Power relations within brand management: the challenge of social media

Abstract

The disruption caused by social media to the power relations between organisations and their stakeholders constitutes a substantial challenge to traditional brand theory and has led to significant changes in practice on the part of both professional marketers and brand consumers (Melewar and Nguyen 2015; Schultz and Peltier 2013). These changing practices are the subject of a rapidly growing number of research projects and papers (see, for example: Azar et al. 2016; Bruhn et al. 2012; Dallar Pozza 2014; De Vries and Carlson 2014; Kumar and Mirchandani 2012; Pinto and Yagnik 2017; Schultz and Peltier 2013; Wallace et al. 2012; Willis and Wang 2016). However, the implications for brand theory of changing power relations have been less attended to, perhaps because the concept of power relations has not itself been a major focus for brand-centred research or within the marketing research literature more generally. This paper addresses this gap in the literature: first, by examining the...