12. Building a Sustainable Brand Image in Luxury Fashion Companies

Building a sustainable brand image for a luxury fashion company is a very complex and tangled marketing process. Brand image is a set of perceptions and beliefs surrounding a particular brand fixed in the mind of the consumer. It represents the result of the associations that the consumer recognizes in a brand and summarizes the positioning, personality and reputation of the brand itself. Companies can derive fundamental insights by analysing the associations and how they are formed and, in particular, whether they are related to their positioning choices. In the luxury fashion business, brand image communication is often delegated to offline events to convey specific values, ideals and messages to consumers and build brand associations. The Salvatore Ferragamo Museum, in particular, with its “Sustainable Thinking” exhibition, is seen as the emblem of this vision, the goal of which is to deliver a specific concept of a sustainable brand image to its customers. The objective of this empirical research was to seek correspondences or discrepancies between consumer brand perceptions and the identity conveyed by the Ferragamo brand in terms of sustainability. By using a netnographic and text mining methodology we found that the consumer associates the brand with a company committed to the environment and involved in social issues; a company that traditionally shows creative and experimental skills, using unusual materials, artisanry, innovative techniques and unique designs. The image that the company wants to convey, however, also includes other characterizations. Specifically, the company considers the “Made in Italy” aspect, the importance of its history and its family identity as decisive associations. These are all elements that, as far as this survey is concerned, were not found in the consumer perspective. As a result, from the comparison between the brand associations of both subjects, gaps emerge on which the company must intervene by designing new communication strategies or correcting existing ones in order to improve brand image and the overall brand value in terms of sustainability.