Hold the Line! The Challenge of Being a Premium Brand in the Social Media Era

Social media represents a substantially new way of communicating with customers. Whereas marketers used to spread their messages without receiving any direct feedback or reactions, customers now have the possibility to instantly reply to companies’ communication efforts. Adapting to altered communication patterns poses a huge challenge especially for premium brands. On social media, premium brands are not anymore able to entirely rely on their huge marketing budgets but rather need to embrace and utilize newly emerged communication approaches. This study examines a sample of 1156 car brand posts of US Facebook pages and reveals that premium brands possess specific characteristics in their communication strategy. Our findings offer valuable insights into marketing communication activities of premium brands on social media sites.