The Role of Social Media within the Fashion and Luxury Industries: Depicting Social Media's possible role within the peculiar communication strategy carried by a Fashion or Luxury company

While the recruitment of Social Media within a firm's media plan is today nearly considered a 'routine activity' in the vast majority of sectors, the same cannot be asserted for what concerns Social Media's adoption by industries where the Value Chain is greatly influenced by the interaction between economics, management and creative and intellectual attributes. In fact, for what concerns these sectors, the adoption of these latter has been very recent and has developed exponentially only within the last couple of years. Six different real initiatives, carried by six different companies pertaining to either the Luxury or Fashion (both low and high end) sectors have been reported and analyzed. The acclaimed discretion that these industries apply to their numbers and other types of data impaired the possibility to carry a respectable quantitative analysis. The conclusions were hence mainly drawn by the study of the six cases and supported in part by some unofficial numbers retrieved by reliable sources such as Audiweb, the Social Media Monitoring program 'Scoutlabs' and reports from the consulting companies Nielsen and McKinsey.