Seminar on the Chilling Effect and Brand Meaning of Social Media

The Social Media Research Cluster invites you to a joint research seminar with Assistant Professor Ben Marder from Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh University and two newly completed Masters students: Maja Hermansen & Line Møller-Damgaard.

Wednesday 23rd November, Kilen, Room KL 2.75

• 13:00 Welcome
• 13:05-14:00 The 'Chilling Effect' of Social Media surveillance on consumers, Ben Marder, PhD, Edinburgh Business School
• 14:00-14:30 Brand Meaning in an online discursive process, cand.merc. Maja Hermansen & cand.merc. Line Møller, CBS
• 14:30 Closing

We look forward to seeing you there and to some thrilling discussions. There will be time afterwards to meet and discuss with the presenters.

Register for the event via email to reception.marktg@cbs.dk no later than 17th November.

The 'Chilling Effect' of Social Media surveillance on consumers

Social media users are subject to surveillance 24 hours a day by their peers. This can give rise to negative emotions and the need for self-regulatory behaviour both on and offline (I.e. The ‘Chilling Effect’). The seminar will present highlights from four accepted journal articles which examine the impact of peer-to-peer surveillance on consumer behaviour. This will include discussions of marketing risqué brands and political parties through social media.

Ben has a PhD in Marketing and Information Systems from the University of Bath and is currently an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest surrounds social and commercial behaviour linked to the use of social media.

His research has focused on the impact of surveillance on consumer behaviour, friending behaviours in the workplace, visible political affiliation, movie trailer virality and the online multiple audience problem. He is a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary researchers and has published qualitative and quantitative empirical studies in journals spanning Marketing, Psychology and Information Systems.

Brand Meaning in an online discursive process

The digitalization of the fashion industry has triggered blurred lines between brands and stakeholder ecosystems. This has fostered a digital market place in which social actors have become active participants in brands’ discourse and thereby contributors to brand meaning. In this study of 3 start-up fashion brands, we analyse the complex interdiscursive system in which brand meaning is created through the interdiscursive connection between four main discourses: advertising/marketing discourse, relational discourse, conversational discourse and experiential discourse. These discourses are constituted by contextual elements in their social practice, which emerge through their own foundational narratives as well as the societal structural frame of entrepreneurship and digital media. However we also note that the discourses are constituent for social practice by rearticulating the orders of discourse through a hybridization of discursive practices and by a mutual colonization of private and public domains.