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Resolving The Hype of Luxury Brand Experience In Social Media: The Integral Role of Customer-to-Customer Interactions

HAJAWI, DOA'A,SAID,MOHMMED (2021) Resolving The Hype of Luxury Brand Experience In Social Media: The Integral Role of Customer-to-Customer Interactions. Doctoral thesis, Durham University.

Like never before, we are witnessing the cutting-edge advancement in the typology of the business environment. The emergence of social media has dramatically transformed customer- brands relationships. Billions of people are connected, interacting in real-time. Thus, brands presence on social media has become ubiquitous to maintain a competitive pace and deliver a superior customer experience. However, luxury brands were reluctant to accede to the social media world due to the contradictions with its nature of exclusivity and uniqueness. Despite that, the luxury industry has been exponentially growing. It captured practitioners’ interest, and the popularity of brand fan pages has increased. Yet, there is a scarcity of academic research on luxury brand experience within social media platforms. The brand experience is a promising concept, which emerged in consumer research. However, unlike other brand-related concepts, it has not been addressed explicitly across various contexts and practices. The online design element is isolated. Therefore, there is a need to adjust the experience to reflect the characteristics of the brands' categories and understand how customer-to-customer interaction might enrich the brand experience. Thus, this thesis explores luxury brand experience types formulated in response to brands social media activities and community actors’ interactions. The thesis employs a sequential exploratory multiple-method research design. It consists of two studies addressing three research questions. The first study adopts qualitative methods using a grounded theory approach to compare and analyze social media data of luxury and high street fashion brands activities and customers responses, resulting in a conceptual framework including new constructs to luxury experience literature. The second study adopts quantitative methods drawing on the first study’s framework. It uses a survey approach to collect data from (609) luxury brands customers and followers to test the relationships in the conceptual framework. The findings reveal that all social media marketing activities (curiosity creation, sensory marketing, and trendiness) directly affect the luxury brand experience occurring on social media platforms, namely fandom, immersive, informative, and aesthetic experience. Meanwhile, customer to customer interaction (socialization) mediates these relationships. The valance of exchanged II information moderates the mediated relationship between social media marketing activities and fandom experience. Therefore, this thesis is contributing literature stream through firstly, extending the luxury brands marketing literature in social media platforms by identifying the customer brand experience types towards luxury brands activities. Thus, it highlighted the most critical emerging concept, “fandom experience”. Secondly, extending the experiential marketing literature through exploring brand experience in the lens of customer dominant logic approach in response to social media marketing in a luxury fashion context. Thirdly, developing a luxury brand experience framework clarifies the integral role of customer-to-customer interactions in enhancing experience. Final, luxury marketers can preserve the brand unique positioning in social media by offering quality content strategy, reinforcing the customer-to-customer interactions and delivering a superior brand experience

Item Type:Thesis (Doctoral)
Award:Doctor of Philosophy
Keywords:Luxury Fashion Brand Experience, Social Media Marketing, Customer to Customer interactions, Customer-Dominant Logic CDL.
Faculty and Department:
Thesis Date:2021
Copyright:Copyright of this thesis is held by the author
Deposited On:06 Dec 2021 10:32

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Journal of Consumer Marketing

ISSN : 0736-3761

Article publication date: 25 January 2022

Issue publication date: 9 February 2022

Although the consumption of luxury brands is significantly on the rise in emerging markets, a significant impetus is needed to boost their growth to achieve desired revenues and profitability. This paper aims to consider social media marketing activities and consumer-brand engagement as key constructs to realize these desired objectives.

Design/methodology/approach

The empirical relationships among social media marketing activities, consumer-brand engagement and consumer response have been examined with a sample of 465 respondents.

Social media marketing activities foster engagement among luxury brand consumers, translating into a favorable response. Besides this, informational marketer generated content (MGC) moderates the relationship between social media marketing activities and consumer-brand engagement.

Practical implications

Marketers can use the outcomes of this study to better engage consumers of luxury brands on social media platforms to engender a favorable response.

Originality/value

This paper highlights how consumers of luxury brands are engaged through different marketing activities in the social media context. Also, the moderating role of MGC has been explored.

  • Luxury brands
  • Brand purchase intentions
  • Social media marketing activities
  • Consumer-brand engagement
  • Price premium

Kumar, V. , Khan, I. , Fatma, M. and Singh, A. (2022), "Engaging luxury brand consumers on social media", Journal of Consumer Marketing , Vol. 39 No. 1, pp. 121-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCM-10-2020-4175

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Lisa Habernik

How are luxury fashion brands adopting their social media content in alinement with a more sustainable business approach?

Publication.

The notion of luxury and the idea of sustainability are regarded as incompatible (Davies et al., 2012; Janssen et al., 2015). Luxury is associated with an excessive and opulent lifestyle, while sustainability promotes abstinence and modesty (Cvijanovich, 2011; Kapferer and Michaut-Denizeau, 2014). At the same time, society expects luxury brands to be committed to sustainable practices and to openly communicate about them. This poses difficulties for luxury brands in terms of sustainability communication. Research has shown that through integrating sustainability narratives into their communication, luxury brands risk alienating luxury consumers (Kong, Witmaier and Ko, 2021). The challenge for luxury brands is therefore to find strategies to maintain a glamorous and exclusive image while meeting consumer demands and informing about sustainable practices. An additional challenge is to communicate about sustainable initiatives in a way, that builds credibility and trust, as consumers have become sceptical of brands' sustainability claims due to increasing greenwashing scandals. This study aims to identify how luxury fashion brands tackle this challenge and analyses how sustainability communication is done on the most popular social media platform Instagram. The four luxury brands selected for this study are Gucci, Stella McCartney, Chloé and Prada. To conduct the research, 40 sustainability related posts from each brand were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The goal was to identify what aspects of their sustainability practices brands communicate and how they communicate. The findings are thus divided into two parts: content topics and content style. The results show that due to the rising awareness of sustainability all four brands have acknowledged the importance of communicating about their efforts related to sustainable practices. However, they have incorporated this into their social media presence to different degrees and with different approaches. Overall, there is still the tendency to present information on sustainability practices in an abstract and vague way, as identified in previous research. Brands often fail to provide specific details and concrete evidence with their sustainability claims, or overuse sustainability buzzwords, such as ‘recycled’, ‘ethically sourced’ or ‘raw material’ in their communication. These approaches can raise distrust about the actual impact and truth of brands' sustainability efforts and lead to suspicions of greenwashing. In this regard, next to the overuse of sustainability buzzwords, the study also found that on the other hand luxury brands often paraphrase sustainability terms. This helps them to maintain their elevated and sophisticated speech when communicating about the topic sustainability.

Additional Metadata
Keywords luxury fashion; sustainability communication; communication strategies; luxury brand communication
Thesis Advisor Donagh Horgan
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. . Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/71687

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