The research examines the role of social media as a part of marketing communications strategy in the fashion industry. The aim is to develop a conceptual framework for marketing communications in the digital age, given the rise in importance of social media and the decline of traditional print media in terms of fashion influence.

The aim of this paper is to understand which are the most effective social media strategies for gaining customer engagement for fashion companies. The study has been conducted using the empirical research methodology and the information has been collected with the use of an online survey distributed among companies belonging to the fashion industry. 42 questionnaires have been collected and therefore discussed. The analysis led to the definition of a list of strategies used by fashion companies on the adoption of social media tools. Subsequently, activities and the social tools able to improve customer engagement have been analysed. Finally, according to the size of the companies and to their positioning on the market, a descriptive analysis of the results have been carried out, comparing companies with similar characteristics. The research shows that companies of the same segment adopt the same approach to social media as well as a similar set of social media marketing strategies. The findings of this paper confirm the growing interest both from academics and practitioners for Social Media Marketing tools and they will suggest implications to fashion brands to manage their customer engagement and their social media activity.

Anna Dello Russo has worked with H&M, the Sartorialist's Scott Schuman has written his second book and home-grown Susie Bubble has consulted for Gap, Armani and Selfridges to name a few. There is no doubt that these figures are key influencers in the world of fashion and they are turning their efforts and knowledge into fiscal benefits. Fashion blogs have become not only a form of user-generated content, a medium for communicating to the masses without any prior training or knowledge, but have also evolved to become a new marketing communications channel in their own right. Fashion writers are not only dictating content to esteemed fashion titles that were once only contributed to by the fashion journalist elite, but they are engaged as brand consultants with the aim of shaping the future direction of brands in terms of content, style and scope. When did all this power and influence happen and how can we measure it? This is the central question inherent to this study’s focus. The dynamic nature of digital, online and social media activities means that most research is out of date or getting closer to ‘expiry’ even as the ink dries on the page. To exemplify: research dated just three years ago still includes MySpace in a comprehensive list of online networks and social media sites (e.g. Mir and Zaheer, 2012) and ‘second life’ as an innovation [albeit this has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance within certain consumer sectors in recent times]. This aside, the point is thus: academic scholarship cannot keep up with the rapid rate of digital change in the landscape, but it continues to try, as does this humble study. A volume of research has recently contributed to the understanding of the influence of social media in the fashion sphere, predominately from an electronic word-of-mouth (e-wom) perspective, for example (Bronner and Hoog, 2013; Fang, 2014; Hennig-Thurau, 2004; Kulmala et al., 2013; Liu, 2006; Trusov et al., 2009) engagement with social media (e.g. Campbell et al, 2012; Dhaoui, 2014). This body of literature has supplied a solid foundation for understanding why user-generated content may be shared and under what circumstances and to whom. However, a limitation of these significant contributions are reasons for propensity to influence, that is, once it has been shared, distributed and circulated, how do we measure the impact of this influence? Yes we can use analytics to quickly demonstrate quantitative and numerical impact in terms of followers, traffic, interaction, sales and (not so quickly) the wider reach of blogs on PR for brands, brand-metrics and customer engagement. But what about the wider influential impact of key social media writers and opinion leaders, or those that follow and listen to them: how can we evaluate this impact of influence? How does it work? Why does it work with some over others? We seek to find answers around this notion of social influence and ask: why do people listen to bloggers? Do consumers of this information distinguish between platforms: do they prefer blogs? Twitter? Picture-content through Instagram or Pinterest? Is there a gender difference? Considering also the rise in ‘erasable’ social media in the form of SnapChat, which lasts ten seconds before ‘self destructing’: what impact are these having in terms of influence in particular sectors like fashion, how can brands harness this power and use it to build equity, target new consumers, increase sales and revenue? In other geographical domains, such as China, where social media constraints and censorship are notable, emerging applications like WeChat are increasing in popularity, first with consumers, but retail and fashion brands are also beginning to endorse them to facilitate a meaningful conversation with their customers through these innovations. We also aim to explore the current state of play regarding terminology for social media contributors – are they still bloggers even though they create content across-platform? (It would be unusual for example, for a popular and credible blogger to