Power relations within brand management: the challenge of social media

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 concept of power relations in a brand context; second, by analysing how social media has disrupted power relations between organisations and their stakeholders; and finally, by setting out some of the emerging implications for brand theory and brand management.

Power relations

Within the brand management literature, the term ‘power’ has often been used as an interchangeable synonym for other concepts, including: strength relative to others, as in ‘the ‘power of the brand’ (e.g. Hennigs et al. 2013); possessing an ‘ability’ to achieve something, as in ‘the selling power’ (e.g. Ramaseshan and Stein 2014), and wealth as in ‘purchasing power’ (e.g. Dwivedi et al. 2014). In each case, the substitution of the words ‘strength’, ‘ability’, or ‘wealth’ in place of the word ‘power’, does little to affect the meaning, as in ‘this strong brand has demonstrated its ability to attract wealthy consumers’ rather than ‘this powerful brand has demonstrated its power to attract consumers with purchasing power’. These ill-defined usages, which are largely disconnected from the substantial body of social science and the philosophical literature on the concept of power, arguably serve to obfuscate rather than add clarity. The following brief overview of ‘power’ is intended to link the concept of power—as applied to brand management—with this literature through a focus on four core characteristics:

• 1. Relationships

• 2. Social practices

• 3. Power/knowledge

• 4. Resistance

‘Relationships’ are such a core characteristic of power that the terms ‘power’ and ‘relations’ are, in the title of this paper, conjoined as ‘power relations’. It is very difficult to write or speak about power without reference to the relationships within which power is embedded or the relational context within which power may be said to circulate. Even the relatively superficial usages of ‘power’ in the brand management literature, which were briefly outlined above, have a relational component. When actors assert that they have power, they are generally making a claim about the nature of their relationship(s) with others. As Foucault (1982a, p. 786) asserts:

[W]hat characterizes the power we are analysing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). For let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others.

When we speak about power relations within the context of brand management, we are therefore speaking about the ability of some actors to exercise more or less power in relation to the brand as compared to other actors.

The relational character of power is clearly evident, for example, in Boyd et al.’s (2014) proposed ontology of consumer brand empowerment in online social networks. In their paper, Boyd et al. (2014) argue against a ‘strategic’ view of empowerment, whereby a degree of control over the brand is said to be ‘granted’ to consumers by the organisation, and against an ‘information’ view of empowerment, whereby empowerment is seen as a matter of the organisation agreeing to provide information to consumers. Instead, they define consumer brand empowerment as ‘a consumer’s perceived influence over the brand attitudes of other consumers in an online social network resulting from the consumer’s exchange of brand information in the network’ (Boyd et al. 2014, p. 518). The major difference between these various understandings of brand empowerment is that, while the first two are embedded in a relationship between an organisation and its consumers, the suggested new definition situates power relations and ‘empowerment’ entirely within the sphere of consumer-to-consumer relationships in the highly mediated context of online social networks. The rise of consumer-to-consumer relationships enabled by social media will be further discussed below.

The second characteristic of power relations considered in this paper is that, for the most part, they are firmly embedded within social practices (Foucault 1982b). Power may be—and often is—exercised from above or by force, but within the context of contemporary western democracies, power relations are more likely to operate through a myriad of ostensibly mundane techniques, processes, procedures, systems, routines, and social norms. As Fairclough (1992, p. 50) contends, ‘Power is implicit within everyday social practices which are pervasively distributed at every level in all domains of social life and are constantly engaged in’. Interviews, counselling sessions, confessions, and examinations are all examples of social practices that underpin the operationalisation of particular sets of power relations. When we examine power relations within brand management, we therefore need to consider structural relationships but also always look beyond them to the myriad ways in which actors may, for example, allow themselves to be constituted as certain types of subjects, as certain kinds of brand consumers. We might, for example, ask how it become normalised for consumers to display their brand allegiances on their clothing as part of the broader growth of luxury brand consumption (Powell 2015, p. 692). This reversal in consumer behaviour was not triggered by a structural alteration in power relations, but by changes in social practices that were communicated via advertising and legitimated through the mechanisms of celebrity endorsement (Dwivedi et al. 2014).

