The market for luxury is changing with new competitors to the market, more modest growth, and new types of customers (Kim and Ko 2012, Ko, Phau and Aiello 2016) as well as the ubiquity of digital marketing channels (Okonkwo 2009). Moreover, social media has transformed the logic of fashion marketing by providing new ways of engaging, interacting, and connecting with customers (Dhaoui 2014) as well as enabling consumers to participate in branding process (Burman 2010). As a consequence, also luxury brands need to develop experience-based marketing strategies that emphasise interactivity, connectivity and creativity (Atwal and Williams 2009). What is more, despite of growing importance of social media marketing in luxury industry, extant research on the topic still remains quite limited (Ko and Megehee 2012). While the previous studies have well documented the benefits of luxury marketing on social media (Kim and Ko 2012, Kim and Ko 2010, Brogi et al. 2013, Kontu and Vecchi 2014, Godey et al. 2016), and their implications on luxury brand management (Dhaoui 2014, Larraufie and Kourdoughli 2014), and even co-creative marketing practices (Choi, Ko and Kim 2016, Tynan, McKehnie, and Chuon 2010), no studies to this date have looked at co-creation from consumer-perspective. This article provides a novel perspective on luxury branding, by following the resource-based theory of consumer (Arnould, Price and Malshe 2006) to study the brand identity as co-created in social media. To do this, visual frame analysis (Goffman 1974, Luhtakallio 2013) is applied on consumer generated images downloaded from Instagram feed of brand exhibition staged by luxury brand Louis Vuitton. Based on the analysis, a typology of co-created brand identities is proposed. The findings indicate that in the branded exhibitions, consumers co-create brand identity by utilising resources available in the experiential brandscape by taking and posting these objectifications of brand on social media (Presi et al. 2016) and in so doing create symbolic/expressive, and experiential/hedonic value (Tynan et al. 2010). Theoretically, this article provides a novel perspective on luxury brand as co-created and in so doing, demonstrates the dynamics of firm-consumer co-creation. What is more, to extend the emerging stream of visual analysis of luxury (Kim et al. 2016, Freire 2014, Megehee and Spake 2012), an application of novel is demonstrated in the article. Managerially, this explorative study provides new insights on luxury marketing in social media by suggesting that branded experiences should be designed in a manner that engages the consumer to actively use the resources available to them. The financial implications of this shift are also significant as according to McKinsey study, three out of four luxury purchases are influenced by social media (Hope 2016)
Exhibitions are becoming a new important marketing tool in the fashion industry. Consumer’s interest in the haute couture and arts is increasing in parallel to the increase of the need of museums to attract visitors. While many fashion brands have been holding exhibitions, very few studies have investigated the effectiveness of exhibitions.
This study aims to obtain practical implications which can be applied to further exhibition marketing processes. To this end, the main goals of this study are thus as follows: (1) to analyze the fashion exhibition cases by categories; and (2) to examine customer satisfaction by the fashion exhibition types and to determine how customer satisfaction affects the brand image.
In order to classify the fashion exhibition types, a total of 160 cases held in the last five years in all over the world were collected and the range was set to the B2C fashion exhibition practices. For quantitative analysis of the customer recognition, the survey was distributed to total of 309 participants. Each of respondents evaluated three stimuli therefore the nine stimuli were respectively evaluated by 103 people.
As a result of our analysis, nine types of fashion exhibitions were derived by two criteria, namely, (1) the main purpose of an exhibition and (2) the contents of an exhibition. Most fashion exhibitions are held with the goals of aesthetics, sociability, and remembrance. Exhibitions display various fashion products, such as apparel, shoes, bags, and jewellry, fashion photography, as well as various artistic media, such as video, drawings, and installation arts. The nine types of fashion exhibitions were used as a stimulus to quantitatively verify the effectiveness of fashion exhibitions. According to the results of the statistical analyses, customer satisfaction and brand image were significantly different in the fashion exhibition type but the exhibition type does not directly affect the brand image.
This study provides a better understanding of the growing influence of factors on the fashion exhibitions and extends the limited research area by verifying the response of fashion exhibition visitors on the marketing level. Moreover, our results provide practical implications for fashion brands to establish successful exhibition marketing strategies.