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

Abstract

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.