brand a clear promise, but it points in one direction: inspiration flows from the screen to the customer.

The team’s reading of the brand was that its own story had moved on. The existence story is one of rebirth — a business that survived warehouse fires, losses and closures by committing to the internet and to a young, self-expressive audience. The strategic question was how a campaign could reflect that, rather than repeating the original premise.

Before any campaign work, the team set out what the brand stands for: a mission to empower people to express themselves through fashion, a vision of a fashion democracy, and values built on inclusivity, affordability and ethical practice.

The personality chosen to carry that was The Rebel — a brand that breaks from the status quo, encourages people to be confident in who they want to be, and gives them the means to invent a style that is their own.

The campaign was aimed at consumers in their twenties, described across three lenses:

• Behavioural— technology savvy, and active on smartphones and digital devices.
• Demographic— 20-something youth consumers.
• Psychographic— prioritises saving money, cares about the way they dress, and likes to try new things.

That last trait carried the most weight. An audience that wants to try new things but is careful with money has an obvious barrier: buying an unfamiliar style is a risk. The concept that followed was designed around removing that risk.

The brand guide covered the components a team would need to produce consistent work: logo usage, typography, voice, colour, photographic direction and the tangible places the brand shows up.

Identity

Where the brand shows up

‘As Seen On Screen’ implied that ordinary people could end up wearing the clothes they had seen on television. ‘As Seen On U’ inverts it: the customer becomes the fashion inspiration other people follow.

Encourage consumers in their twenties to step out of their comfort zone and take charge of finding their own style.

The emotional target was set as confident, empowered and unfettered — the feeling of turning an idea into something real and taking charge of how you dress.

The big idea is an avatar game feature inside the ASOS app, where customers explore styles and dress an avatar in ASOS apparel without the cost or commitment of buying first.

How it would work

• A customisable avatar — gender, body shape, facial features — where users set out their current style and what they want to try.
• Avatar clothing suggested from those preferences, paired with the identical real-life products so a virtual outfit can be bought.
• A social layer where users share outfits with one another and take inspiration from what others have put together.
• Encouragement to post ‘As Seen On U’ outfits externally, turning customers into the campaign’s source of fashion inspiration.

The mechanic and the message line up: a brand whose personality is The Rebel gives people a low-risk place to break out of their own fashion habits, and the campaign promise is fulfilled by the product rather than described by an advert.

To show what the feature might look like, the team generated concept imagery from prompts describing an ASOS mobile game where people customise and dress avatars in a rebel, fashion-led style.

These are AI-generated concept visuals produced for the presentation. They are not product screens, interface designs or anything ASOS has built.

The project delivered a complete brand guide and a campaign concept that connects the brand’s positioning to a specific, buildable product feature. Its value is in the argument it makes: that a campaign for a self-expression brand is more convincing when the audience is given something to do than when they are given something to watch.

An academic project. ASOS did not commission, review, adopt or build any part of this work, and no performance results are claimed.