Achieving cultural relevance in technomediated platforms: instant cultural branding and controversial clicktivism
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Achieving cultural relevance in technomediated platforms: instant cultural branding and controversial clicktivism Silvia Biraghi1 · Rossella Chiara Gambetti1 · Angela Antonia Beccanulli1 Received: 2 March 2020 / Accepted: 24 July 2020 © Società Italiana Marketing 2020
Abstract Cultural branding acknowledges brands’ power as cultural artifacts that infuse culture with meanings and absorb new meanings from culture. The last mile of brand humanization sees brands act as citizens that construct their meanings through taking active part in socio-political discourse. This participation has been magnified and challenged by digital platforms that activate clicktivism practices to propagate cultural values. Our study is aimed at exploring how clicktivism is currently being leveraged by brands to achieve cultural relevance. We set our study in the clicktivist engagement solicited by the political mandate of Donald Trump, as numerous brands saw in Trump’s contested political agenda an opportunity to stand up and achieve cultural relevance. We term this new brand activism and its temporal dynamics as “instant cultural branding”, pointing at branding initiatives that apply fast, real time communication logics to get organically embedded in technomediated conversations with consumers, leveraging on cogent socio-cultural and political issues. Our findings reveal how, despite ambivalence of perceived authenticity of brand discourse can cause strong consumer criticism in digital conversations, deliberate ambiguity of instant cultural branding proves to be a trigger of clicktivist engagement. Ambiguity in taking socio-political stance resonates with the cultural norms of contemporary shifting consumers’ activism and ideology. Hence, controversial clicktivism emerges as a new dimension of cultural relevance in the fast temporality of technomediated discourse. Keywords Cultural branding · Clicktivism · Corporate citizenship · Technomediated platforms, Brand activism
* Angela Antonia Beccanulli [email protected] Silvia Biraghi [email protected] Rossella Chiara Gambetti [email protected] 1
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, LABCOM, Largo Gemelli, 1, 20123 Milan, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Italian Journal of Marketing
1 Introduction In the current scenario, technomediated platforms are the new locus for cultural branding efforts thanks to the formation and empowerment of crowdcultures (Holt 2016) meant as online formations that can quickly generate critical mass around myriad issues, causes and concerns (Khamis 2019). According to Holt (2016) brands are now trying to anticipate, address and exploit the power of crowdcultures (their moods, motivations and interests) through cultural branding. This is leading brands to take a stand by acting as people among people, as citizens among citizens by selecting sides and partnering on critical social issues and commitments. Most of these forms of social aggregations and activations are now finding an outburst of participations in technomediat
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