The stories they tell: An exploratory study on how luxury and premium fashion brands profile themselves online

Sammanfattning: What do premium and luxury brands communicate in a digital world? Despite a growing number of studies in the field of luxury within the past few years, confusion persists among scholars about what constitutes a luxury brand as opposed to a premium brand. The rise of the internet has further blurred any distinction between these two categories. Today, an important tool for brands to share their values and engage consumers is creating stories online. Therefore, this thesis aims to address the research gap by describing how these brands profile themselves through stories on their websites. Moreover, this thesis delineates the similarities and differences between the stories of luxury versus premium brands. An explorative study was designed in which nearly 18 months' worth of stories published on the webpages of ten luxury fashion brands and ten premium fashion brands were analyzed by making sense of the data, open coding, developing coding sheets, engaging in categorization, and conducting abstraction. In this study, categorizations emerged from the data, and the study found that there are several similarities and differences between the stories of luxury and premium fashion brands. A key similarity between the two is that their stories are equally focused on describing their brand identity, brand heritage, and founders. A major difference is that luxury brands do not discuss discounts in their stories; whereas, premium brands promote sales in their stories. Ultimately, this thesis offers theoretical and practical implications for understanding what luxury brands are communicating to consumers online as compared to premium brands.