What’s The Difference? How Luxury Brands Represent Themselves On Social Media Platforms
What’s The Difference?
How Luxury Brands Represent Themselves On Social Media Platforms
What kind of content is being posted? Who is featured on the page? How are the posts captioned? In this blog we will take a look at what distinguishes a luxury brand from a causal one on social media and see if there is even a difference.
Can You Guess?
Look at these two pictures. When I took the screenshots I tried to keep out any product indicators so that guessing the brands can become somewhat tough. However, can you still tell whether the picture is “luxurious” or just casual?
Both posts are from beauty product companies, and to be honest just looking at the pictures without any context I would say that there is absolutely no difference in the “status” of the companies. However, you would be surprised at how many differences there are when we compare the Instagram pages of @ArmaniBeauty (on the left) and @FentyBeauty (on the right).
For those who are not very familiar with this brand, Giorgio Armani is an Italian luxury fashion and now beauty house founded in Milan in 1975.
The official (Beauty specific) Instagram page for this brand has about 3.1 Million followers. There are many pictures posted, most of them featuring famous actors and actresses. Other posts consist of professionally photographed models and beauty products. The only reels on @ArmaniBeauty are of official product advertisements.
Now let’s compare this luxury beauty brand to Fenty Beauty.
The content on this brand’s page is a lot more influencer guided, meaning that there are many product users featured on the page. Similar to Armani, the Fenty products are professionally photographed and there are also reels showing official product advertisements.
Did you spot any major differences? Notice that the majority of the posts on @FentyBeauty are reels and not pictures! Memes are part of the feed as well, which we don’t see on the Armani page. Finally, we cannot ignore the great difference in the number of followers; 3.1M versus 12.7M. Do these numbers determine the success of these brands or do they not matter when it comes to luxury?
So, What Else Calls Out “I’m A Luxury Brand”!?
I am wondering, does the characteristics of the luxury brand’s IG page that we saw above apply to other luxury brands? Right here we will take a look at some fairly popular luxury brands that I personally follow and have an interest in.
First is Louis Vuitton, a French luxury fashion house and company founded in 1854. The @LouisVuitton IG page has about 54.7 Million followers.
As you can see, the IG feed for this brand is clear of any memes or unprofessional content. Another thing that you might notice is that there are no influencers featured on the page; instead we see very famous personalities like Beyoncé and even the Madam Macron, wife to the current French President. If you take a look at the many posts on the LV Instagram page you will notice that there are rarely any hashtags, the captions are very professionally written/descriptive, and in some cases there are no captions at all!
Christian Louboutin, famous for their red soles, is also a French luxury brand that started in 1992. They currently have about 16.8 Million followers of IG.
Well looking at @LouboutinWorld on IG we can definitely feel the uniqueness of the brand with the red color hinting in each post and the hand drawn art portraying the luxury products. As this brand features many models we also see many celebrities like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, as well as pictures of Christian Louboutin himself! Also, notice that the captions on the posts that @LouboutinWorld makes are not so serious (it is allowed to use exclamation points here!!!).
Wannabe Luxurious
I believe that casual brands find it more important to be “for the people” and interact more with the community instead of following some strict social media guidelines. However, I have found some brands that try to stay within those “luxurious guidelines” even though they are ones that we see nearly everywhere.
One of those brands is H&M, a Swedish clothing business that started in 1947. @HM has about 38.3 Million followers on IG.
As you can see this clothing brand, although not luxury, is representing themselves in the most “luxurious” professional way. No memes, professionally photographed products, pictures more than reels, and models! I think that the only thing they are missing is the support of any product users; no celebrities, no actors, and not even instagram influencers. Is that what distinguishes a luxury brand from a casual one? Luxury brands can definitely connect with big personalities more easily!
So What’s The Difference Then?
I would say that perhaps the major difference is the audience of each brand; or maybe the unique personality of the brand!; or is it simply that luxury should speak for itself?
To bring all the things we analyzed throughout this blog together, I believe that luxury on social media is a style that the brand chooses to use or leave behind. As we saw in the many examples, some luxury brands like CL like to keep things on a lighter note, posting art, animations, and celebrities that people are familiar with. Other luxury brands like LV (and others that I didn’t include pictures of like Dior) took luxury very seriously with featuring government, royal, and very famous personalities. While brands like American Eagle and Fenty decided to use a more humorous tone that many young social media users can relate to and engage with.
I know we pointed out many differences between luxury and casual brand’s IG accounts, but I believe that the similarities were greater. Each brand we discussed tailors their content to the audience that they want to reach, they use their unique color schemes and touches throughout the feed, and they remain original to themselves at all times.
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