Setting the sustainability agenda: The impact of luxury brands' SDG-related tweets on consumer engagement.

This study examines luxury market brands' communications related to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) on the socialmedia platform “X,” and their impact on online consumer engagement. Our longitudinal study analyses 57,000 social mediaposts by 19 luxury brands (7-year period), revealing that social and environmental sustainability communications are the mostpopular to elicit consumer engagement, while economic sustainability messaging lacks a similar effect. The personal luxuryindustry (which includes apparel, footwear, watches, jewelry, and accessories) was chosen for this study as this industry facesunique challenges and more scrutiny over its practices. The study highlights the importance of sustainability communicationin branded owned media, while emphasizing the role of the brand in shaping the public agenda through the content consumerslike and share. Conceptually, agenda-setting theory is extended in this paper to cover luxury brand communications on socialmedia. In this context, the theory is proven for some of the 17 SDGs; however, for economic agendas, extra strategic marketingpractices beyond online social media communications may be required. Recommendations include prioritizing the reframingof economic sustainability communications and the continuation of the social and environmental sustainability messaging forconsumer resonance.