Background: The Swedish fashion industry grows steadily, today it’s populated by many small and medium sized companies. Due to the big clothing chains dominant position small businesses risks to be ousted out of the fashion industry.

Smaller companies may find it difficult to reach out to the customer by traditional advertising because their budgets are often smaller. It is therefore important for smaller companies to create loyal customers. If the smaller sized businesses in the fashion industry do not follow the rapid developments in society and focus on building strong brands and relationships, they will have problems with surviving in the long run.

Problem definition: Which communicative factors are important in the choice of brand strategy to create a long-term survival for small and medium-sized companies in the fashion industry?

Purpose: The purpose of the essay is to analyse and evaluate the brand as a communications tool for building a brand image.

Method: The data which is being used in the essay is collected from interviews with companies and survey of each company's existing and potential customers.

Theoretical perspective: Relationship Marketing Perspective and Transaction Marketing Perspective

Theories: Brand Strategies, Total Communication, Brand Equity, Involvement Theory, Service Value Profit Chain.

Empiric: The empirical data is primary data gathered from interviews with a representative for each company and from the questionnaires distributed to the customers of each company.

Analysis: The analysis is an interpretation of the empirical material collected from interviews with each company and customers survey. Each company is being analysed along the characteristics that emerges in the theory chapter.

Results: The results of the study show that the companies use a mixture communication form consisting of one-and two way communication. The results from survey show that the customer is highly involved and therefore it is important for companies to maintain a relationship perspective.

Conclusions/Discussion: In order to achieve a long-term survival, it is important that smaller companies work from a relational consumers approach. In that way companies can create loyal consumers which can later on contribute to good Word-Of-Mouth. In its turn this can generate new consumers.