Known originally for climbing gear and outdoor clothing, Patagonia is now a leader in the area of sustainability practices. In this qualitative study, we examined the content of Patagonia’s blog “Stories We Wear” (SWW) that features customers’ stories about Patagonia apparel items worn and repaired to extend the product lifecycle. Patagonia encourages its customers to take part in a dialog of anti-consumption via the blog in which readers and authors of the posts can both engage with the brand and create their own sustainable identity. The overarching research question for the study was to determine the major reoccurring themes of the SWW blog posts. Five key themes identified in the blog posts were: (1) the emotional attachment to the apparel item; (2) outdoor adventure travel connecting to escapism; (3) the imagined future of the item; (4) valuing the item as an investment or the mark of a turning point in one’s life and identity; and (5) the act of repairing the item. The reasons SWW writers keep their Patagonia apparel items include quality and comfort, as well as the emotional attachment to both the apparel item and the brand. Carroll and Ahuvia’s (2006) concept of brand love is embedded in SWW stories. The repairs promote sustainability, a brand, and societal value. Customers did not discontinue purchase of new items; instead, they viewed purchases of Patagonia apparel as an investment. Through SWW, Patagonia encourages emotional attachment to its brand and promotes sustainability, while offering customers an opportunity to embrace a shared identity with the brand. The findings demonstrate that the SWW blog is a positive marketing strategy (Gopaldas, 2015) that promotes company, customer, and societal values of sustainability. The themes found in Patagonia’s SWW concept can be utilized by other companies seeking to enhance their sustainability practices and customer engagement with their products.

While it was found that consumers’ experience on purchase intention is significantly affected by greater involvement in blogging (Hsu & Tsou, 2011), not many fashion companies use blogs to improve online consumption and relationship with their employee or customer (Fieseler & Fleck, 2013). Further, despite the growing significance of blog communication, there is a lack of understanding for the impact of accumulation of social capital in the blogosphere on the consumers’ attitude and engagement in previous research. This study is designed to address this gap, and particularly the role of three dimensions of social capital (i.e., structural, relational, and cognitive) in understanding blog user’s attitude and engagement. The purpose of this study is to investigate 1) the effect of blog user’s motivation (i.e., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, reputation, altruism, enjoyment, community identification) on their level of social capital within the blog 2) the influence of structural social capital and cognitive social on user’s relational social capital and 3) the impact of relational social capital on blog user’s attitude and engagement. Data was collected through a marketing research firm utilizing online survey method. With 530 usable data, the results of this study indicated enjoyment have positive significant effect on structural social capital while community identification have negative significant effect on structural social capital. For the effect of blogging motivation on cognitive social capital, the result showed positive significant effect of perceived usefulness, altruism and community identification on cognitive social capital Further, structural social capital does not have relationship with relational social capital while cognitive social capital has significant effect on relational social capital. The results also indicated that the relational social capital has influence on blogging attitude, which in turn has strong positive relationship with blogging engagement. The findings of this study contribute some useful knowledge about fashion blog and the relationships of the three social capital dimensions to the literature. Also, this study not only provides theoretical insight into understanding the influence of fashion blog user’s motivation on blogging behavior and satisfaction of needs of belong, it also exposes the influence of relationships building in blog community on user’s blogging attitude and engagement. Previous studies focused more on social influence on knowledge sharing motivation, and most of the researchers paid attention to the interaction of cognitive social capital and relational capital. This study employs the knowledge sharing motivation findings of previous studies, and it uses the effective motivation factors to test if they have the same impacts on people’s blogging behavior.

In this paper, researchers investigated current fashion brands’ social media micro-blogging marketing strategy and consumers’ word of mouth reactions. More than 5,000 of the micro-blogs posted by fashion brands and 143,000 of customers’ comments were analysed in this study. Researchers firstly investigated the overall micro-blogging marketing structure for each fashion brand and compared them. Then researchers identified the type of expression pattern of each fashion brand currently in the micro-blogging context, negative or positive sentiments. Researchers found that fashion brands are using different micro-blogging marketing strategies. Forever21 used 61% micro-blogs for customer communication. H&M posted very diverse micro-blogs content to their official account. Their main micro-blogs were used for new product promotion (43%) and brand’s live event broadcasting (33%). Luxury brands, such as Burberry, more than 52% of micro-blogs posted last year were used for new product promotion and 36% of their micro-blogs contents included celebrities’ images of wearing Burberry product. Chanel used 60% of their micro-blogs to broadcast and introduce their brand events. There was no sale information posted on Chanel and Burberry’s micro-blogs account. Through sentiment analysis, researchers also found the brands have very positive electronic word of mouth (e-WOM). Particular, luxury fashion brands are having better e-WOM than fast fashion brands.

This study used focus group transcripts and blog entries to explore the experiences of five Korean community college students in a course designed to promote second language (L2) writing development. To provide an in-depth look at this experience from the learner’s perspective, the author was “embedded” in this writing course, taking on the role of participant-researcher. Through multiple readings and coding of data from focus groups and students’ shared blogs, five relevant themes emerged from the students’ discourse: internalization; depersonalization; simplification; bonding; and approbation. From consideration of the students’ perspectives on their experiences in the writing class, suggestions for improving the experience of Korean and other L2 writing students are proposed, including use of relevant and accessible writing topics. The cohesiveness established through the discussion activities in the current study may have benefited participants’ motivational and strategic adaptation, suggesting that such sharing of experiences could be helpful for L2 writing students.