Monica Faraoni

Exploring relationships among brand credibility, purchase intention and social media for fashion brands: A conditional mediation model

ABSTRACT Social media have opened up a whole new era for fashion companies and brands, encouraging them to identify innovative relationship with consumer. In order to face these new challenges, understanding the combinatory mechanism of brand credibility and brand image in the formation of brand purchase intention is strategic for fashion brands practitioners. The main purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of social media on the relationship between brand credibility, brand image and purchase intention of fashion brands. A conditional process analysis methodology is employed to describe the mediation and moderation effects of the variables analyzed. The findings show that brand credibility has a positive influence on brand image and purchase intention. In addition, social media activity is positively influential on the direct relationship between brand image and purchase intention. However, the results show that, over social media activity, the direct influence of brand credibility on purchase intention decreases. From a managerial point of view, the study helps fashion brand managers in executing marketing decisions through the evaluation of brand credibility and the understanding of the impact of social media activity to increase the brand image and consumer purchase.

Having a Great Vacation and Blaming the Wines: an Attribution Theory Perspective on Consumer Attachments to Regional Brands

Tourists’ affective experiences are important in a variety of contexts as their influence goes beyond immediate, short-term outcomes, such as satisfaction and spending. These experiences impact the relationship between the consumer and objects associated with the experience including brands. Yet, research on the influence of consumer affective experiences on emotional attachments to brands in general, and the process by which affect influences attachments in particular, has been limited. This study uses attribution theory to explain consumer attachments to regional brands in a tourism and wine context. Survey results covering twelve touristic wine regions on three continents (N =2,445) suggest that (a) causal attributions mediate the affective experience – brand attachment relationship, (b) consumers’ attributions depend on brand name strength, and (c) place attachment and spatial distance affect brand attributions. Results also suggest that when consumers attribute the pleasantness and satisfaction of the tourism experience to the brand, attachment increases; however, if consumers attribute the experience to the region, attachments decrease. Implications relate to destination marketing and brand management.

BE SOCIAL AND BE TUNED EVALUATE YOUR BRANDS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES

The paper proposes an analytical approach that explores brands in virtual environments by combining indicators of consumer brand alignment with measurements of social engagement. The results illustrated can be useful to devise adjustments to brand communication. The analysis is applied to brands belonging to the fashion industry.

Social media strategy in the Italian fashion industry: A new model of analysis

Research regarding social-media strategy is a rapidly growing field of interest as social media (SM hereinafter) become vital tools for marketing managers to communicate with the consumer who is increasingly eager to share opinions and to be involved in the “brand life”. Customer involvement through interaction with a brand is deeply related to the effectiveness of the SM strategy. As a consequence, companies need to carefully define the key elements of their SM strategy and make decisions about goals, the target audience, channel choice, content-planning activities, resource allocation, internal policies, monitoring, and controlling the online activity in order to increase consumer brand awareness and make their SM strategy more effective. The literature provides some models of analysis, but further investigations are still necessary. In particular, it is not clear how certain variables such as the level of brand social engagement or, the company size and the company market segment, can affect the level of importance of the SM strategic dimensions. We hypothesized that the key elements of SM strategy can have variable weights in relation to these variables, and we test our assumptions on fashion industry companies. Analysis was conducted on a total sample of 42 companies, and the results show that there is a significantly different perception about the weight that the single strategic dimension can have. Companies with a high level of social engagement, for example, have a higher perception of the strategic role of the resource allocation, internal policies, and the content definition compared with the perception of lower socially engaged companies; small companies generally do not perceived the importance of monitoring and controlling SM activity highly as compared to large and medium companies, while luxury-brand companies rely more on the strategic role of the target audience dimension, the policy, and the content-planning activity. Managerial implications about the way the marketing manager can plan a SM strategy are then derived from these results.

The Brand Personality in Online Communities

This paper proposes a methodological approach to investigate the correspondence between brand personality as communicated by companies and brand personality as perceived by consumers. Applied to the online fashion community, it is based on linguistic techniques whose results find their synthesis in two ratios. The first one is Cbpa (Consumer Brand Personality Alignment, and the second is the Cbpc(C/B) (Consumer Brand Personality Coverage). The methodology is implemented with 42 fashion brands belonging to the premium apparel segment.