Recently there has been debate in popular media on brands that used other cultures’ elements in their advertising (Green & Kaiser, 2017). For example, the Dutch brand “Rituals Cosmetics” attempted to promote their Asian-inspired product lines called “Samurai” and “Namasté” by hiring a Caucasian model dressed in a supposedly traditional Asian costume, while posing in a Chinese temple-like setting (Peters, 2018). Because the company’s European origin and the ethnicity of the model did not align with the Asian setting, props and apparel, this marketing activity can be considered an act of cultural appropriation. The advert has since sparked controversy on social media as cultural exploitation or unethical cultural appropriation (Bryanboy, 2018). To avoid such controversy, marketers need to achieve cultural sensitivity while effectively managing culturally overlapping situations (Usunier & Lee, 2005; De Mooij, 1998). A mismanagement of cultural appropriation is potentially eliciting a negative customer response. Hence, it is integral to understand how do customers respond to culturally appropriated elements in advertisement?

The current research demonstrates that luxury product advertisements containing kitsch lowbrow art are perceived as unique, trendy, and hip and the perceived uniqueness positively influences luxuriousness judgment of the featured products, especially for participants with high narcissism and status seeking tendency.

Digitalisation, increasing global competition, new relational approaches to communication and advertising by new generations of consumers (for example, the New Millennials) together with social issues such as sustainability and authenticity in branding definition, pose important challenges for companies operating in the luxury fashion industry. In facing them, these companies seem to re-elaborate meanings attributed to luxury rethinking their strategies and their interactive approaches to market. The specialized literature, from its part, shows that luxury is no longer only ostentation but it has evolved in something else; on the one hand luxury as a state of mind and mood, and on the other still a sort of heritage and authenticity. These two extremes tend increasingly to contaminate each other and to co-exist one in the other, albeit with different reciprocal influence. The aim of this paper is determine how this co-existence can occur. It involves two opposing aspects of luxury, that of owning and that of being. There are other facets of luxury that may occur between these extremes. Research has shown, in fact, that luxury is also experience, co-creation, sharing and even self-achievement. Rendering luxury status, but at the same time making it an instrument for individual evolution may determine an integration of its various faces paving the way for a re-conceptualization of fashion luxury in communication.

This research scrutinizes the synergism of virtual reality, the Internet, and television on credibility, memory, attitude, presence, and purchase intention. Respondents are randomly assigned to view two advertisements on the same or different media. This present study parses outs the relationship between immersive media and extant media in cross-media advertising.

The emergence and explosive growth of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tweeter, etc. has dramatically changed both the way consumers shop and brands advertise. According to a study by Track Maven, Instagram is the most engaging social media platform nowadays with the most average interactions per post per 1,000 followers. It stimulates “Instagram influencer marketing” to develop rapidly and promotes a great variety of brands. It has fundamentally changed the balance of power between customers and brands because it allows peer recommendations to play a much larger role in purchasing decisions [13]. It has become one of the trendiest marketing strategies that focus on influential figures on Instagram rather than targeting on the market as a whole. Instagram influencer marketing highlights content creators who may impact their audiences’ buying habits. For example, shoppers who compare hotel reviews can simply search “hashtag plus hotel name (e.g. #hiltonnewyork) in Instagram and read people’s experiences with that hotel among related posts. Many of those posts were created by influencers who are collaborating with the brands to advertise. Based on activities of more than 12 million Instagram influencers between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, Social bakers created a report to categorize influencers into three categories: micro-influencers who have fewer than 10,000 followers, macro influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and celebrities who attracts a million or more followers. The majority of Instagram influencers are “micro-influencers”. Their finding also reveals that the combined amount of sponsored content on Instagram for all three categories of influencers in North America has jumped 150% in the last year.

A new era for luxury brands is emerging, in which the prevailing motivations need to be reexamined. Considering that advertisements are frequently based on the motivations that the luxury brand aims to satisfy, this research sets out to fill this gap in the literature. Through a quasi-experiment, this study examines how a series of personal characteristics affect the relationship between advertised values and Aad, Ab and PI. Preliminary findings are reported and suggestions for further research are presented as well. Indicative implications and limitations are also noted.