Luxury Brands and Communication on Social Media: A Study on Language, Visual Strategies and Logo Prominence

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyse and deeply comprehend the Hamletian relationship between the two major protagonist entities: luxury and social media. A new and controversial relationship, born after the changes in consumers behaviour due to the phenomenon of digitalisation whose developments played as a fuel for this work, generating curiosity and interests as it usually happens for all little-know topics, which are having an expanding echo nowadays. As title reports, the thesis is a study on how luxury brands communicate their high-end position on social media through a dive deep on their language strategy, meticulous attention to visual content used in campaigns and with a focus on logo prominence and their influence on final consumers. During the development of the elaborate, many case studies are going to be reported and quoted, but a final and special focus on a dedicated chapter will be placed on my internship in the Social Media team of Lancôme. All these examples include winning choices and strategies, showing how brands are working to make their visual and communication an art of high standards, to touch the sensitivity of all their target audience’s common needs and implying the stunning importance communicating on online media has achieved towards the recent years and in a way how it is impossible not to communicate though these channels, even in an indirect way. The focus of this research is indeed on topics that are in some ways under explored, diving deep in a territory which has not yet fully being colonized and that offers tantalizing prospects for settlement. Specifically, this territory is the “added content”, i.e. the online world where luxury brands would intent to expand their markets. However, the current and still strong evolution of the online market has made it difficult to find definite sources and instruments needed to fully analyse the study path. The virgin topics, in this regard, are those concerned with the language that brands should adopt on social media, how their different application changes depending on the type of brand and what effect this relationship has on the consumer. In detail, the aim of the experimental study is to test how the use of abstract or concrete language (Semin, Fielder, 1989) in relation to a high or low logo prominence of the luxury brand, determines in the user a decisive stimulation of the willingness to buy, i.e. the consequent strong inclination to buy in the context of social media. The idea of correlating in the research the hypothesis of abstract language to low logo prominence and the concrete language to high logo prominence was assumed by investigating the positive relationship between high level of prior knowledge (of the service) and abstract language, and low level of prior knowledge of the service and concrete language (De Angelis et al, 2015). Consequently, it was established that a high level of prior knowledge correlated with low logo prominence, and thus with a type of consumer influenced in his or her purchases fundamentally by elements such as culture, emotions, and personal self. In parallel to a low level of knowledge, a high logo prominence has been correlated, which is typical of individuals who have no experience or knowledge in relation to a product or service, and therefore choose the brand that highlights the logo the most, because it is the only element they recognise. The following chapters examine the phenomenon of luxury, its theorisation, its evolutionary path, up to the necessary analysis of the characteristics of the reference market with the necessary attention to my internship experience as a Social Media Assistant at Lancôme, the French luxury beauty house.