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

Abstract

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
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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