La construcción de marca a través del relatoel caso de las marcas de moda de lujo en Instagram

Resumen

In the last few years, the luxury market has been deeply affected by some global changes like the emergence of some developing countries, the irruption of new technologies and new communication channels. In this scenario, luxury fashion brands have been forced to explore new ways to reach their clients. At the same time, in some disciplines such as education, journalism or business organization, storytelling has resurged as an efficient communication tool to connect with heterogeneous audiences. Some authors (Fog, Budtz, Munch y Blanchette, 2010) propose the use of storytelling also in branding. The aim of this research is to evaluate how luxury fashion brands can build and tell their stories in new communication channels, such as Instagram, and how they are doing it already. We choose Instagram because, as we were able to confirm, nowadays it is a key communication channel in the fashion luxury industry. One of the first steps has been checking the literature about luxury fashion branding, to better understand the current scenario and how the storytelling strategy can be incorporated. In addition, we have deepened into Instagram´s features in order to figure out how can it boost luxury fashion brands. Once the theoretical frame was completed, we have analyzed luxury fashion brands’ activity on Instagram. For that purpose, we have used a quantitative technique as well as other qualitative one. In the first place, we have conducted a content analysis of luxury fashion brands’ posts. These brands were previously chosen based on their antiquity, relevance and digital activity. The analysis unit has been the post and the period of study has included 6 months, from July 1st to December 31st, 2017 to cover the brand´s activity in normal periods but also in more intense ones. The corpus consists of 6,977 posts that we have codified from a single code based in formal variables and others related to the content. To complete and enrich this analysis, we have conducted in-depth interviews with 9 experts on the issue. Broadly, we have observed that luxury fashion brands use Instagram without a specific strategy. Only 36.6% of the analyzed posts have a narrative purpose. The remaining has an informative and commercial intention and use Instagram merely as a product exhibition platform. We also note small differences between brands’ content. Most of the brands follow the same pattern. They take pictures in similar spaces –mostly events and neutral environments– and their characters embrace the same kind of inexpressive archetypes. Similarly, results show that, as social media, Instagram potential has not been fully explored nor for community engagement or to encourage users to take part. Only 3.7% of the post pursuit users’ interaction. We conclude that the analyzed brands underuse the potential that Instagram provides to develop the brand story and to satisfy the current market requirements. To transcend criticism in a useful and practical way, we present a collection of good practices obtained from observing the leading fashion luxury brands’ activity on Instagram