Luxury experience offline and online - A qualitative study of luxury experience from offline to online through the paradox

Sammanfattning: This study has aimed to problematize how luxury retail brands transfer luxury experience from offline to online and to contribute with knowledge on how they visually communicate in two different communication mediums. This study has been based on two research areas within luxury retail brands, visual merchandising and online visual merchandising. Further, as a result of the limited research on online visual merchandising the complementary web strategy, user experience design has been used to understand the digital environment. Furthermore, the empirical material has been gathered from Gucci’s flagship store and e-commerce site. More specifically, through a video clip from an observation of the store and a documentation from the website. Based on the collected empirical material, a multimodal semiotic analysis has been used, and from the analysis of the offline and online channels showed that similar semiotic resources are used to create a luxury experience. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the store and the website had similar underlying messages that they communicated, however they did not always used the same means to communicate. The result from the analysis shows that the sender uses semiotic resources to create a luxury experience in the store and on the website. The study provides practical implications for how semiotic resources can be used to create luxury experience in the store and on the website. This knowledge can also be useful for future strategic communicators who will operate a store and a website on the global market, but also for those who only run either a store or website.