Comparing the Effectiveness of Marketer and User Generated Content in Influencing Brand Equity for UK Pureplay Fashion Brands

Popular social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram embody numerous social commerce properties (Liang et al., 2011), and can be leveraged to create value for existing and potential customers, whilst building brand equity. This paper contributes to the existing knowledge on brand equity built through social media by examining the effect of both marketer and user generated content on each of the four dimensions (Aaker, 1991) in a specific context. Focussing on the UK, and a sample of consumers aged 18-21, six of the most profitable pureplay fashion brands are examined using PLS SEM for analysis. The results are compared primarily with findings from two similar previous paper from Schivinski and Dabrowski (2015), and Grubor et al. (2017), and highlight both similarities and differences that warrant further investigation through future research. Practitioners in the fashion industry can directly apply the knowledge from this paper when planning their social media strategies to plan correctly for benefits, and avoid planning for goals that are unlikely to come to fruition through a particular medium.