Adopting dissonance -solving approach to investigate luxury social media advertising: Role of gaps in self, projective self, influencer and brand image [Abstract]

The massive usage of social media and soaring power of online influencers have created huge challenge to marketing, psychology, and other technological disciplines to adopt a synthetic framework to understand why consumers are (or aren’t) engaged with online communication and subsequent behaviours. The luxury fashion marketing, in particular, needs to address this challenge as the mismatch of the luxury brand, brand ambassador and consumer self-construal has led to fatal negligence. Though it is documented that consumer cognitive processes have impacted their luxury brand buying, the underlying mechanisms of how the discrepancies of brand, endorser, and their self-identity collectively determine the consequent engagement and actions remain unclear before being put into practice. This research adopts a map-mapping approach which is derived from the self-construal theory, to highlight six critical “gaps” with relevant to strategic marketing, brand management, communication, self-construal, demonstration, virtual agent pilgrimage, and social recognition. ....