Communication des marques de luxe françaises à Taïwan autour de la notion d’identité : étude de cas de Dior

Details

Supervisors

François, Thomas

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres françaises et romanes, orientation français langue étrangère, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enIn the context of digital transformation and the rise of influencer marketing, luxury brands are increasingly confronted with challenge of maintaining a coherent global identity while adapting their communication to culturally differentiated markets. As digital platforms and social media reshape brand-consumer relationships, the communication of luxury brands must negotiate between global consistency and local expectations. This thesis investigates the identity communication of the French luxury house Dior through a comparative case study of its communication in French and Taiwan. More specifically, the study aims to understand how brand identity is constructed and conveyed through both official brand communication and influencer-generated content, as well as the extent to which influencers complement or extend the institutional discourse of the brand across different cultural contexts. The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining marketing studies, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism serves as the main theoretical framework of the study. The analysis is based on self-built bilingual corpus composed of official text published on Dior’s French and Taiwanese websites and social media publications produced by influencers collaborating with the brand in both contexts. Methodologically, the study combines statistical analyses and qualitative discourse analysis in order to identity the identity facets mobilized in the corpora and to examine communication strategies observable across the two cultural settings. Overall, the findings show that Dior globally emphasizes the same core identity facets in both France and Taiwan, with Physique and Culture constituting the most central dimensions of the brand’s communication. Analyses of keywords, lexical items, and document frequency further reveal that Dior maintains a relatively stable brand identity across markets through recurring core concepts related to savoir-faire, artistic heritage, designers, product collections, and brand symbolism. Nevertheless, important differences emerge in the ways these identity facets are communicated. In France, Dior’s communication places stronger emphasis on the symbolic, artistic, and heritage dimensions of luxury. In Taiwan, by contrast, the discourse foregrounds more tangible aspects of products, such as appearance and product effects, while also mobilizing stereotypical representations associated with French luxury, Parisian elegance, and the image of “French style”. The analysis also highlights significant differences in influencer communication between the two contexts. In France, influencers mainly reproduce and prolonged the official discourse of the brand. In Taiwan, however, influencer communication appears more personal, narrative and experience oriented. Taiwanese influencers frequently integrated elements of everyday life and lifestyle storytelling into their social media publications, thereby mobilizing more strongly the Relationship, Reflection, and Self-image facts of the brand identity prism. In this context, Dior is often presented not only as a luxury brand but also as a familiar companion integrated into the influencer’s daily life. The results therefore suggest that influencers play a substantially more complementary rule in Taiwan than in France in the dissemination of Dior’s brand identity. Beyond its empirical findings, this thesis also contributes methodologically and theoretically to the study of brand communication. First, it proposes an operational adaptation of Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism for corpus-based linguistic analysis, allowing identity facets to be identified through observable textual and discursive features. Second, it outlines a preliminary corpus-based model for the study of brand identity. The model distinguishes different analytical levels ranging from discourse elements strongly shaped by linguistic and cultural context to more stable and recurring components reflecting the core values of the brand. More broadly, this research demonstrates the relevance of combining corpus linguistics and intercultural approaches in the study of luxury brand communication in the digital era.