Heterotopian selfies: how social media destabilizes brand assemblages
Abstract
Purpose
Digital technologies are changing the ways in which the meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This research aims to extend knowledge of how consumer-made “selfie” images shared in social media might contribute to the destabilization of brands as assemblages.
Design/methodology/approach
Insights are drawn from a critical visual content analysis of three popular champagne brand accounts and consumer-made selfies featuring these brands in Instagram.
Findings
This study shows how brands and branded selves intersect through “heterotopian selfie practices”. Accentuated by the rise of attention economy and “consumer microcelebrity”, the authors argue that these proliferating selfie images can destabilize spatial, temporal, symbolic and material properties of brand assemblages.
Practical implications
The implications include a consideration of how selfie practices engender new challenges for brand design and brand management.
Originality/value
This study illustrates how a brand assemblage approach can guide investigations of brands at multiple scales of analysis. In particular, this paper extends knowledge of visual brand-related user-generated content in terms of how consumers express, visualize and share selfies and how the heterotopian quality of this sharing consequently shapes brand assemblages.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the participants at the 7th Kern Conference on Visual Communications at Rochester, USA, for their helpful comments on the previous version of this manuscript. In addition, the authors wish to thank Maria Federley for her illustration work and permission to reproduce the images used in this manuscript.
Citation
Rokka, J. and Canniford, R. (2016), "Heterotopian selfies: how social media destabilizes brand assemblages", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 50 No. 9/10, pp. 1789-1813. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-08-2015-0517
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited