When Luxury Fashion Brands Meet Social Networks
When Luxury Fashion Brands Meet Social Networks
Introduction
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” -Coco Chanel
In the fashion industry, it’s about going ahead and setting the trend or run as fast as you can to not be out of date. What’s happening right now is that the way people communicate and keep connected has been changing because of the internet and so called social networks. At the end of 2011, 10 billion social media accounts were created (Athow, 2011). It just becomes more popular when people start to see social networks as their private channel to keep up, share links and discuss with friends (Fournier & Avery, 2011). In their private spaces, it allows them to express their identity and reinforce their individuality and enables them to satisfy social needs through sharing of consumption related experiences (Christodoulides, 2009). Whatever people talk online from blogs, Facebook, Twitter to LinkedIn and YouTube offers firms a chance to involve in a conversation with millions of customers around the world every day (Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, n.d.). Every company in every industry to jump into social networks and change their marketing strategies by focusing on talking to customers aiming for deepened relationship. Nevertheless, not every business appreciates this new channel even though building the deepened relationship via social media is cheap and it means brand loyalty which can be referred to generate sale because brands will completely lose control and the power will shift to consumer side (Fournier and Avery, 2011) especially in a luxury-brand industry. However, to not become a part of social media can make brands absent from customers’ minds as well, so with many opportunities that companies could achieve through social media activities and bunch of risks that companies could have avoided are such
Introduction
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” -Coco Chanel
In the fashion industry, it’s about going ahead and setting the trend or run as fast as you can to not be out of date. What’s happening right now is that the way people communicate and keep connected has been changing because of the internet and so called social networks. At the end of 2011, 10 billion social media accounts were created (Athow, 2011). It just becomes more popular when people start to see social networks as their private channel to keep up, share links and discuss with friends (Fournier & Avery, 2011). In their private spaces, it allows them to express their identity and reinforce their individuality and enables them to satisfy social needs through sharing of consumption related experiences (Christodoulides, 2009). Whatever people talk online from blogs, Facebook, Twitter to LinkedIn and YouTube offers firms a chance to involve in a conversation with millions of customers around the world every day (Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, n.d.). Every company in every industry to jump into social networks and change their marketing strategies by focusing on talking to customers aiming for deepened relationship. Nevertheless, not every business appreciates this new channel even though building the deepened relationship via social media is cheap and it means brand loyalty which can be referred to generate sale because brands will completely lose control and the power will shift to consumer side (Fournier and Avery, 2011) especially in a luxury-brand industry. However, to not become a part of social media can make brands absent from customers’ minds as well, so with many opportunities that companies could achieve through social media activities and bunch of risks that companies could have avoided are such