The third core characteristic of power relations to be considered here is the relationship between power and knowledge. Foucault (1982b, p. 52) offers us the conjoined concept of power/knowledge on the grounds that ‘The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces power.’ Here, Foucault is pointing to a circularity in the relationship between knowledge and power. As Motion et al. (2016, p. 52) argue, ‘Knowledge supports and enables the exercise of power, while the exercise of power generates and legitimates knowledge’. The mechanisms of celebrity endorsement were referenced above in relation to the normalisation of brand label displays, especially on apparel and accessories, such as handbags. This changing practice provides a simple example of power/knowledge in practice. The power of celebrities in contemporary society is arguably an outcome of their own objectification as branded products that are almost constantly visible to consumers through social media. As powerful ‘brands’, celebrities are able to define other brands as desirable, fashionable, and therefore valuable, merely by being associated with them. Celebrities produce, reinforce, and communicate knowledge about brand value to consumers. Conversely, existing consumer knowledge about brand value serves to reinforce the power of the celebrities associated with these brands.

The fourth and final characteristic of power relations to be discussed here is that existing sets of power relations should always be seen as open to potential challenge and change through resistance. There is a tendency to reify power relations, perhaps because the mutually reinforcing character of power/knowledge is constantly in play and serves to reinforce the status quo. However, power relations may be resisted, even overthrown, and new relations of power emerge to take their place. The apparent strength of existing sets of power relations can be illusory and the reign of particular configurations short-lived. Indeed, resistance may be seen as a direct and expected product of power relations (Clegg et al. 2006). In the context of brand management, the issue of consumer resistance and the associated rise of ‘anti-brand activism’ (Ostergaard et al. 2015; Romani et al. 2015) has been a growing focus for research.

This brief examination of four core characteristics of the concept of power has sought to add some degree of clarity to what is an often ill-defined concept within the brand management literature. It is now followed by a discussion of some of the major ways in which social media has disrupted the power relations between organisations and their stakeholders in a brand context.

Social media as a disruptive force

As noted above, social media has been the focus of a growing body of research in many disciplines, including within the brand management literature and the marketing literature more generally. Early work has been rightly criticised for over-hyping social media (Schultz and Peltier 2013), especially in relation to its utility as a marketing technology that would drive sales and increase revenues. However, the same criticism can be made of early writings on most major technological innovations. Early writings on social media will no doubt provide future researchers with valuable insights into the origins and evolution of Web 2.0. The major defining feature of Web 2.0 lies in its social character, in that it enables direct user-to-user connectivity and supports the creation and sharing of user-generated content. Earlier incarnations of the Web centred on websites or aggregating portals that were often little more than online publishing sites. Content was created and published on the website, just as it was once created and published in paper-based formats. The direction of communication was primarily one-way, with few opportunities provided for interactivity with or between users. Web 2.0 was not so much a technical change as a major evolution in the design of the Web, which involved a move, not just from one-way to two-way, but arguably to ‘everyway’ communication (Motion et al. 2016). The concept of everyway communication captures the large-scale, synchronous, and asynchronous creation and sharing of content that social media enables. Your Tweet may be shared with your Twitter followers, who may add comments and share with their followers, and so on until a large, complex web of communication that literally goes ‘everyway’ emerges. The concepts of one-way and two-way communication are clearly inadequate to describe contemporary communication practices in social media contexts or to enable adequate theorisation of the emerging new opportunities for marketing practice.

Much of the value of early websites lay in their ability to share information simultaneously with large, potentially global audiences, and this ability was amplified and, arguably, democratised by Web 2.0. Globalisation has been one of the major trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the continuing rise of the Internet has been one of the key enablers of this trend. As Clegg et al. (2006, p. 369) contend, ‘What made contemporary globalization possible, in part, was the virtual capillaries of instantaneous communication and trade embedded in the Internet’. It is worth noting here that Clegg et al. (2006) were writing at a time when Web 2.0 was barely 2 years old as a concept and social media platforms were only just emerging as major players on the Internet, especially on mobile Internet. For example, (the) Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, and WeChat, Pinterest, and Instagram in 2010. Collectively, these sites now enable billions of individuals and organisations to create and share content, including a significant amount of content about brands. Moreover, Clegg et al. (2006) had yet to experience the globalising force of social media as played out in the so-called Arab Spring of 2010 or the ensuing backlash on the part of repressive regimes that was also at least partly enacted via social media (Motion et al. 2016). Finally, Clegg et al. (2006) had not foreseen the exponential growth in smart phone usage, estimated to have increased from around 122 million units sold in 2007 to 1.5 billion units sold in 2016 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/). In addition to allowing consumers to remain permanently connected to the Internet, the high-quality cameras and cheap content-creating tools included with smart phones have made them the ideal vector for accelerating the global spread of social media.

