THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON BRAND IMAGE IN THE UK’S FASHION INDUSTRY

Globalisation has exposed many companies in the UK’s fashion industry to intense competition. As a result, these companies must build and leverage their competitive advantages to be sustainable. According to Kim and Oh (2020), creating and sustaining a strong brand image is one way these companies can sustainably compete in domestic and international markets. Therefore, due to the intense competition, companies need to understand how they can leverage the powers of social media to overcome the problem by influencing consumer loyalty. Social media technologies are some of the strategies global apparel industries use to build their brand images. Increasingly, online communities, characterised by the prevalent use of social media, continue to upsurge. This fact necessitates the need to investigate the influence of social media on the brand images of apparel industries. Although it is widely acknowledged that social media impacts the fashion industry, it has not been established which of the many social media platforms have the most significant impacts among companies in the UK. Moreover, it has not been found whether social media platforms have had positive or negative effects on the customers’ emotional, sensory, and cognitive attachments to the UK’s small and medium-sized fashion industry (Lee and Lee, 2018).

Currently, sustainability issues are one of the major problems facing the UK’s fashion industry. Today’s generation is increasingly concerned with possible perceptions of societal injustices, a situation that has made them labelled as the “woke’ generation (Sobande, 2019). For many young consumers of the fashion industry products, sustainability is currently high on their agenda, and they would prefer brand images that align with their values (Hur and Cassidy, 2019). The fashion industry players have also been recently called into action to be responsible for the wastes they create. Despite this problem, however, companies in this industry still do not know how their increasing use of social media platforms has influenced and impacted consumers’ perception of their brand images regarding sustainability, awareness, and reputation (Kim et al., 2021).