| Résumé : |
Proximity to the consumer and high involvement towards the brand in luxury fashion have traditionally meant low luxury value of the brand (Park et al., 2018), confirming the conceptual link to the traditional attributes of distance and scarcity at the very basis of the notion of luxury (Kapferer and Bastien, 2009).
In 2019, however, Laura Sherman for Business of Fashion, in “Traditional PR Doesn’t Work Anymore. Here’s What Does” stated that traditional ways to communicate are no longer effective. After several interviews with Luxury Fashion communication professionals, she asserted that brands were supposed to be friendlier, more relatable, and closer to the consumers and to give the buyers an actual reason to talk about them. Among the thriving brands, she mentioned Simon Porte Jacquemus, and defined his eponymous brand as a “perfect meme fodder”. Sherman’s article also confirms existing literature on the fact that traditional celebrity placement doesn’t work either. Indeed, celebrity marketing might be effective to raise awareness (Campbell and Farrell, 2020) for low and medium involvement products (Khan and Chapa, 2021), therefore not luxury fashion, but macro, micro and even nano-influencers - those with less than 10,000 followers as per Campbell and Farrell (2020) - who are closer to the public and to whom the average users mirror themselves, result more believable, as they are more authentic and relatable (Khan and Chapa, 2021; Campbell and Farrell, 2020). On this note, memes can be considered a very popular tool for Generation Z to market luxury fashion brands, especially on platforms such as TikTok (Edelmann, 2020), due to their ability to convey direct, authentic messaging (Shifman, 2018) to a sharply targeted community and for their ability to go viral (Zanette et al., 2019). Nonetheless, until today, there are no contributions in scientific literature investigating the possible applications of memes in luxury fashion communication. Hence, in this dissertation, I would like to contribute to the conversation, and inspire other academics to further investigate this topic. |
How to implement Memetic Power in Luxury Fashion Communication Strategies? / 2022 
