Social media marketing offers a vast array of opportunities for fashion brands to engage with their core customers and the broader digital audience. However, they still struggle with the question of which specific strategies can be successfully applied to enhance the effectiveness social media marketing (Rampton, 2014). This study investigates how a luxury brand’ social media brand page satisfaction and brand love are positively related to desired marketing outcomes (i.e., word-of-mouth and loyalty intentions toward the luxury brand). On the basis of Customer Value Theory (Sweeny & Soutar, 2001) and Brand Love Theory (Carroll & Ahuvia, 2006), this study developed and tested a dual impact model encompassing both brand page value (i.e., information, financial, brand interaction, social interaction, and entertainment value) and brand value (i.e., inner self-and social self-expressive value).
Usable responses from 290 U.S. consumers following at least one luxury brand on social media were used for data analysis. The results of structural equation modeling showed that information, brand interaction, and entertainment values were positively related to brand page satisfaction while financial and social interaction values were not. In addition, inner self-and social self-expressive brand values were positively related to brand love. In addition, brand page satisfaction was positively related to WOM intentions but was not related to loyalty intentions whereas brand love was positively related to both WOM and loyalty intentions. Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that brand page satisfaction fully mediated the influences of information, brand interaction, and entertainment values on WOM intentions. In addition, brand love fully mediated the influences of social self-expressive value on WOM and loyalty intentions.
Our study suggests that social media brand pages providing unique value propositions can reap benefits in terms of enhanced brand page satisfaction, highlighting the crucial role of “content excellence” in social media marketing (Holt, 2016). Our findings also show that brand followers tend to love a particular luxury brand when the brand helps express their self and when the symbolic meaning of the brand is integrated into their own self-identity. Thus, one of the roles of social media marketing is in elucidating brand followers how to express their inner states guided by the desire to signal their self-identity not to others but to themselves (Berger & Heath, 2017).

• Sanga Song(University of Minnesota, USA)
• Hye-Young Kim(University of Minnesota, USA)