Despite its relative youth, the globalising, everyway communication of social media has already proven to be a major disruptive force on brand management because of its effects on the established power relations between organisations and their stakeholders. The disintermediation of communication enabled by social media, we would contend, has proven to be a major force of destabilisation, the effects of which have already disrupted some markets and led to the demise of former market leaders. Research about disruptive innovation proposes that innovations can disrupt markets either through low-end market offerings that may be initially cheap and of inferior quality, or by establishing new markets, especially markets in which the targeted consumer groups are made up of people who were not considered to be potential consumers by the existing brands (Christensen and Raynor 2003). Arguably, the social networking technologies of social media have disrupted status quo power relations within numerous markets through both of these mechanisms: by bringing low-end products and services to market and by developing new markets comprising new groups of consumers. For example, social networking technologies have disrupted the travel industry and created a new market player and arguably market leader, in TripAdvisor. In 2000, TripAdvisor began to offer free travel advice, which was initially seen as inferior insofar as experts heavily discounted the value of the opinions of lay travellers. The innovative business model initiated by TripAdvisor is now proven and has been the cause of significant market disruption within the travel industry, including for established travel guide publishers and travel agents. Rather than discounting the advice and recommendations of other travellers, consumers appear to place more value on the views of their peers.

Social media has also created disruptions through new market offerings. For example, online dating sites have not only opened up a major, new industry niche that is global in reach, but also changed the way in which a whole generation of young (and not so young) people now meet and form relationships. Similarly, crowdfunding sites are disrupting financial markets by opening up funding opportunities for consumers that established financial institutions had not previously considered to be consumers, and by sourcing funds from individuals that the financial institutions had not previously considered to be funders. In order to better understand how these disruptive effects have impacted brand management, each of the four core characteristics of power that were examined above will now be discussed.

Relationships

Relationships exist within particular contexts and may change if the context changes. The importance of considering context was, however, not apparent in early brand-related practices in social media contexts. Indeed, as Schultz and Peltier observed in 2013, ‘Fearing to be left behind in the race to win the social media battle, the vast majority of businesses have ventured into the social media world, often with no strategic thought or plan’ (p. 87). Prior to the interactivity of Web 2.0, organisations were able to place themselves at the centre of their relationships with consumers. The rise of the Internet had massively extended the reach of brand-related communication and therefore amplified the message. However, while the Internet was still primarily about websites and portals, these benefits were disproportionately skewed towards larger organisations with the resources to maintain and update the sites. Unidirectional communication and top-down communication were still possible, with organisations continuing to favour time-limited, promotional campaigns. Web 2.0 decentred the locus of control on the Internet, diffusing it through global networks and, thereby, rendering many of the tried and tested methodologies of brand management and marketing redundant.

Prior to the advent of social media, organisations developed a brand which was then communicated to consumers, often through time-limited campaigns. Individual consumers did not necessarily give their permission to receive this brand communication or react in the ways intended by the organisation, but their role in actively shaping and communicating the brand to other consumers was relatively limited (Godin 1999). This predominately unidirectional flow of brand information—from the organisation to consumers—has been overturned within social media contexts where engagement occurs directly between brand consumers and may entirely bypass the brand owner (Motion et al. 2016). Moreover, the social media platforms of new and disruptive market players that operate in the sphere of consumer-to-consumer relationships have the capability to significantly affect the brand image and reputation of multiple brands. For example, organisations such as TripAdvisor enable consumers to share their personal experiences with and opinions about multiple brands. Through their postings, consumers may directly influence the brand attitudes and purchase decisions of many other consumers (Jeacle and Carter 2011). This disruptive process potentially upends status quo power relations between organisations and their consumers in that brand consumers—rather than brand owners—now play the central role within forums that serve as primary sources of brand information (Boyd et al. 2014).

