The reputation of personal luxury brands has undergone a significant transformation since 2018, with the industry experiencing a reputation recession followed by an uneven reputation renaissance. This shift underscores a deeper misalignment between luxury brands and the evolving values of the new luxury consumer. Millennials, soon set to dominate the luxury market, have accelerated this change. Their engagement with brands on Instagram not only shapes brand perception but also reflects their shifting interests. As social media become central to shaping brand reputation, analysing these engagement patterns offers critical insight into the preferences of the new luxury consumer.

This study examines how successful and struggling brands manage their reputation through content and engagement practices on Instagram. Using a hybrid research approach, it integrates quantitative engagement metrics with qualitative multimodal thematic analysis conducted on six luxury brands (three successful and three struggling) between 2021 and 2023, marking the onset of the reputation recession. To guide the exploratory nature of this study, an integrative framework of brand reputation was developed to synthesise company-controlled, consumer-controlled, and co-created reputation factors. The findings reveal that successful brands leverage cultural capital, particularly through collaboration with South Korean pop culture figures, to enhance brand coolness and foster deeper emotional connections. Struggling brands fail to establish these connections, relying on conventional celebrity endorsements that lack subcultural appeal, leading to continued reputation challenges.

By analysing only the most and least liked posts on Instagram, subtle engagement strategy adjustments could not be identified. Additionally, excluding comment data limited deeper sentiment analysis. Moreover, this research investigates a symptom of a deeper underlying issue caused by a changed luxury consumer. Future research should explore consumer sentiment through the comment section, expand the dataset to detect brand coolness life cycle transitions and most importantly, examine the values of the new luxury consumer that shape their purchasing behaviour. Despite these limitations, this research contributes to brand reputation literature by bridging fragmented studies into a cohesive framework for evaluating brand reputation factors. For luxury brands, the reputation dashboard provides a structured framework that identifies one of these factors, brand coolness, as a competitive advantage to strengthen consumer loyalty, word-of-mouth, and brand equity. Finally, transforming an once-abstract and intangible concept into a tool for business strategy.