Luxury brands are increasingly embracing intrinsic values in their advertising campaigns. This paper reports an exploratory study examining the adoption of value-laden advertising focusing on intrinsic values. Through a content analysis of ads from 9 top luxury fashion brands, the depiction of intrinsic values was examined. Research results are discussed and academic and managerial implications are presented.

We conducted this study to determine the TikTok usage status of Chinese consumers, and the effect of fashion advertisement type preference and TikTok characteristics on fashion product purchase intentions. For this study, we conducted a literature review and survey method. The following conclusions were drawn by collecting data online and performing statistical analysis. Firstly, the period of use was 2–4 years, and 95.1% of people used it for 2–3 hours a day, and 95.1% of the people had a purchasing experience on TikTok. Secondly, the most people were interested in self creating and editing videos in TikTok. With regards to TikTok content, groups aged 30 are significantly more interested in fashion coordination suggestions and influencer’ recommendations than groups aged 20. Thirdly, this study found that the characteristics of TikTok fashion advertisements significantly influenced purchase intention. Among the characteristics of fashion advertisements, this study conclude that the “fashion entertainment” characteristic factor that fashion advertisements are fun and entertaining was the most influential variable on purchase intention, followed by useful information, reliability, and interactivity related to fashion. Fourthly, the types of preferred TikTok fashion advertising had a statistically significant effect on product purchase intention. The influential types of preferred advertising are top view, live advertisement, hashtag challenge, in-feed ads, and sticker ads.

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 study investigates the effects of the type of advertisement, brand extension, and consumer innovativeness on the credibility of fashion advertisements. The factorial design is constructed as a 2(type of fashion advertisement: general vs. cross-media) × 2(consumer innovativeness: high vs. low) × 2(the type of fashion brand extension: similar vs. dissimilar) three-way mixed design in which consumer innovativeness is the between-subjects variable. Subjects of this study included 210 men and women in their 20s and 30s who resid in Seoul and had SNS experiences. Frequency analysis, credibility analysis, three-way ANOVA, and simple interaction analysis were conducted using the SPSS 20.0 statistics package. The results are as follows: First, the type of fashion advertisement had a significant effect on advertising credibility. Cross-media advertisements had a more positive effect than general advertisements on all of the dependent variables. Also, the type of brand extension and consumer innovativeness showed significant effect on advertising credibility and the interaction effect between the type of fashion advertisement and consumer innovativeness was significant. Lastly, the effect of different types of brand extensions on advertising credibility showed a significant difference according to consumer innovativeness. Thus, a marketing strategy using cross-media advertising is proven to be effective in gaining consumer trust for a fashion brand.

In recent years, companies, consumers, and society have increasingly committed to actions aimed at protecting the environment. Thus, environmental activity has become central to companies’ strategies. Apparel is becoming a disposable product, resulting in a sharp consumption increase (Hwang et al., 2016). The fast growing rates of apparel products consumption and waste lead to an environmental crisis. Smaller brands as well as many multinational companies, including large chains started selling clothes made of ecological fiber. According to the Ethical Fashion Forum, green fashion refers “represents an approach to the design, sourcing and manufacture of apparel which maximizes benefits to people and communities while minimizing impact on the environment.” (Cervellon & Wernerfelt, 2012). The purpose of this research is to analyze the relationship between perceived effectiveness of green products, attitude toward advertising, brand attitude, purchase intention and green behavior intention and to identify how claim specificity types, cognitive style and sustainable involvement influence on the relationship between variables.

City-branding is usually a topic that practitioners, official bodies and academic researchers have approached from the marketing perspective, i.e. the deliberate strategy set to better “sell” a city-location to various stakeholders, from tourists to investors. The idea is to shape the city image which, as any location image, is a multidimensional phenomenon involving cognition and emotions. It has been defined as the aggregate of impressions, expectations and thoughts related to a definite place (Kotler et al., 1999; Ulaga et al. 2002). However, some scholars have found that places are “like a blank canvas upon which a series of representation are layered producing a place that is uniquely identifiable” (Staiff, 2014). Such representations include poetry, painting, film, travel writing, postcards, novels, maps, guide books and advertising. They build some imaginary of the place with physical buildings as metonymic characteristics of it, producing in the end some hyperreal meaning of the city, an iconic one (Ellul, 1988; Staiff, 2014). Therefore, studying the successive ways of staging a city in advertising, one should be able to identify the iconic elements of the city, the overall city-image implicitly built (and congruent categories of products) and in the end the culturally-built current visual imagery of the city, i.e. the one being currently promoted by city-branding marketing strategies. Particularly, fashion advertising is, as a creative industry (Howkins, 2002), part of some cultural-expression and cultural-building processes. Regular reuse of a setting would simultaneously shape the imaginary of this setting, while borrowing some of its features and facets. The setting would thus become quite quickly an iconic representation of itself (Greimas, 1966), ultimately becoming hyperreal. We use Venezia as the field of study. Our objective is to show the hyperreal nature of the current city-image, with the disappearance of distinctions between signified and sign (Baudrillard, 1994), thanks to the successive reproduction of preceding reproductions of reality in fashion ads using Venezia as a setting. To do so, we use semiotics, building some analytic grid. Particularly, we study: the general impression/feelings when observing the ad; denotation; iconic semiotic analysis including gestalt elements; lexicographic analysis of the text present on the ad; enunciation and emitter’s position; whether the ad is opaque or transparent; the connotations that derive from all previous; and the ultimate classification of the ad depending on its ideology (Floch, 1990). The final results will be ready by the time of the conference. Some interesting trends already emerge, for instance the regular empowering nature of the city for human beings represented in the ad, or the transparent nature of the ad. Besides from providing interesting conclusion on Venezia and on fashion advertising systematically using some setting, we believe the added value of the research is also in the methodological approach that could be used by official entities to understand how their city is iconically represented and craft consistent city-branding strategies, esp. when the city has some historical linkage with fashion and luxury history. Similarly, fashion marketers and advertisers would benefit from knowing about the processes behind systematic reuse of a setting with insights for all fashion-related or luxury-related cities (Paris, Milan, Florence, New York, etc.).

Some clothing manufacturers and retailers use attractive endorsers on their advertising. However, according to recent research, consumers with low body esteem evaluate the clothing items more negatively when they try them on in the fitting room and find that they are inferior to the attractive advertising endorser wearing the same items (Dahl, Argo, & Morales, 2012). Is it always true? Should clothing companies not use attractive endorsers? When Dahl, et al. (2012) emphasized the negative impact of an attractive endorser and discussed body esteem, they implicitly assumed body-related consumption, in which consumers wear clothing items to enrich their physical appearance. However, other research on fashion has suggested that consumers often wear clothing items for self-expression (e.g., Piacentiti & Malier, 2004). Luxury fashion brands have been particularly regarded as symbols of wealth, so consumers wear luxury fashion clothing items to show off their high status (Shavitt, 1989; Wilcox, Kim & Sen, 2009). Thus, status-related consumption should be considered in addition to body-related consumption. Considering status-related consumption, this research introduces another kind of self-esteem, i.e., status esteem, which refers to how confident consumers are in their status. Assuming that there are two types of self-esteem, body esteem (or external esteem) and status esteem (or internal esteem), both of which are related to clothing, we hypothesize that consumers low in status esteem will evaluate a status-related product more positively than consumers high in status esteem when their consumption aligns (vs. when it does not align) with an attractive endorser even though they are low in body esteem. To test the hypothesis, we conducted three laboratory experiments. The result of multiple regression analysis showed that our hypothesis was supported. By suggesting that even consumers with low body and status esteem can evaluate status-related product positively, when finding that they are inferior to the advertising endorser in terms of body, this research expands our understanding on how attractive advertising endorsers affect consumer evaluation of clothing items focusing on two kinds of selfesteem, body and status esteem.