Another interesting dynamic associated with consumer participation in social media is the extent to which consumers use these sites to express or enact their personal relationships with favoured brands (Pinto and Yagnik 2017). Such personal brand relationships can manifest through, for example, the establishment of social media sites or ‘pages’ devoted to a particular brand by consumers. These sites allow consumers to work with one another to co-create new brand experiences or associations. Brand consumers may also communicate across multiple sites by means of agreed, brand-related hashtags. While ‘brand-fan’ sites and hashtags might seem ideal, cost-effective ways for organisations to enhance consumer loyalty, Brown, Broderick and Lee (2007), in their analysis of postings within an online community comprising fans of the television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, found that the brand itself was sometimes less important than the social links made in relation to the brand. Moreover, as brand fan communities grow in size and the relationships between brand consumers strengthen, the sites may come to function as strict enforcers of the status quo. If brand fans have come to see themselves, rather than the brand owners, as the true custodians of brand values and traditions, then organisations may find themselves locked in bitter struggles with their own consumers over any proposed changes. For example, negative social media campaigns about the new flavouring of a popular Australian biscuit, BBQ Shapes, exerted such pressure on the company that they reintroduced the old flavouring option (http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/arnotts-shapes-consumer-backlash-forces-flavour-backdown/news-story/3b9a5acdce3117e3d5acdb7f74c04f6a).

Social practices

In decentring the power relations of traditional brand management, social media has also fundamentally altered the associated social practices. The creation, contestation, reproduction, and dissemination of brand associations or meanings now occur, increasingly, through the everyday interactions of brand consumers rather than through the organisational practices of brand managers or within the confines of brand campaigns. These everyday interactions may also be magnified through social media in unanticipated ways. For example, one of the most popular and, arguably, powerful people in social media is Joseph Garrett, aka ‘Stampy Cat’ or ‘Stampylongnose’. YouTube videos of Garrett and his friends playing the popular video game, Minecraft, rank amongst the top ten most watched videos on YouTube and, at the time of writing, in July 2017, boasted 8.5 million subscribers (https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/category/games). In freely sharing images of himself at play, a standard social practice within social media contexts, Garrett was elevated into global prominence as a major source of brand information about Minecraft. It is worth noting that Minecraft itself was bought by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion dollars in 2014, and a major component of that value lay in the vast, online social network that had been established by game players. The social practice of freely sharing ideas, experiences, images, and opinions with the intent of informing or entertaining others is now a proven source of corporate value creation and of personal power for consumers who engage in it. This social practice may also be seen as a primary source of disruption of pre-existing power relations.

The ability to increase one’s personal power, and even develop a personal brand that can be monetised, may be seen as one source of the disruptive potential of social media sharing. However, sharing with others in social media contexts is sometimes undertaken anonymously and in ways that are difficult to trace or authenticate. This ability to disguise one’s identity, which is freely offered to participants within some social media sites, may enable an unknown actor to become a powerful source of influence over consumer attitudes towards a brand. A disguised identity may serve positive purposes, such as to empower a consumer with personal characteristics that might result in discrimination in the physical world and thereby allow a broader range of consumers to interact with brands and influence the brand attitudes of others. However, anonymity may also generate social practices that would be considered unacceptable in the physical world, particularly the negative practices that are collectively known as ‘trolling’. Trolling has been defined as ‘malicious online behaviour, intended to aggravate, annoy or otherwise disrupt online interactions and communication’ (Coles and West 2016, p. 233). Managing the social practices of online trolling in order to prevent or minimise damage to brand reputation is difficult and time-consuming for organisations that find their bands targeted by trolls (Coles and West 2016). The social media sites on which troll attacks occur are unlikely to be either owned or controlled by the brand owners and may be situated in different legal jurisdictions. While the dominant social practices associated with sharing on social media sites have served to democratise or broaden participation in the shaping of brand attitudes, they may also be seen to have opened the door to a range of behaviours that range from the mischievous to the criminal.

