Buzz vs. Sales: Big Social Data Analytics of Style Icon Campaigns and Fashion Designer Collaborations on H&M’s Facebook Page

This paper examines the relationship between social media engagement and financial performance of the global fast fashion company, H&M. We analyze big social data from Facebook on the seven H&M style collections that occurred during 2012 and 2013 to investigate if style icon campaigns have a larger effect on quarterly sales than designer collaborations. We find that style icons such as David Beckham generate more social buzz than designer collaborations. Social Set Analysis of the Facebook data shows that the overlap between the users H&M reach with their different style collections is fairly small. The deviations between forecasted quarterly sales and actual quarterly sales are analyzed. Our results show that that style icon campaigns have a larger impact on sales than designer collaborations and reveal that the quarters with the largest deviations coincide with the quarter in which H&M ran a style icon campaign. We discuss the implications of our findings and outline directions for future research

Reviewing the impact of the Confederation Bridge

Islands are the challenging targets of a global pursuit in the closing of gaps, their distinct geography so far having seemingly eluded and mocked both human ingenuity and terra firma. This article seeks to deconstruct the concept of the bridge as more than just a value-free symbol of inexorable technological progress, and uses islands as the reference point to flesh out such an argument. Bridges impact on the subtle balance between the characteristic ‘local–global’ nature of an island identity; such an impact is multi-faceted, complex and case-specific. These ideas are applied to the specific case of the Confederation Bridge, the 14-km structure linking Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick, and which celebrated its tenth anniversary in June 2007.peer-reviewe