“Does It Go Without Saying?” Implication of Electronic Word of Mouth in Luxury Branding: An Abstract

TY - CHAP

T1 - “Does It Go Without Saying?” Implication of Electronic Word of Mouth in Luxury Branding

T2 - An Abstract

AU - Mander, Harjordan

AU - Cheng, Zixuan (Mia)

AU - De Regt, Anouk

AU - Fawaz, Rayan

AU - Montecchi, Matteo

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The rise of social media has provided firms with ample new opportunities to communicate their brands (Carlson et al. 2019; Zhang et al. 2018). Additionally, because textual and audio-visual data on social media platforms can be preserved, the medium has become a valuable tool for providing insights and informing strategic brand management (Kim et al. 2019; Greco and Polli 2019). Within the overall social media communication environment, brand communities specifically provide unique insights, as they can enhance understanding regarding changes in consumer’s opinions and feeling and how they perceive and talk to each other about a brand (Kim and Lee 2019). Using automated text analysis and Berthon and his colleagues’ (2009) framework to classify the user-generated brand content, this study investigates consumer attitudes towards luxury products based on the online communication within a Facebook brand community. This study includes a sample size of 15,014 comments from 302 posts from a Facebook luxury fashion group. The analysis revealed several significant main and interaction effects. This included significant main effects of aesthetics on analytic thinking and tone. More importantly, a significant two-way interaction between aesthetic and ontology occurred on analytic thinking and tone. The study provides useful and interesting insights into the theory and practice of luxury branding. For marketers bringing luxury to the masses could ensure higher sales, however, the perceived loss of exclusivity experienced by the high aesthetic customers could negatively impact the brand’s image in the long run. Luxury brands could mitigate these negative feelings and fuel prolonged consumer engagement by providing other options that make this part of their target audience feel special. Since the high aesthetic consumers are generally well informed about a company’s products or services, brands should consider selecting these individuals for co-creation and product innovation design purposes. This will not only help in re-building the consumer-brand relationship but because of their status within the social group will likely add to enhanced positive social discourse. This work also adds to the luxury fashion literature by incorporating linguistic inquiry and word count as a research tool to investigating luxury brand discourse in online brand communities, confirming the influence of the social context and conclusions by Berthon et al. (2009) that multiple market segments for one luxury brand exist and that marketing strategies should be focused accordingly.

AB - The rise of social media has provided firms with ample new opportunities to communicate their brands (Carlson et al. 2019; Zhang et al. 2018). Additionally, because textual and audio-visual data on social media platforms can be preserved, the medium has become a valuable tool for providing insights and informing strategic brand management (Kim et al. 2019; Greco and Polli 2019). Within the overall social media communication environment, brand communities specifically provide unique insights, as they can enhance understanding regarding changes in consumer’s opinions and feeling and how they perceive and talk to each other about a brand (Kim and Lee 2019). Using automated text analysis and Berthon and his colleagues’ (2009) framework to classify the user-generated brand content, this study investigates consumer attitudes towards luxury products based on the online communication within a Facebook brand community. This study includes a sample size of 15,014 comments from 302 posts from a Facebook luxury fashion group. The analysis revealed several significant main and interaction effects. This included significant main effects of aesthetics on analytic thinking and tone. More importantly, a significant two-way interaction between aesthetic and ontology occurred on analytic thinking and tone. The study provides useful and interesting insights into the theory and practice of luxury branding. For marketers bringing luxury to the masses could ensure higher sales, however, the perceived loss of exclusivity experienced by the high aesthetic customers could negatively impact the brand’s image in the long run. Luxury brands could mitigate these negative feelings and fuel prolonged consumer engagement by providing other options that make this part of their target audience feel special. Since the high aesthetic consumers are generally well informed about a company’s products or services, brands should consider selecting these individuals for co-creation and product innovation design purposes. This will not only help in re-building the consumer-brand relationship but because of their status within the social group will likely add to enhanced positive social discourse. This work also adds to the luxury fashion literature by incorporating linguistic inquiry and word count as a research tool to investigating luxury brand discourse in online brand communities, confirming the influence of the social context and conclusions by Berthon et al. (2009) that multiple market segments for one luxury brand exist and that marketing strategies should be focused accordingly.

KW - eWOM

KW - LIWC

KW - Luxury branding

KW - Social media

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85127962705&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-89883-0_73

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-89883-0_73

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85127962705

T3 - Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science

SP - 257

EP - 258

BT - Developments in Marketing Science

PB - Springer Nature

ER -