depth with next.
3.4 Analytical approach to case studies
The purpose of using case studies is to explain how luxury brands maintain their identity on the social media platform Facebook. Yin states: “To explain a phenomenon is to stipulate a
presumed set of causal links about it, or “how” or “why” something happened” (Yin 2009: 141).
As a tool to go into depth we will use semiotics as a tool to explain why luxury brands succeed or fail to maintain their luxury brand on Facebook.
3.4.1 Netnography
Netnography is a method developed to investigate online behaviour, user insights, and especially prone to observe social media (Kozinets 2010: 2). We will make use of netnography as a means to structure our data collection of online case example material from social media, i.e. Facebook. Netnography is compatible with our scientific approach social constructivism due to the strong focus on social interactions as a main carrier of ‘the meaning’. “Netnography is different because it treats online communications not as mere “content”, but as social interaction, as embedded expression of meaning, and as cultural artifact.” (Kozinets 2010: 4)
We will use netnography to find and reduce useful online data from Facebook, and can be regarded as implicit coding online. Therefore, we will not look into the user behaviour, but only use the data collection steps by Kozinets. The social media material found through the use of these data collection steps will function as case examples throughout our semiotic and main analysis.
In the process of data collection we regard it as an advantage that netnography has focus on context as it corresponds to the qualitative research approach: “Netnography pays very close attention to context.” (Kozinets 2010: 4).
In order to prepare our data collection of online material we will follow the two steps ‘research planning’ and ‘entrée’ (Kozinets 2010: 5). The ‘research planning’ is based on the question
‘Which online spaces do luxury brands use to communicate the luxury brand message to consumers?’. A high amount of luxury brands use Facebook and that lead us to our ‘entrée’ on Facebook. We enter Facebook using our private profiles and thereby includes personal
predispositions and settings. Another significant element of this ‘entrée’ is that we have to make another entrance into the luxury brand communities on Facebook by liking the Facebook brand pages. The ‘entrée’ will be useful for us throughout the writing and research period to continuously observe the luxury brand Facebook communities and potential developments within the media landscape to update our online content accordingly.
The data collection is thus based on the luxury brands’ Facebook brand pages. Kozinets proposes using of a software program that consists of seven steps to make data collection.
Even though we have not made use of this software system, we have gone through the steps manually. We will only make use of the five first steps, as the final two are not directly applicable to our ‘manual’ method.
The first task is about ‘sourcing’ the online environment for relevant data, which in our case is Facebook. We will ‘source’ the Facebook brand pages based on the theoretical framework, the data and problem statement in order to find relevant material for the research. It is worth taking into consideration that when ‘sourcing’ material on Facebook brand pages the luxury brand itself is the sender of material. This is contrary to using search engines, such as Google, as it would result in articles and other material from a vast amount of senders.
The second step in the data collection is ‘tracking’. This “…provides some context to the data so that relevance and cultural insight can be judged.” (Kozinets 2010: 6). This step will therefore
include investigation of the specific brand websites, Facebook brand pages, interviews conducted with employees and management in the luxury organisation by others, press releases and articles in general. The ‘tracking’ will become the ‘case description’ of our main cases. The case descriptions are going to function as the foundation for our understanding of the luxury brand identity. Third step of the data collection, ‘marking’, is where we combine the relevant material collected from sourcing and tracking. The fourth step, ‘collecting’ is a step focused on archiving in the software program, however we will make use of ‘dropbox’ to share and store data. The fifth step is ‘reducing’. In order to reduce and extract relevant data, we will make use of our three research questions, case descriptions, primary and secondary data.
Taking our research questions into consideration we will choose examples from the online data collection and analyse these using a semiotic analysis.
3.4.2 A semiotic analysis
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and the meaning attached to them. Umberto Eco states: “semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign.” (Meyers 2011:
200), and hereby establishes that signs can be anything from images and language to culture and art (Meyers 2011: 198).
A luxury brand is made up of a certain set of codes that separates luxury brands from other types of brands, according to Appadurai (1986), Corbellini and Saviolo (2010), and Kapferer and Bastien (2012). We will bear these codes in mind in order to explain if and how luxury brands can be maintained on Facebook. More specifically we will analyse our cases’ Facebook material in terms of videos, images and text.
The work by Roland Barthes and his theory on connotators and text-‐image relationship will be our tool for the semiotic analysis (Barthes 1977). Barthes analytical approach consists of six connotators, which will be explained in the beginning of the semiotic analysis.