KOREASCHOLAR

This study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media marketing as a tool in communicating a “populist” (Scott, 2015) luxury fashion brand’s good intentions toward ordinary people; it also seeks to identify whether luxury fashion brands frequently perceived as exclusive and “envied” could become approachable and “admired” brands, simply by expressing “warm” intentions on their social media sites. Ultimately, we aim to investigate whether positive relational outcomes can be derived from the brand repositioning process, from envy to admiration. This study builds on the brands as intentional agents framework (Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012), which categorizes brands in terms of their “intentions” and “ability”: “able/ill-intentioned” luxury brands are categorized as “envied brands,” while “able/well-intentioned” brands elicit the general public’s admiration. Our pre-test results confirmed that consumers can sense a brand’s good intentions and ability via its social media site. We then conducted an online selfreported survey among 488 US women aged 18–49 years who were following or “liking” at least one luxury fashion brand’s official social media site. Using structural equation modeling, we found that intentions have a negative impact on consumer envy, and that they have a positive impact on consumer admiration. Ability was found to have a positive impact on consumer admiration of the brands, while it has a negative impact on consumer envy. Although we confirmed negative directions, consumer envy of the brands had nonsignificant impacts on both emotional brand attachment and brand forgiveness. However, consumer admiration of the brands had a positive impact on both kinds of brand responses. In conclusion, while most luxury fashion brands have stuck to exclusivity, the findings of this study imply that by continually showing good intentions towards ordinary people, luxury fashion brands could reposition themselves as admired brands, which would in turn enhance emotional brand attachment. In this way, these brands could cultivate affectionate and passionate consumer–brand relationships making consumers feel more connected to them. In doing so, luxury fashion brands can acquire through social media powerful consumer allies (Phan, Thomas, & Heine, 2011), who are willing to forgive their failures.

• Bo Ra Joo(University of Minnesota, USA)
• Hye-Young Kim(University of Minnesota, USA)