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Luxury brands have been hesitant to embrace social media to a full extent; yet, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted many companies to accelerate their adoption of digital strategies. For the first time, fashion show presentations of new collections were reinvented to be virtually streamed. This innovative shift entails an urgent examination of consumers’ sentiment vis-à-vis digital fashion show videos streamed on each of the main social media platforms, namely: YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Sentiment analysis using supervised machine learning and lexicon-based were employed to test and identify the classification of 21,424 comments conveyed towards the different types of fashion shows. Five different types emerged from the examination of all scraped comments; (a) show configuration, (b) emotional connection, (c) geographical tagging, (d) referral/tagging, and (e) collection related. This paper is amongst the first to examine consumers’ sentiment towards digital fashion shows. The literature related to digital strategies based on the sentiment analysis conveyed towards luxury fashion shows is still nascent. This study fills a considerable gap in the literature regarding marketing strategies to be adapted per digital channel for luxury fashion runways.

Brand connections are one of the key marketing fields that have seen growth through social networking sites (SNS). The literature agrees that SNS users have positive relationships with their favorite brands based on their experiences. However, such acceptance could be formed prematurely, because sometimes analysis of consumer relationships excludes the mediator position of the social network itself. This study seeks to examine the mediating role in consumer relationships between affective and cognitive customers and SNS. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 41 people were conducted to establish qualitative research designs. The results indicate a deep affective customer-SNS partnership, which implies that SNS consumers and brands work together in a counterintuitive way. The results suggest that while SNS are trusted and highly valued by users, they do not always support brands. This shows that close relationships with social platforms outweigh users’ relationship with other brands on these SNS platforms. This study shows that SNS have an interfering adverse impact on consumer-brand relationships within these platforms. The research discusses the counterintuitive influence of social platforms on consumer-brand relationships.