Some well-known luxury fashion brands log off social media or deliberately keep their accounts empty. The article investigates how consumers of high-end fashion brands react to this social media strategy through a series of experiments. This study provides managerial implications for social media strategy of luxury fashion brands.

Consumers become increasingly concerned about the impact of business on the society and social media platforms facilitate the spread of their concern worldwide. This research investigates how consumers react (i.e. Electronic Word-of-Mouth) when brands initiate good or bad practices in the context of social and environmental corporate responsibility. Three experiments provide a multifaceted representation of the phenomenon. We examine the role of consumers’ self-conscious moral emotions (i.e. guilt and pride), in combination with brand engagement in self-concept (BESC) and brand loyalty, in explaining consumers’ reaction. The results will help scholars and managers to better understand and address the spread of consumers’ e-WOM relating to what they perceive as responsible or irresponsible brand behaviors.

The current study investigates how retailers deal with sustainability issues in different market fields with a specific focus on fashion industry. This work examines the last ten years of the scientific literature on sustainable retailing (SR), through a systematic literature review. 215 papers selected from the EBSCO database are analyzed, in order to develop an overview on the state of the art of research on SR. A comprehensive framework for a holistic definition of SR and for retailers’ practices related to sustainability is outlined. Future research directions on SR are provided.

This research investigates the effect of digital advertising on the customer-brand relationship, looking at the mediating role of privacy risk perceptions on consumers’ purchase intentions. Through an online experiment, authors show how the source of the customized promotion via e-mail (known source vs. unknown source) has implications on privacy risk perceptions which in turn influence purchase intentions. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Given the relevance of social media platforms into everyday life, User-Generated- Contents (UGC) have come to represent one of the richest and used source of online information (Koltringer and Dickinger, 2015). UGC include online information sources that are developed, and used by consumers who intend to communicate each other and share information about products, brands and services (Culotta and Cutler, 2016) influencing other customers’ perception and decision-making process. In this perspective, for marketers who need to manage their brands, UGC on social media provide new opportunities and new dangers. One particular kind of contents created by consumers are parodies of advertisement (parodic ads), humorous messages that parody extant advertising (Roehm and Roehm, 2014). This kind of UGC can damage or be beneficial for brands image and reputation. After the development of an overview about parody literature in management discipline, this research aims at investigating the effect of parodic ads video - created and shared by users on social media - on the image and the reputation of the parodied advertising's brand. With this aim, authors will developed a content analysis on ads videos and parodic ads videos and related comments on You Tube.

The present study contributes to the recent debate on luxury brands and sustainability practices. By combining Implicit Association Test (IAT) with two online experiments, the research aims at reconciling previous results on this topic. Particularly, in the first study, millennials’ unconscious associations to sustainable luxury are investigated. In the second study, the effect of sustainability on millennials intentions to buy toward luxury and fast-fashion products are assessed. Finally, the third study considers the role of different product appeals involved in the sustainability practices in determining consumers’ responses. Expected results of study 1 and 2 confirm the idea supported by a part of previous studies that sustainability is not automatically and positively associated to luxury brands. Study 3 provides with an explanation of discording results, by focusing on sustainability appeals and their centrality on the evaluation of luxury products. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how social media and user-generated content (UGC) foster consumer engagement through the development of a good city image. Special emphasis is placed on the attitudes of potential visitors, how these attitudes affect a city’s image, and the perceived social distance between users and the authors of social media content. The study adopts a 2 x 2 experimental design in which high/low green image and high/low social distance are examined. The results suggest that a green city image has a significant effect on potential visitors’ attitude towards cities. Moreover, this study found that the effects of social media content varies according to the perceived social distance between the author of the post and potential visitors.

This study aims at identifying a novel framework that further explains the relationship between brands and customers in the online context at different touchpoints (e.g. social media, website) of the customer journey. In pursuing this goal, authors expect online brand experience as the main trigger in determining specific customer brand engagement (CBE) behaviours.

This paper aims to monitor brand image of two important fashion cities on social media (Instagram). Through a content analysis of pictures and texts authors attempt to identify the main associations that various actors have of London and Florence, both traditionally strictly related to the fashion system. As recent literature has argued for brands or products, even for places and cities (Gilboa et al. 2015), it is important to monitor the perceived city brand image resulting from the overall online experience (Choi et al. 2007), especially on social media. Indeed, it is demonstrated that word of mouth on social media is able to strongly affect users’ perceptions (Gretzel, Yuan, and Fosenmaier, 2000), thus contributing at the construction of the city brand image. This paper is one of the first one that applies content analysis on Instagram in city/place branding, where the core of communication is based on images. Therefore, differently from previous studies (Andéhn et al. 2014; De Moya and Jain, 2013), this work principally focuses on visual communication, as form of textual paralanguage communication (Luangrath, Peck, and Barger, 2016), for the construction of city image of London and Florence.

