Social Media Engagement with Luxury Brands: An Exploratory Study: An Abstract

Abstract

Existing research on use of social media marketing (SMM) by luxury brands reports that despite the contradiction between the luxury appeals of exclusivity, uniqueness, and status and the accessibility of social media (SM) channels to broad masses around the world, SMM enhances consumer trust and intimacy with luxury brands (Kim and Ko 2010), brand and relationship equity (Kim and Ko 2012), as well as consumer-brand engagement and brand evangelism (Dhaoui 2014). Given the increasing interest in and use of SMM by luxury brands, with the correspondingly growing marketing allocations to SM, it is important to understand how and why luxury consumers interact with their favorite brands, and what potential these interactions may have for luxury brand meaning co-creation. In the past decade, marketing scholars have noticeably moved away from conceptualizing brands as “controllable knowledge structures” and consumers as “passive absorbers of brand knowledge” (Gensler et al. 2013, p. 243). Still, research is lacking in the areas investigating specific behaviors that represent consumers’ input into the process of brand meaning co-creation in SM and the drivers of consumer participation in this process (Alexander and Jaakkola 2016).