only have a blog and no twitter or Instagram activity). Is the term blogger naturally all-encompassing or is it a misnomer that we need to create new terminology to explain these phenomena? Cullen (2014) the fashion magazine editor of Elle Australia created a blogger award ceremony to honour the contribution of these fashion influencers and comments that: “We picked the ones that we felt have the most traction with our readers. It is very clear we are in a blogger boom right now and everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and [the nominees] gave fashion this new relevance. They took fashion and democratized it, so rather than have to see what the designer wanted you to see [on the catwalk], they took the runway fashion and put it together in their own ways. They made it wearable, as they mixed it with other labels and all those things that make an outfit work for real life.” This quote serves to illuminate an example of the commercial impact of fashion bloggers in the fashion sector and the relevance that influential opinion leaders believe they can have on their readership. Thus, we seek, through our research, to interrogate existing literature on social media, marketing, consumption and consumer psychological theories in the context of fashion influence with the aim of contributing to understanding in this fast-evolving transformative sector. Social media has been defined as: ‘A group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content. (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, .61). Within this context, social media applications exist to facilitate user interaction, and include blogs, content communities, discussion boards and chat rooms, product and/or service review sites, virtual worlds, and social networking sites (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). In this paper we focus on social networking, which refers to applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, Instagram/Pinterest and more disposable aps like Snapchat. Essentially, we take an all-embracing approach to understanding social media, as this is simply how it is used by consumers, in the virtual landscape (for example, users do not distinguish between platforms, they simply use the most appropriate means to communicate their content at that time). We aim to contribute a perspective that is original by investigating existing literature in two territories: social media influence and Social Impact Theory, which we will use as a theoretical perspective to explore the influence of social media on fashion. A Theoretical Lens: Social Influence Theory (SIT) After dismissing other theoretical frameworks for our study’s focus including: Uses and Gratifications theory; Involvement and Motivation, the choice to focus on Social Impact Theory (SIT) (Latane, 1981) was rationalized by the centrality of influence as a construct, to the characteristics of the theory. SIT (Latane, 1981) maintains, “as the number of people increases the impact on the target individual’s attitude and behavior enhances”. As influence is inherent to our aim, this theory, albeit being created almost two decades before the concept of social media, may have transferable qualities that may aid comprehension of understanding into the complexities associated with understanding the influence of social media in the fashion sector. This seemingly large leap from a traditional application of the theory to the virtual world is made more plausible by at least one previous study, that has started to also recognize the value of this framework for understanding online activity for example, Mir and Zaheer (2012) who use SIT in the contexts of social media and banking. The theory has not however, been used thus far in the realm of fashion and social media, thus, a study of this kind aims to contribute to knowledge in this field. Social impact has been defined by the founding father of the theory as: ‘Any of the great variety of changes in physiological states and subjective feelings, motives and emotions, cognitions and beliefs, values and behavior, that occur in an individual, human, or animal, as a result of the real, implied or imagined presence or actions of other individuals’. (Latané, 1981, p. 343) Latané (1981) created social impact theory to validate his hypothesis about how influence works, which led to the identification of three factors that make up social impact theory: 1) Strength: How important is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 2) Immediacy: How close in proximity and in time is the influencing group to the target of the influence; 3) Number: How many people are in the influencing group. Taking each one of these in turn, the leverage of these variables to a social media context seems obvious. Social media by its very nature encourages a ‘pull’ approach to groups or communities (hence the ‘strength’ variable); the ‘immediacy’ of social media in the sense that messages can be communicated and responded to in real time, have been facilitated by social media capabilities. Finally, the third variable of SIT is ‘number’; in a virtual world, there is a real sense that there is no limit to the amount of people you can communicate with. To exemplify, we refer to Facebook with its 9 Billion plus users as an example of this reach, or Lady GaGa with her 44 Million plus followers on Twitter. This succinct insight into SIT theory provides a short rationale as to its applicability to a social media context, specifically the fashion sector. A more in-depth analysis of its use and application to this study will be developed for the final paper following data collection.

