The communities of fashion brands and their cross connections: An empirical investigation based on Facebook data
Résumé
It is not any surprise to say that Facebook is one of the most popular social networks. This growing and powerful market enable fashion brands to attain consumers worldwide, increasing their popularity and sales figure. For that reason their investment on marketing and management of Facebook pages is highly increasing. Also, this field is gaining strong interest from researchers in fashion studies. Surveys and data analysis have been done considering the users’ social experience and user’s influence on Facebook (Lewis, Gonzalez and Kaufman : 2011), the user’s motivations to “like” fashion pages (LI and Mousseaux : 2013), the construction of identity by displaying pages of brands in personal accounts (Zhao, Grasmuck and Martin 2008) and so on. However, this paper aims to treat another dimension of fashion brands pages on Facebook, observing experimentaly the proximity and the distance between communities of fashion brands pages on Facebook, formed by the subscription of its users. We propose to base our study on scatter diagrams that represents fashion brands that were “liked” simultaneously by 280 Facebook users chose randomly and worldwide. Once we identify these communities using community algorithm (Facebook data tools provided for developers), we will propose a few hypothesis to justify their organization. We propose to analyse the different phenomena represented from this data and to speculate the reasons that could explain the connection or the exclusion of brands in these communities, the interactivity between them or their interdependence. Also, and for further study, we will analyze more closely the profile of people in each group, what would specify users and consumers of those brands and the interdependence of brands. The goal of this article which is based on a Masters thesis project is to observe the relationship between fashion brands on online social networks and to understand their interactive reciprocity. That study would allow us to have an overview of fashion brands organization in the market and new fashion communication patterns that could be developped to improve the cross connection between fashion brands on online platforms like Facebook.
Mots clés
Fashion films
Fashion film
Brand communication
Brand community
Fashion brands
Cinephilia
Facebook analytics
Community Communication
Brands valuation how to estimate the respective value of brands and trade marks
Scatter diagram
Social network Analysis SNA
Facebook reactions
Facebook site web
Facebook pages
Communities of Knowledge
Communities of Interests
Communities of Brands