KOL collaboration increases orders today, dilutes positioning tomorrow

There was a season when sales surged. Collaborations were continuous. The brand name appeared on the personal pages of tens of thousands of people. But when sitting down with the team, the question no one could answer was: what do customers remember us for? That was the moment many local Vietnamese fashion brands realized they were sitting on a machine generating orders without building a brand.

Orders and positioning are two different things

KOL collaborations operate on a borrowing mechanism. The brand taps into the KOL's audience in exchange for a collaboration fee or commission. In the short term, this mechanism is clearly effective. However, what is borrowed is loyalty to the KOL, not to the brand.

When a KOL ends a campaign and moves on to promote another label, most of the audience follows them, not staying with the brand. Therefore, the return rate of customers from KOL collaborations is often significantly lower than that of customers coming from brand-produced content. This holds true even if the initial order numbers look impressive.

In a market of such scale and growth rate, competition is abundant. And when everyone uses KOL collaborations as a primary strategy, the only remaining differentiator is price. That is a battle with no true winners.

The root of the problem is a lack of consistency

Many brands misunderstand the root of the problem. They believe that collaborating with the wrong KOL is the cause. But the issue runs deeper. Even if each individual collaboration makes sense, those collaborations can still carry different aesthetics and stories. In that case, the overall perception creates chaos in the audience's mind.

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass research group have shown that brand identity assets only remain in the audience's memory when consistently repeated over time. These assets include colors, visual language, and storytelling style. Each collaboration with someone who has a completely different style does not add to that memory. The brand is overwriting a new signal over an old one.

A brand is not a logo, nor a tagline. It is the perception in the hearts of customers about you.

Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

When that perception is created by ten different people in ten different styles, customers cannot form a perception of the brand. They only have perceptions of each specific KOL.

The brand portrait is fading

Try a simple test. Take the last ten collab posts from the brand, cover the brand name, and ask outsiders: whose are these? If they don't recognize it, or each post looks like it's from a different brand, that's evidence that positioning has started to dilute.

This not only affects visual identity. It impacts the entire system of meaning that the brand is trying to build. New customers do not understand what the brand stands for. Existing customers begin to feel that the brand is changing in a direction they no longer recognize. And the internal team loses a common compass to decide what to do or not to do.

Gen Z, the customer group that most KOL collaboration strategies are targeting, is the least loyal to a single brand. This does not mean that relationships cannot be built with them. However, if the brand does not have a clear identity for them to recognize and want to connect with, KOL collaborations only buy temporary attention. They do not secure a place in their minds.

From borrowing to owning identity

Fashion brands with enduring identities do not avoid KOL collaborations. They collaborate selectively, based on a clear principle: does this person truly live in the worldview that the brand is building?

Aime Leon Dore, a streetwear brand from New York frequently mentioned in the industry, does not choose KOLs based on follower count. They select individuals who share an aesthetic related to sports, music, and New York street culture from the early 90s. Each collaboration adds a layer to that worldview, rather than taking a new direction.

In Vietnam, some local brands are beginning to understand this. Instead of seeking the KOL with the largest audience, they are starting to ask a different question: what story does this collab tell about us? Is that story consistent with what we've been saying for the past six months?

This figure suggests a more practical direction for local brands with limited budgets. Instead of a large collaboration with a KOL who has millions of followers, a local brand can opt for a series of smaller collaborations with individuals who have a narrower but aesthetically aligned audience. This approach often yields better long-term identity-building results.

What you need before collaborating

The issue is not whether to collaborate with KOLs. The issue is whether the brand is clear enough about itself before inviting others to represent it.

If the brand does not have clear answers to fundamental questions, each KOL collaboration will fill that gap with someone else's answers. Those fundamental questions are: what do we stand for, how do we communicate, who is our ideal customer, and what values do they live by? Over time, the brand becomes a collection of answers that are not its own.

This is why fashion brands with sustainable positioning often start with internal work. They clarify the founder's perspective, define the core aesthetics, and then translate those into a sufficiently consistent identity system. As a result, every subsequent collaboration must pass through a common filter. This filter acts as a compass, helping the team make quick and correct decisions, even under short-term sales pressure.