Luxury in Instagram's eyes

Social scientists are struggling to define and measure luxury in the contemporary marketing practices. It became an even more evolving issue when introducing the luxury marketing practices on social media platforms. In the absence of a clear definition for an intangible phenomenon like luxury and the luxury marketing as performance held on inexpensive sources such as social media, exploring this phenomenon from a new point of view is essential. This study takes three exemplary brands to represent the luxury fashion sector, Burberry, Louis Vuitton and Gucci and investigated the marketing practices held on Instagram. To begin with a qualitative content analysis of the visual posts by the three brands on Instagram was conducted to understand the marketing communication techniques used. Followed by a qualitative content analysis of comments by followers on these visual posts, to comprehend the language of comments and their role in the ‘luxury performance’. The findings suggest that the brands on Instagram emphasized on communicating luxury brand associations more regular than traditional marketing practices, those associations were chosen to fit to the visual images and to Instagram as a medium. Followers’ responses were mainly positive, and showed emotional attachment towards the brands. The communicated brand associations from the brand corresponded to a great level with the perceived message seen in the form of comments by followers. Some contradictions do exist between communication luxury brand associations on Instagram, but there is no effect on maintaining, sustaining and ‘performing luxury’ on Instagram.