Consumer brand curation on social shopping sites

Consumers engage in online curation using branded items (e.g., product images) on social shopping websites (i.e., sites that combine commerce and social media) in ways that can have important implications for fashion brands. Beyond being passive recipients of a brand’s marketing message, consumers now actively participate in co-creating the brand by combining brands and presenting them to others, generating novel co-branding connections and revising brand categorization. We use behavioral data collected from two communities on a popular social shopping site (Polyvore.com) and employ a clustering technique to demonstrate that curating consumers are assembling different brands together, thus creating implicit brand associations. We additionally conduct an analysis of curated fashion displays to understand which features make a display more popular. Looking at consumer curation behavior on social shopping sites, fashion brand managers can better understand the ways in which their brands’ images are being co-created by consumers.