Network Analysis of Luxury Brand’s Knowledge Exchange in Social Media: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Millennials and generation Z (the so-called digital natives) dominates the growth of luxury consumers in recent times. These consumers are very active in social media sharing their knowledge and experience about the products and services. Extant studies lacks in developing and analysing the knowledge exchange structure (network) of luxury products in social media and their impact on market performance. This paper attempts to develop network models of knowledge sharing structure of three luxury brands (Christian Dior, Prada and Ralph Lauren) and sheds some light on the influence of knowledge exchange structure (network) on marketing performance of the products. Social network analysis (SNA) method is used as the main tool. The preliminary analyses show that knowledge exchange map of Dior is bigger and denser followed by Prada and Ralph Lauren (RL). The knowledge contents generated on Prada were mostly interactive type (90%) either between brand-and-users or users-and-users discussing different aspects of the brand expressing creation (77%) generated by the firm (79%). On the other hand, knowledge contents of Ralph Lauren focused on entertainment and trendiness (60%). However, the social media content expressed the consumption engagement (70%) type which were mostly generated by the users (70%) of Ralph Lauren brand. The Dior map is found to be more dispersed (less connected), has more average degree, and covers more tweets/retweets in the same time period of data collection. In knowledge exchange network higher average degree means knowledge overload. Thus in line with the extant literature it is asserted that Dior may not use the knowledge effectively for better marketing performance. Implications of the findings will be presented.