Managing Integrated Brand Communication Strategies in the Online Era: New Marketing Frontiers for Luxury Goods

Introduction

Spaces and environments are places of consumption, but they also provide communication opportunities to the consumer who, in turn, uses consumption as a communication system that is expressed through a variety of languages (Mosca et al., 2013).In the luxury sector, it must be considered that products encompass intangibles values that go beyond their functions and are often the main reason for purchases (Mosca, 2017). Academics and practitioners agree on the multidimensional concept of Luxury (Chandon et al., 2016; H. Kauppinen-Raisanen et al., 2019), that determines different motivations to buy this type of products and, moreover, a variety of interpretations depending on the consumer. Of course, there are certain factors which are known to affect the willingness to buy a luxury product and the purchasing behaviour: people culture, education, financial resources and social status are some examples. On the other hand, luxury goods are able to convey inner and personal expressions. Therefore, the value of the Brand is partly defined by the consumer creative role, who takes the brand meanings and personalizes them (Seo & Buchanan-Oliver, 2017). The result is that both the management and the final consumer participate in communicating the concept of the Brand. This is particularly true for luxury goods which are sold in markets that are difficult to define, but which is possible to find various layers of media attitudes. In fact, it is possible to say that the traditional consideration whereby business serves as the exclusive source of communication massages and brand-related content, design to influence the behaviour of the consumer and create brand equity is overtaken. This is due to the fact that marketing and communication strategies, together with the instruments and actors involved in their planning processes, need to take into account the evolution of technology, the transformation of consumer behaviour and media attitudes, the fact that stakeholders constantly communicate each other and this kind of communication is difficult to manage. The communication works in attracting people interest toward a certain brand, but, at the same time, it works as a shield for the corporate reputation and a springboard for spreading corporate values. It is important to underline that technological evolution has been leading mass media to a decline in their ability to attract people’s (audiences’) attention. It should be considered that attitudes toward the media have changed, together with the growing interest in new media content generated by people – the so-called user-generated content (UGC) – such as blogging, podcasting, online videos, and social networking. Across all the social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook are the most common in the luxury sector. More than the 80% of members of most the luxury categories have an account on Instagram and on Facebook (Altagamma& Accenture, 2020). In 2019, another interesting social network became widely used among young individuals: TikTok. The majority of luxury brands are still discovering this channel, in fact, less than the 20% are currently present on TikTok, but we already have a practical and successful example: Gucci (Altagamma& Accenture, 2020). It is evident that the digitalization has led to a real change in the luxury industry where companies have finally accepted and leveraged the coexistence of both offline and online channels. In order to respond to the aforementioned trends, organizations are generally dealing with developing a communication plan that can integrate all those tools with which they intended to interface with their stakeholders (Schultz, Tannenbaum &Lauterborn, 1993; Krugman et al., 1994; Duncan &Mulhern, 2004; Belch & Belch, 1998, 2009; Baker et al., 2018; Park et al., 2018; Knowledge@Wharton, 2020; Lee at al., 2020; Ryu, 2020).