Social media, Web 2.0 based social activity and powerful marketing tool, brought about a new paradigm for the 21st century culture and society. In line with the trend, the fashion industry is vigorously undertaking marketing activities on social media, seeking to build and maintain relationships with their customers through the Internet and mobile devices. The one-way provision of information by firms to customers has evolved to a symmetrical form of customers, whereby the customers also supply information to the firms share information with other customers. Through social media services, customers not only share their thoughts and experiences but also exchange tangible products and publicize the products, thereby directly participating in production and marketing activities of brands. Such participation of consumers offers inspirations for differentiated service on the part of the brands, for which proactive and long-term participatory activities of customers are required. Customer participation is of primary importance in current service marketing industry. Until now, related literature on customer participation has mostly centered on offline service situations. However, the advent of social media has simplified the process of participation for customers, and invoking voluntary customer participation has become the greatest challenge facing service industries, and, at the same time, the path to success. Those of us who live in the age of information technology are offered the opportunity to engage in two-way communication with other customers, the brand, and the media. Thus, customer participation is just as, if not, more important in an online environment. More and more customers are becoming directly involved in brand activities, which affect the brands as well as the customers themselves. Nonetheless, extant customer participation research focuses on developing constructs that are largely based on offline situations. Although such constructs correspond in part to the online setting, they fall short of meeting the unique characteristics of customer participation in social media. Therefore, in order to establish constructs for customer participation in social media, revision and supplementation of the offline-based constructs were found to be necessary. Based on interaction theory, this study explored the notion of customer participation in fashion brands’ social networking site (SNS) service by categorizing it into three types: customer-customer, customer-brand, and customer-media participation. In addition, it examined the external factors that influence customer social participation and how active social participation of customers in SNS affects trust and customer equity. The association between measurement variables according to the brand type was also closely examined. This study underwent two pre-tests to revise and supplement the survey items on customer social participation. A preliminary investigation was conducted on 516 respondents, and a total of 582 respondents participated in the main investigation. The respondents who were invited to participate lived in Korea, were in their 20s or 30s, and had previous experience in using fashion brands’ SNS service, SPSS 18.0 was used to conduct frequency analysis, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and t-test. Based on the results, AMOS 18.0 was used to undergo confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The results of the study are summarized as follows. Based on the brand type (SPA and luxury) and the rate of sales, Uniqlo, a global SPA brand that boasts the largest number of SNS fans, and Louis Vuitton, a global luxury brand, were chosen for the study. The respondents consisted of consumers in their 20s and the 30s who, within the last six months, had previous experience in using the SNS service of the brands. The sample consisted of 40.7% male and 59.6% female, and 72.5% were in their 20s and 27.5% in 30s. A large percentage of the respondents were students (64.9%). The large proportion of university students reflects the trend of most active users of SNS being university students. Second, SNS service shopping context found positive association with customer-customer participation and customer-brand participation, but customer-media participation was insignificant. The results show that as the SNS is characterized by its linkage to different websites and platforms, customers are exposed to constant opportunities for participation. On the other hand, customer-media participation was found to be insignificant, which can be interpreted as indiscriminate constant supply of information that seeks to spur impulsive buying leading to antagonism of the customers. Such negative situations can be avoided by departing from indiscriminate provision of information to offering information that is customized to the needs and demands of each customer and invoking the customer to participate in information delivery. Third, SNS participation motivation and customer social participation were all positively associated. In particular, customer-media participation demonstrated the strongest influence, followed by customer-customer and customer-brand participation. As such, active participation of the customer with the brand is the most effective way to create collaborative, synergy effect or co-creation. Fourth, all routes from SNS user orientation to customer social participation were significant. SNS users in general possessed high levels of self-efficacy and tended to feel elevated as well as find altruistic pleasure in providing information that would help others. Such users participate through numerous ways such as customer-brand and customer-media participation but were the most active in customer-customer participation. Fifth, it was found that customer-customer and customer-brand participation builds trust of the customers toward the SNS service and the information or the information provider. However, customer-media participation did not indicate the same results. In order to build trust through participation, brands need to provide an inviting environment for customers to post comments and share information. Furthermore, marketing strategies, such as offering events and coupons to stimulate E-WOM activities of customers as well as creating a space for open communication are vital to building trust. Sixth, customer-media participation was positively associated with customer equity. Unlike customer-customer and customer-brand participation which requires constant physical effort of the customer, customer-media participation demands considerably less time and effort apart from the initial stages during which customization process is undergone to receive tailored information with just one click. Therefore, establishing convenient and practical system that targets the Y-generation in their 20s and 30s is emphasized in order to maintain a long-term relationship. Seventh, trust is positively associated with customer equity. Building trust is based on interactivity among people. This study found that customer-customer participation and customer-brand participation influence customer equity through trust, while customer-media participation leads to customer equity without being mediated by trust. Therefore, all three types of participation are equally important to customer equity. Eighth, brand type was a meaningful moderator to the relationship between SNS service shopping context, SNS service user orientation, participation motivation, customer social participation, trust, and customer equity. To summarize, the type of participation to encourage is based on the brand type, and as customers may have different expectations according to the brand, it is important to understand their orientations and provide customized information or an open space for communication. In addition, participation behavior has a strong potential to influence customer equity, but depending on the type of participation, trust may not necessarily positively influence customer equity. Therefore, it is recommended that brands offer credible and sincere information that customers can trust and follow. The significance of this study is that it is one of the first studies to examine customer participation in a social media environment. At a point in time where customers’ value creation is attracting increased attention, this study empirically revealed that customer-media relationship, which enables customer-customer and customer-brand participation on SNS, is also within the bounds of participation. Furthermore, this study identified the importance of relational marketing approach to brand and customer through customer social participation. By applying the concept of customer equity, which is in its fledgling stage in the area of consumer fashion marketing, it offers a basis for future research on long-term relationship building with firms The limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed below. The sample of the study consisted of Koreans between the ages of 20 to 30. The limitation in the sample is inadequate to generalize the findings, and therefore, a comparative study with broader sample across culture and age is necessary. Moreover, this study observed customer participation on SNS environment. However, as there was a lack of preceding literature in this area, the measurement scales were revised and supplemented to fit the purpose of this study. The measurement instrument, therefore, needs to be further applied with different antecedents and consequences in subsequent research. Finally, due to the lack of previous literature on customer participation in SNS environment, the theoretical basis of the relationship between the variables lacked solidity. This study adapted a part of a theoretical framework to fit the context of the study to come up with the hypothesized relationship between the variables. Therefore, it is suggested that future research works toward developing and strengthening the theoretical framework of customer social participation.

