Luxury brands join hands: building interactive alliances on social media

Purpose This study, which is based on the extended hierarchy of effects (HOE) model, aims to examine whether social media interactions with one or more luxury brands can affect consumers' knowledge of, affection for and purchases of as well as loyalty to luxury fashion brands as a category. Design/methodology/approach SoJump (a leading data collection company in China) launched an online survey to collect data from Chinese luxury fashion brand consumers. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to analyze data from the random sample of 308 Chinese luxury fashion brand consumers. Findings The findings of this study demonstrated that social media interaction had direct positive influences on three stages of the luxury fashion brand decision-making process – knowledge, affection and loyalty – but not purchases. The results also empirically confirmed that consumers' response to social media interaction follows the cognition-affect-conation sequential process presented in the HOE model. Practical implications This study not only provides a new perspective for researchers to investigate the impacts of interactive social media marketing on purchase decision-making in the luxury fashion brand category but also underpins the importance of building interactive alliances for luxury brands to increase consumers' knowledge of, affection for, purchases in and loyalty to the luxury fashion brand category. Originality/value This study is among the first to investigate whether social media interactions with luxury fashion brands as a category influence consumers' knowledge of, affection for and loyalty to that category. In addition, this study is the first attempt to explore whether social media interactions can directly influence consumers' luxury fashion brand purchases.