Power/knowledge

In the virtual space of social media sites, the dominant social practices of sharing have made ‘information’ in its broadest sense, the primary currency of exchange for participants (Brown et al. 2007). In the Stampy Cat example, cited above, Joseph Garrett established his credibility as a source of knowledge about Minecraft by freely sharing videos that demonstrated his expertise at the game. These videos increased his personal brand power in ways that enabled him to earn a substantial income. There was also a positive outcome for the brand owner in that Garrett’s videos helped to positively shape consumer attitudes towards the game and thereby potentially increased the brand value of Minecraft. A mutually reinforcing power/knowledge relationship thus grew up between Garret and Minecraft. Similarly, beauty and fashion video bloggers, or ‘vloggers’ as they are known, on YouTube have become successful through regularly uploading video reviews of beauty or fashion products (Lee and Watkins 2016). These beauty and fashion vloggers have become trusted sources of knowledge about a range of brands, which has reinforced the power of both the brands that the vloggers promote and the vloggers themselves. However, celebrity vloggers contribute only one stream to what may be characterised as a daily flood of fashion brand-related images on social media. The invention of photo-messaging apps, particularly Instagram, has enabled the rise of what is known as the ‘selfie culture’ (McLachlan 2017). Any brand consumer with a smart phone is now able to upload and share images of themselves in which they are using branded products or undergoing brand-related experiences. Some of these images are so widely shared that previously unknown individuals become famous, albeit briefly. In 1968, Andy Warhol reportedly said that ‘In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ (Guinn and Perry 2005). Instagram appears perfectly designed to enable millions of people to achieve their ‘Warholian’ fifteen minutes of fame. However, Warhol did not foresee the major shift in power relations between brands and consumers that could be engendered by such a democratisation of access to the mechanisms of fame.

Social media sharing enables such rapid and widespread dissemination of content that it leaves little time for verification of the facticity of information or images. Such content may be accepted quickly and uncritically as ‘knowledge’ even though it is fictitious or has been shared with malicious or manipulative intent. Those who contribute most actively to the circulation of content are subsequently rewarded by new followers on, for example, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, as they come to be recognised as authoritative or favoured sources. The interests of social media users who share content are thus aligned with those whose material interests are served by that content. Each year, the Oxford Dictionary selects a ‘word of the year’ from a shortlist of words that have attracted significant attention over the previous 12 months. Given the growth of unverified communication enabled by social media, it was not surprising that, in 2016, Oxford awarded this honour to ‘post-truth’. Oxford defined post-truth as an adjective ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 ). Monitoring of the term ‘post-truth’ showed that, over the course of the previous decade, it had moved from the periphery to the centre of political commentary and that users no longer felt the need to define its meaning. A well-publicised example of a post-truth practice occurred during a ‘Meet the Press’ interview on January 22, 2017 when the U.S.A. Counsellor to President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, defended a false account of the crowd numbers attending the Presidential inauguration, as an ‘alternative fact’ (Kakutani 2017). Conway then resisted attempts from the press gallery to acknowledge the falsehood, insisting instead that she was just offering ‘alternative facts and additional information’. The hashtag ‘#alternativefacts’ has subsequently become a mainstay of jokes on Twitter as well as a popular Internet meme.

Resistance

The intentions of consumers who engage in brand-related social media communication—even when the content is inaccurate—are often positive. However, social media also provides a global forum for resisting corporate power by damaging brands. Major brands in particular have found themselves the focus of sometimes well-organised attacks through social media as well as on the Internet more generally, as part of a growing phenomenon known as ‘anti-branding’ (Ostergaard et al. 2015). For example, the McDonald’s chain of restaurants has been a highly visible target of anti-corporate sentiment. From the anti-Mc Donald’s website www.McSpotlight.org to the I hate McDonald’s Facebook pages and the Anti-McDonalds hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, the online world has provided a means and a forum for individuals to communicate anti-brand sentiments. Legislative recourse has thus far proved to have limited power in countering this movement. Resistance of powerful brands also emerged in the late 1990s in the form of subverted logos that become highly sought after ‘ironic fashion fakes’ (Elan 2016). As Ostergaard et al. (2015, p. 63) note, ‘Consumers are at times against consumerism but are not willing to give up consuming’. These subverted logos combined creativity and humour to disrupt the power of brands, but not necessarily to halt consumption of alternative products.

There is also a growing so-called ‘dark net’ comprising peer-to-peer encrypted networks that actively enable the anonymity of both users and websites. The dark net is just one component of the ‘deep web’, which is that part of the Internet protected from public view by, for example, passwords. Unlike the ‘surface web’, the deep web is not indexed by search engines and includes private databases and intranets. The majority of web pages on the Internet lie within the deep web. The dark net is a subset of the deep web in that it requires specific pieces of software to access, most commonly Tor, Freenet or I2P. The Tor browser was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory to enable anonymous communication by preventing the physical IP address of users from being traced. The advantages of cloaking geolocation and identity are obvious. These mechanisms serve to protect sensitive communications with commercial or national security implications. However, the secretive nature of the dark net has made it synonymous with drug dealing, pornography, prostitution, terrorist networking, and other forms of illicit or illegal activity. In the U.S.A, the Department of Homeland Security became sufficiently concerned about the use of social media by terrorists that it established a Social Media Task Force and expanded its data mining capabilities (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/homeland-security-social-media-refugees.html). The dark net provides an ideal site for anti-brand activism because anonymity offers a high degree of protection from prosecution. This protection is not absolute, as the infamous trial and successful prosecution of Silk Road founder, Ross Ulbricht, has demonstrated. However, it is undoubtedly much easier to evade legal sanction on the dark net, which serves to attract and encourage behaviours that lie outside of social, legal, and ethical norms. It is not possible to provide any accurate estimate of the scale of social media activity, including anti-brand activity, which is occurring on the dark net. It is also very difficult to monitor activity and impossible to control it. Clearly, the shift in the balance of power relations, from brand owners to brand consumers, that social media has driven within the surface web is magnified in the context of the dark net.

