Analyzing the Perception of Experiential Luxury Consumption of Millennials on Instagram: A New Methodological Approach

Luxury consumption has been extensively researched, primarily looking at the consumption of material goods, but has neglected experiential luxury consumption. In fact, millennials, the new upcoming luxury consumers, seem to be more interested in the latter. Instagram, a visual social media platform, is used by millennials - 18 to 30 year olds - more so than other generations (Pew Research Center 2016). Instagram allows users to record their everyday lives through posting pictures containing features such as geolocation tags (Manikonda, Hu, and Kambhampati 2014)(Manikonda, Hu, & Kambhampati, 2014). Yet there is a gap in the literature in understanding how and to what end millennials use these features. Recently a new sub-group of wealthy millennials, called Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI for short) emerged on the platform. RKOI are millennials, micro-celebrity pioneers (Senft 2008), heavy luxury consumers influencers that are extensively followed on Instagram. In this study, we explore (1) how these rich millennials signal their experiential luxury consumption through geo-tags on Instagram, and (2) how this type of unconventional luxury consumption is perceived by these rich millennial followers. The research design aims at examining the perception of experiential luxury consumption of RKOI by Instagram users. Thus we focus on following attributes: (1) the perception-intensity of RKOI posts by Instagram users, measured in the number of likes and comments (in the following referred to as “social response”), (2) the location of the RKOI posts and their social response in geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) and (3) the visual post content, categorized in distinctive settings by a qualitative content analysis (Bock 2011). The data collection is based in a data mining process, with which we crawl and extract information from the HTML structure of each RKOI post – such as number of likes and comments, hashtags, descriptions or location via coordinates. Our sample of RKOI posts consists of 700 geotagged RKOI posts by 21 European citizen users on 407 unique locations.