Over the last decade, e-commerce platforms for goods and services have been widely explored by the marketing literature. Coherently, e-commerce is emerging as a relevant distribution channel also in the wine industry. This notwithstanding, wine e-commerce platforms show a slower growth rate whether compared to other goods and services categories – such as electronic and digital products. This is particularly true in Italy where the total volume of e-commerce sales in the food and drink sector are less than 1% of the total online sales. Therefore, it is important to investigate the underlying mechanisms explaining consumers’ positive and negative intentions to purchase wine online. This will in fact allow both theoretical and practical insights to wine industry marketers. Hence, this study proposes and empirically tests a conceptual model concerning the antecedents of consumers’ intention to purchase wine online. Specifically, the objective is to identify the differences that are specific to the context of the wine buying process. The 5 steps of the purchasing process – need perception, pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase, intention of repatronage – are analyzed through eleven determinants such as risk aversion, convenience propensity, product information availability, degree of independence in purchasing, shopping enjoyment, channel layout, shipping conditions, loyalty intention, and free-riding behavior. Data were collected from a sample of Italian 570 online consumers who habitually purchase wine online. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for testing the hypothesized relationships. Results show that product information availability and convenience propensity significantly influence the digital channel selection and, consequently, loyalty and patronage intention. Building on these results, the present study suggests that wine industry should focus more on digital channels’ layout in order to better stimulate consumers’ loyalty and intention to provide positive feedbacks. Yet, it also emerged how this kind of channel is useful at most when targeting price sensitive consumers. Theoretical and practical implications are thus provided along with suggestions for future research in the marketing literature.

The paper proposes an analytical approach that explores brands in virtual environments by combining indicators of consumer brand alignment with measurements of social engagement. The results illustrated can be useful to devise adjustments to brand communication. The analysis is applied to brands belonging to the fashion industry.

New communication challenges for companies that use social media are: 1) the knowledge and control of the degree of alignment between communicated and perceived brand personality in order to measure the effectiveness of competitive positioning, and 2) the measurement of engagement among consumers who share comments about brands in online communities. Our research proposes research tools that can help fashion companies meet these challenges. In particular, we present an innovative methodological approach that combines netnography and text-mining to extract and analyze data from online communities of fashion brands.

The aim of this paper is to understand which are the most effective social media strategies for gaining customer engagement for fashion companies. The study has been conducted using the empirical research methodology and the information has been collected with the use of an online survey distributed among companies belonging to the fashion industry. 42 questionnaires have been collected and therefore discussed. The analysis led to the definition of a list of strategies used by fashion companies on the adoption of social media tools. Subsequently, activities and the social tools able to improve customer engagement have been analysed. Finally, according to the size of the companies and to their positioning on the market, a descriptive analysis of the results have been carried out, comparing companies with similar characteristics. The research shows that companies of the same segment adopt the same approach to social media as well as a similar set of social media marketing strategies. The findings of this paper confirm the growing interest both from academics and practitioners for Social Media Marketing tools and they will suggest implications to fashion brands to manage their customer engagement and their social media activity.