Marina Leban's PhD thesis looked into the luxury consumption practices of high-end luxury prosumers and lurkers on visual social media platform Instagram. It was made up of three articles, two of which were published in high-level academic journals with supervisor Ben Voyer, and was rewarded by a best thesis prize.
Marina Leban successfully defended her thesis in Management Sciences on 8 July, at ESCP Business School’s Paris (République) campus. The jury made up of referees Delphine Dion (ESSEC Business School), Margherita Pagani (EMLyon Business School), suffragans Yuri Seo (University of Auckland) and Luca M. Visconti (Università della Svizzera Italiana) also encouraged her to submit her thesis to best thesis prizes such as the prestigious “prix de thèse de la Chancellerie des Universités de Paris”, which she was officially awarded recently.
"With the transition to liquid modernity, and the acceleration of society due to the high production and consumption of new content through new media technologies such as social media, social hierarchies seem to be more fragmented, unstable, ephemeral and changing,” explains Marina Leban. “To this end, research still needs to be done to uncover new forms of luxury consumption practices in a digitalized and liquid society, taking place on social media platforms.” To address this gap, her thesis looked at the luxury consumption practices of the specific segment of high-end luxury consumers (prosumers), at how they define, display and consume luxury on the visual social media platform called Instagram. One of her two articles on this topic was published in the Journal of Business Ethics. The third one takes a different approach by investigating how lurkers, as opposed to prosumers, digitally and virtually consume luxury-related content on Instagram, and was published in the Journal of Business Research:
She also co-authored with Ben Voyer a book chapter entitled Social media influencers versus traditional influencers.