Objectives and methodology of the study

Starting from the above considerations, the aim of the study is to carry out an empirical in-depth analysis on the digital communication of the brands belonging to the 30 most important luxury holdings in the world (Table 11.1). The aim is to compare the conceptual categories of the brand heritage with the communicative codes used by luxury fashion companies to express and transfer the symbolic value of their heritage. The content analysis was conducted on a total of 88 official websites of brands owned by the top 30 luxury corporations based on the annual report published by Deloitte, The Global Power of Luxury Goods Companies, 2017.

Data collection

The identification of the units of analysis was done through the selection of the official documents published by luxury companies on their brand websites. The selected documents were the ones describing the history, legacy, tradition and heritage of those companies. For reasons of clarity and in order to ensure linguistic consistency of the results, texts have been selected and downloaded exclusively in English. Based on a careful assessment of brand heritage literature (Urde et al., 2007; Rindell, 2010; Wiedmann et al., 2013), web sections were identified on the basis of the following keywords: “heritage”, “brand heritage”, “history”, “tradition”, “identity” and “inspiration”.

Analysis of the corpus

Selected documents have been processed using the software Nvivo 12. The textual analysis consisted of three main steps (Bolasco, 2005). The first step of the analysis consisted in the pre-treatment of the data and was carried out through the normalization of the texts. In order to obtain a standardization of the orthographic variations, the software uniformed the textual forms thanks to the so-called parsing procedure. During this process, conjunctions and adverbs were added to the stop word list, and they were excluded from the analysis. The result of this phase is a list of all words present in the text. The list includes approximately 5,061 word-types

Table 11.1 Top 30 luxury goods companies

(Continued)

Source.- Deloitte (2017).

Digital storytelling 193 with 28,499-word token. Words useful to interpret the content were selected from the list. The data were decomposed by using a process of open coding. The most recurrent words included: “brand” (275 times), “design” (236 times), “world” (222 times), “watch” (196 times), “first” (192 times), “new” (188 times), “products” (176 times), “innovative” (154 times) and “years” (132 times). The result of the text analysis is a word cloud offering a simple and effective graphic representation of the most frequent words associated with heritage communication (Figure 11.2).

Meaningful insights emerged from the comparison of the top five theme words across the corporations under investigation (Table 11.2). For example, with respect to the five most recurrent words of only the top ten holdings in the ranking, some similarities may be found. For example, with respect to the hard luxury product category, the Swatch Group and Kering SA have a similar discursive communication focused on theme words such as “brand”, “world” and “innovation”. The words “design” and “world” are present in four out of ten holdings. These two words highlight the importance of the global position for luxury brands that can be supported by a strong tension to design and creativity. Moreover, three corporations show the presence of both “design” and “world” in the top five words. The word “first” appears two times (2nd rank for both Compagnie Financière

Figure 11.2 Word cloud of the most recurring words.

Source: Author’s elaboration.

Table 11.2 Top 5 most frequent words list considering the top 10 luxury fashion holdings

Source: Author’s elaboration.

Richemont and L’Oréal luxe). In these cases, it could be hypothesised that brands highlight their roles of innovators, confirming the dynamic nature of the heritage that can project the identity of the company into the future.