Reconciling Social Media with Luxury Fashion Brands: An Exploratory Study

Modern developments in communication media are creating new networks of information diffusion which are profoundly altering the way in which people can construct shared ‘realities'. Internet along with its prototypical subsets, notably social media, is enabling the emergence of new mechanism of human association which are shaped by – yet also shape – the development of this new medium of communication. This chapter integrates social media theory and luxury fashion brand theory arguments to examine the knowledge benefits that this cultural transformation provides to the development of a marketing communications programme. The authors argue that the key to providing an effective marketing communication programme is understanding and responding to customer expectations through the integration of social media platforms and traditional marketing communications media.