Fashion Brands and Social Networks: Influencers' Narratives, Sponsorship, and Consumers' Engagement

Introduction

Digital communication is nowadays an integral part of people’s daily life, paving the way for companies to directly connect with consumers. The ongoing use of social networks ensures that consumers and/or potential consumers are actively engaged with a given company’s brand, also contributing to increase the brand visibility. Such digital engagement provides marketers with the opportunity to promote intensively and efficiently their brand on the online platforms. An increasingly more used strategy adopted by brand companies is to enlist social media influencers to promote their products and/or services on the social network platforms, resulting in a marketing strategy known as influencer marketing (Kim & Kim, 2021; Phua et al., 2017). Influencers are viral content generators who have accumulated a large number of followers, which ensures their high visibility on the social network platforms. They represent a fundamental source in marketing communication since they boast a considerable and loyal network of followers. Influencers embed brand products and/or services in textual and visual narratives they generate on the various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Such narratives are usually related to their personal and everyday lives, and in this way, consumers tend to consider them authentic and trustworthy (Schouten et al., 2020).

Before the advent of social media, companies advertised their products mainly through the radio and television, billboards, print advertisement and similar, and in that case, consumers were not able to directly and in real time interact with the brand. Instead, nowadays in the era of social media marketing, consumers are actively engaged, since they can now easily and in real time interact with both the brand and the influencers through comments, likes, shares and similar. The widespread use of influencer marketing leads to attempts for regulating such type of marketing strategy in order to ensure high levels of transparency in this field. For example, an increasingly more used practice by influencers is to embody a statement to unveil their paid relation with the brand (Federal Trade Commission, 2017). For instance, contents like “advertising,” “sponsored”, “paid review”, “ad”, “sp” and similar are all examples of expressions revealing that a given post is sponsored, and that the influencer has been paid to promote a certain brand.

The growing number of brands adopting the strategy of influencer marketing, together with an ever-increasing number of influencers involved in it, leads to a growing interest to deeply understand the user generated contents (UGCs) produced by influencers, as well as the corresponding consumers’ engagement. Such UGCs are in general composed of a textual content, which can be also combined with one or more images and/or videos. In the textual contents, influencers usually embed brand related posts by sharing feelings, personal and/or working stories, some kind of experiences they go through. Such textual contents usually contain also many hashtags, captions, and emoticons which contribute to form a sort of “influencers’ language” adopted to efficiently reach a certain target of consumers and/or potential consumers. When considering the consumers’ engagement, in this phase it mainly relates to posting comments and likes.