Discussion and conclusions

This paper has sought to map the diverse ways that social media has fundamentally disrupted power relations within brand management. Social media has altered the dynamics of the relationship between brands and brands consumers as well as between consumers themselves. Social media has introduced new social practices, especially new practices that are consumer-centric rather than brand-centric. The processes whereby knowledge is created and legitimated have been upended in the fast-paced, sharing culture of social media, which privileges immediacy over veracity as part of the phenomenon of post-truth culture. Social media has also enabled new forms of consumer resistance to brand strategy, as empowered consumers become a primary source of brand information for other consumers. The growth of the lawless dark net has further enabled new forms of resistance to corporate power and provided an ideal forum for anti-brand activism.

For brand managers, social media has also opened up a myriad of opportunities to promote their products and services to new and existing consumers. Brand managers are now able to quickly and cost-effectively communicate right across the scale, ranging from individual consumers to global audiences. By deploying sophisticated algorithms, brand managers target their communications to the individual preferences of their consumers and, with each interaction, the accuracy of their predictions of consumer behaviour increases. Social media has also enabled the rise of permission marketing (Godin 1999). Through social media sites, such as Facebook, brand managers are able to establish virtual places where their consumers voluntarily gather to receive, create, and share brand-related communications. The digital footprints left behind by consumers when they engage with brands through social media provide fuel for the algorithms that now underpin the execution of brand strategies. However, despite all of these new opportunities, we suggest that social media has done more to increase the power of brand consumers than of brand owners. The primary cause of this power shift, we contend, is the exponential growth in direct consumer-to-consumer communication that has been enabled by and amplified through social media.

The twentieth century saw the rise of mass communication, which was primarily one-way, from content-creating organisations to content-receiving consumers. Through mass media brand campaigns, executed primarily through newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema, and then television, brand managers were able to exercise a high degree of control over the brand-related messages that were broadcast to millions of people. As the primary source of brand information, they were able to dominate the spaces in which the brand attitudes of consumers were formed. Their control was never absolute, and their campaigns and strategies were always open to consumer resistance, but the balance of communication power sat squarely on the side of brand managers. The invention of the Internet and its move from the military to civilian use in the late twentieth century arguably served to amplify the power of organisations, because the majority of communication remained either one-way, through static web pages, or between individuals or small groups of individuals using email. This dynamic has been upended in the twenty-first century by the ‘everyway’ communication of social media. Consumers now rival and often surpass organisations in brand-related content creation. Moreover, the increasingly cheap and ubiquitous technologies of the smart phone have proven ideally suited to accelerate the global spread of social media, especially since the inclusion of high-quality cameras became standard.

Despite the disruption that it has already wrought, social media is still in its infancy, just as the Internet itself is still in its infancy. Moreover, despite its infancy, the highly unpredictable nature of social media has meant that we have already witnessed major business failures on the part of apparently successful players. For example, in 2005 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp reportedly paid US$580 million for Facebook’s main competitor, MySpace. In 2011, News Corp quietly on sold the company for around six per cent of the original purchase price. There are clear dangers in picking social media winners too soon, just as there are in picking them too late and after they have disrupted your industry and destroyed your business model. For brand managers, social media poses numerous challenges, including but by no means limited to: staying connected with brand consumers who appear to prefer staying connected with one another; engaging in social media contexts that are inherently hostile to corporate intrusion; balancing the ability to collect and mine data with growing data privacy concerns; determining how best to allocate resources across social media platforms; and protecting brand assets in the age of consumer-generated brand messaging and in the face of widespread brand piracy. These challenges also represent areas of focus for future brand management research.