11 Sustainability or Promotability? An analysis on Social Media promotion on Sustainability

By: Sebastian Chiu

As business owners, it is important that your image relates and resonates with your audience. Sustainability has been a growing problem in the current global economy and climate. How do you really quantify and choose between promoting sustainable change for your business in comparison to bringing in revenue and income. Social media plays a large part in the role of expressing the business’s identity for the general audience, allowing them to keep up with promotions, messaging and perspectives your company depicts. In our research, we analyzed the focus of sustainability in two different fashion groups of Louis Vuitton (LV), a higher range fashion brand and Uniqlo, a more accessible fashion brand.

Sustainability or Just Good PR?

In our research we decided to better analyze “How does brands promote sustainability projects through keywords on Instagram between 2021-2023”. In this research, we focused on creating a content analysis that evaluate to what extent does brands are genuine and tries to promote sustainability for its environmental efforts or its possible economic benefits from their consumers. A key term in understanding this is the use of greenwashing which depicts businesses’ choice in being deceptive promoting sustainability outcome and practices while they are false.

LV vs. Uniqlo: Two Brands, Two Stories

After analyzing the posts between 2021-2023, it is important to note the two companies have different audience bases and therefore interactions on social media. Uniqlo as a more accessible brand with lower prices in comparison to LV, being more accessible creates a larger audience base that interacts and cares about the promotional content and products that it creates. On both brand’s social media posts the choice of discussion for sustainability is very specific about their ideology and choice, instead of explaining the product’s production. This creates opportunities for the audience to make their own judgement to produce these sustainable products. It should be argued that this reduces the opportunity for the brand to greenwash their products to oversimplify its production. In particular, one post in LV received more likes and attention in comparison to Uniqlo and LV’s other posts. This was because of collaboration with Moët & Chandon and Roger Federer, allowing larger reach by both brand and celebrity’s own fans creating more traction but not necessarily because of sustainability.

In content creation, LV created their post’s focusing on the promotion of a story and understanding of LV’s perspective in sustainability, creating a connection between them and their audience through a deeper connection in emotions. Whereas Uniqlo creates their sustainability posts more simply, that focuses on hashtags and overarching explanation of the importance of Uniqlo place on sustainability. This could be explained through LV’s and Uniqlo’s differences in target audience. LV as a brand promotes itself as an experience and gives value to its audience with its larger price, better service and better products. Uniqlo focuses more on sales that are accessible and relatable with lower prices, allows the audience to have these products while being sustainable, instead of being priced for the name Uniqlo. It should be then seen that LV has better quality social media posts. LV creates reels with professional lighting the ability to connect with audiences through partnerships with celebrities. The brand both used similar keywords that explain and create dialogue and representation that is important for sustainability, straying from over glamorized language.

The Power of a Hashtag

This analysis could be relevant to the sharing of sustainable news and projects around the world, where governments and businesses could be placed into different opportunities that sustainability is a issue they have to discuss. Being able to create social media posts that reflect the government/business’ choice for the general public easily and accurately allows audiences to better reason and be informed of the changes in their community. It should be argued that businesses and government officials lack the reach for the younger generation due to the lack of better information in accessible places the younger generation would be on. With better news and promotion of their ideas, the general public is better equipped to make informed decisions that they fully understand.

Why It Matters: Greenwashing, Trust, and the Next Generation

From our findings, it shows that brand has a focus on target audience instead of sustainability by itself. Understanding the importance of sustainability as a means of living and its effects to people overall. They create narratives using these keywords that bring a acknowledgement between audience and brand instead of completely focusing on promotion of sustainability by itself. From our research, it signifies the importance of narratives and production on social media, using examples of LV and Uniqlo we can see that even though both brands have different ideas of what is expected in a social media post. They create a dialogue of what is important in the brand and what steps they have taken to make improvements of this glaring issue in the current world around us. We are more able to better understand what could create more traction for a brand while promoting important issues they want to discuss.

I thank Arbar and Khushi, my group members that help create this content analysis but did not participate in writing this article.