Social media engagement, brand equity and brand preference relationship in luxury clothing brands

Businesses give more importance to their brands in market conditions where competition is intensified, brands are constantly increasing, along with the changing consumer desires. Competition makes it difficult for brands to retain existing customers or attract potential customers to their brands. By increasing brand equity, businesses can affect brand choice of the consumers. The value of a brand is not merely the tangible value of the brand; it involves with the consumer attitudes towards the brand, and intangible values such as perspective. Social media, which gained momentum with the development of information technologies, is another important factor affecting consumers' brand choice. For this reason, businesses should consider many different variables in order to ensure that their brands are at the forefront. From this viewpoint, the aim of this study has been determined as social media engagement, brand equity and brand preference relationships in luxury clothing brands. In addition, the effect of hedonic and utilitarian value and the role of demographic factors were also investigated. In the research, a model was developed based on the studies that have been done in the literature. In Kocaeli province of Turkey, there are consumers, at the age of 18 years old and over, wearing luxury clothing brands have been joined up to the studies for this research. According to the research findings, the social media engegament of luxury brand consumers affects the brand equity and components positively and the brand equity affects consumers' brand choice positively with all their components.