Fashion Brands and Social Networks: Influencers' Narratives, Sponsorship, and Consumers' Engagement

Social networks affect positively the consumers’ brand loyalty. They represent a key tool to efficiently maintain existing consumers and/or to attract new ones. An increasingly more used strategy by several fashion brands is to engage influencers for mentions on social network platforms, also in view of brand strategies to reach certain types of consumers. In this chapter, the author proposes in a conceptual framework a novel approach to efficiently reveal the influencers’ language adopted on social networks for sponsored with respect to not sponsored contents, and by also taking care of aspects related to the consumers’ engagement. The core component of the approach is the Structural Topic Model, which is a substantial improvement of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method. The Structural Topic Model can provide promising results which can be successfully employed by interested practitioners and brand managers to efficiently define marketing strategies, or to strengthen existing ones.