Sustainability in Luxury Fashion Business by Chris K. Y. Lo & Jung Ha-Brookshire

Author:Chris K. Y. Lo & Jung Ha-Brookshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

Context and Approach

Research Context

This study focused on the two dominant social network sites worldwide: Twitter and Instagram. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has around 330 million monthly active users as of the third quarter of 2017 (Statista, 2017a, b). It allows its users to post short messages limited to 140 characters and upload photographs or short videos via the Web or a mobile phone (Statista, 2017a, b). As one of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter enables its members to share and discover topics of their choice in real time (Statista, 2017a, b). One unique feature of Twitter is known as a “retweet,” which enables its users to forward a tweet to their followers. This retweet function facilitates rapid dissemination of information to a larger public since retweets often reach beyond the original tweet’s followers (Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010). Another characteristic of Twitter is the use of hashtags and the reply function. A hashtag is a convention among Twitter users to set a thread of discussion by prefixing a word with a “#” character. This hashtag allows users to identify and emphasize their topics of interests and effectively target the intended audience (Thelwall, Buckley, & Paltoglou, 2011). The reply symbol, which is indicated as “@,” allows Twitter users to post their messages to another Twitter user, thus facilitating effective discussions and engagement of larger audiences (Kwak et al., 2010). The @ sign and the hashtags are effective strategies used by Twitter users in order to relate one tweet to another in regard to a certain topic in real time. Therefore, messages and opinions are able to rapidly reach a wider audience (Thelwall et al., 2011).

Another form of communication, Instagram users can easily share their updates by taking photographs and short videos and adding hashtags to link the photographs and videos up to other content on Instagram featuring the same subject or overall topic (Sheldon & Bryant, 2016). Through the platform, other users can follow, view, like, and comment on these posts. Additionally, since it was acquired by Facebook in 2012 (Luckerson, 2016), Instagram has become one of the most popular social media platforms worldwide by benefiting from its association with Facebook, which allows Instagram content to be posted on Facebook simultaneously (Kawasaki & Fitzpatrick, 2014). It has 800 million monthly active users as of September 2017 (Statista, 2017a, b). Instagram users include both individuals and businesses, and their posts are generally annotated with hashtags, short texts, or keywords to be searchable.

Along with its enormous user base and powerful dissemination with hashtags , Instagram is a valuable social media channel for cosmetics brands to communicate with consumers. More than one million monthly cosmetics commercials were active on Instagram as of March 2017 (Statista, 2017a, b). Moreover, Instagram is powerful among teenagers and young millennials as more than half of the USA. Instagram user base is between the age of 18 and 29. Considering that millennial women ages 18–34 are the dominant consumers of cosmetics products (McCarthy, 2016),

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