Heterotopian selfies: How social media destabilizes brand assemblages

Joonas Rokka and Robin Canniford
Additional contact information
Joonas Rokka: EM - EMLyon Business School

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Purpose Digital technologies are changing the ways in which the meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This research extends 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 Our study shows how brands and branded selves intersect through ‘heterotopian selfie practices'. Accentuated by the rise of attention economy and ‘consumer microcelebrity', we argue that these proliferating selfie images can destabilise spatial, temporal, symbolic, and material properties of brand assemblages. Practical implications Implications include a consideration of how selfie practices engender new challenges for brand design and brand management. Originality/value Our study illustrates how a brand assemblage approach can guide investigations of brands at multiple scales of analysis. In particular, we extend knowledge of visual brand-related user-generated content in terms of how consumers express, visualise and share selfies and how the heterotopian quality of this sharing consequently shapes brand assemblages.

Keywords: Branding; Heterotopia; Brand assemblage; Champagne; Selfie; Visual content analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published in European Journal of Marketing, 2016, 50 (9-10), 1789-1813 p

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02313408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().