Launched in 2008 and 2010 respectively, Instagram and Pinterest are two of the fasted growing social media platforms with 220 million users combined (Leverage 2014, Techcrunch 2014, Loren & Swiderski 2012). Their success is due to their simplicity and a focus on visuals rather than text, furthermore they are described as platforms with strategic potential for fashion brands (Wired 2012). Despite this, many fashion brands have been slow to engage with them. However the Huffington Post (2012) suggests that the visual social media has a wide appeal with respect to both brand positioning and increasing awareness. Recent research by Mashable (2014) highlights that referral traffic and spend is higher from Pinterest users than Facebook users, and this contributes to the rationale for study. The aim of this reseach is twofold, firstly it is to explore the reasons for the utilisation of visual social media platforms within a fashion brands marketing planning cycle, and second it seeks to identify the strategic and operational ways in which fashion brands can use them. For the purpose of this paper only Instagram and Pinterest are investigated. Using a qualitative and inductive approach, the study will use in-depth elite interviews with 6 UK fashion brands (2 Luxury, 2 mid-market, 2 value) alongside content analysis of their platforms. This will enable the research to also consider how each platform can be harnessed at different levels of the market therefore contributing to the lack of empirical applied research in this area.

The purpose for this paper is to categorize and analyze the aesthetic characteristics of graphic factors in contemporary fashion design by media source. Focused on play-instinct visual expression in contemporary fashion design and adopted media source following the way of communication design. A variety of literatures and online sites for graphic factors in contemporary fashion was studied. The standard of media source is classified as graphic media-source: photography media-source, typography media-source, illustration media-source. With this standard, expressed ways are as followings. First, graphic media-source in play-instinct expressional fashion design is mostly borrowing existed character or using designer’s brand logo. Second, photography media-source in play-instinct expressional fashion design is placed photograph of social issued people in front of shirt. Third, typography media-source in play-instinct expressional contemporary fashion design is mostly expressed social messages or designer’s name in brand. Fourth, illustration media-source is the best way to express play-instinct visual expression. Based on these, aesthetic characteristics of graphic factor in contemporary fashion by media source are classified as three: social words, playfulness and information transference. Frequency ratio using media source per aesthetic characteristics is different and these are able to categorize expression way and image feature. In conclusion, expressional way of graphic factors in contemporary fashion design became diverse as social and cultural changing. Frequency of graphic factor use in contemporary fashion is increased than before. This paper suggested that fashion design is one of the way of communicating with people and should be analyzed graphic factors in contemporary fashion design.

Purpose - This study aimed to identify the sub-dimensions of fashion social media quality (information quality, social quality, service quality, system quality) and investigate how they affect purchase intention through fashion information use behavior (information acceptance, information diffusion). Research design, data, and methodology – Data collection was carried out twice for systematic verification of the research model. In the first data collection, the reliability and validity of research variables were verified through 238 respondents and questionnaires were revised and supplemented based on their responses. In March 2018, the final survey was conducted from 755 respondents the age of 20 to 49. Using SPSS 23.0, descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis were performed. In order to test hypotheses, structural equational modeling technique was employed using AMOS 23.0. Results - First of all, fashion Social media quality consists of four factors including information quality, social quality , service quality and system quality. Second, fashion Social media information quality, social quality , and system quality were shown to have a positive(+) effect on information acceptance behavior, and social quality , service quality and system quality were shown to have a positive(+) effect on information diffusion behavior. It was also determined that the acceptance and diffusion behaviors of fashion information through fashion Social media had positive(+) influence on purchase intention. Conclusions - This study holds academic significance in its identification of the components of fashion Social media quality and for conducting an empirical analysis on the causal relationship between fashion information acceptance and diffusion behaviors, and purchase intention. The results of this study indicate that fashion involvement is the key factors in determining the quality of Social media, the acceptance of information through Social media, and, by extension, the purchase of fashion products. Practitioners in the fashion industry may use the findings of this study in order to build more effective Social media strategy.