The current research aims to shed light on consumer-brand relationship, adopting the self-determination theory as theoretical lens for defining the antecedents and the consequences of the Brand Engagement in Self Concept (Sprott, Czellar, & Spangenberg, 2009). The originality of the study stems in the contest of analysis, that is the international cosplayer community, given the extreme engagement manifestation of the actors of the community in comics characters. Thus, the goal of this study is to test a model previously proposed by Razmus, Jaroszyńska, & Palęga (2017) in a community of high engagement manifestations, that is the cosplayer community (e.g. dress-up as their own favourite character). Moreover, authors would like to introduce a novel variable that is the brand-self congruity (Aaker, 1997; Sirgy, 1982), able to influence the relationship between personal aspirations (Kasser and Ryan, 1993; 1996), brand engagement in self-concept, brand advocacy (Kim et al. 2001) and brand loyalty (Oliver, 1999).

The aim of this paper is to investigate, through a content analysis, the communication strategies used by luxury fashion brands on Twitter and the related Twitter eWOM, with the purpose to identify brand associations compared to luxury dimensions considered in literature (De Barnier et al. 2012; Godey et al. 2014). Within the luxury fashion environment, where every detail is meaningful and, consequently, every single word matters, this study attempts to provide a contribution into the field of luxury advertising, by comparing semantic fields of words chosen by digital fashion marketers and by popular fashion bloggers to the dimensions that define the luxury construct in luxury literature.

In recent years, the spread of social media and other digital tools and its massive acceptance have revolutionized marketing practices such as advertising and promotion (Hanna, Rohn and Crittenden, 2011) by changing the approach of communication between consumers and brands (Henkkig-Thurau et al. 2004) and the sources of information about products, services or brands for consumers (Kozinets, 1999). On the one hand, these changes have provided consumers of the additional power to influence other buyers by sharing ideas and experiences about products, services or brands (Ioanăs & Stoica 2014). On the other hand social media websites allow business to engage and interact with users by increasing sense of intimacy with consumers and building strong relationships with potential customers (Mersey et al. 2010). Therefore, the incomparable efficiency of social media has induced industry leaders to participate in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others, with the aim to succeed in online environments (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Furthermore, brands are motivated to develop social network campaigns for gathering consumers’ personal information useful to targeting or personalising future marketing strategies (Noort, Anthenius and Verlegh, 2014). This situation have brought many authors, especially interested in luxury industry, to investigate on social media as a new way for luxury firms to communicate with consumers and influence their purchases. One of the main objectives for literature was to understand if luxury products, related to prestige, uniqueness and exclusivity values, could be express using channels accessible to everyone, such as social media. Indeed, in this era of the “democratization of luxury” (Atwal and Williams 2009), luxury brands are dealing with the challenge of using mass marketing tools and at the same time emphasizing the exclusivity dimension of their products (Okonkwo 2010). So as Hennigs states: “As the virtual environment is a place where images, videos and opinions circulate regardless of brand ownership, is it possible to keep a sense of exclusivity around a luxury brand?” (Hennigs, Wiedmann and Klarmann 2012 p. 30). In Italy, the digital population keep growing and the time spent in front of digital devices is increasing; people is becoming more familiar with e-commerce and as a consequence the communication of firms is more transparent (The Boston Consulting Group 2011). In this perspective, this paper aims to analyse the impact of social media marketing on brand equity and consumer behaviour within the Italian luxury economy. Our research has tried to understand this phenomenon from two perspectives; on the one hand, authors have observed digital marketing strategies of some luxury firms, emphasizing the way these brands use social network to promote their products, their special events or their stories. On the other hand, researchers have studied consumers’ approaches to social networks through a survey (Chisnall 1993) delivered to a sample of Italian respondents. The goal of the research is to show how social media have been used by five luxury brands and how they can influence luxury brand equity, by affecting Italian consumer behaviour. With this objective, the authors have analysed the composition of the sample that is active on social networks in order to gather useful demographic information about users. Moreover, this research has been important to discover the most popular platforms for Italian users and the response of some of the major international luxury brands in terms of contents shared on specific social networks. In addition, the survey has represented a great opportunity to understand the influence of social network on consumer behaviour, seeking to measure cognitive, affective and conative responses (Laroche and Mourali 005).

This research aims to understand how an interdisciplinary approach could help Italian firms to enhance their offer to the market. In this perspective, authors have studied benefits and obstacles of an interdisciplinary research approach, by describing the case of RITRATTO, a project by University of Florence referents of various disciplines (agronomy, design, engineering, history and marketing).