A sociosemiotic approach to consumer engagement in user-generated advertising

ABSTRACT

User-generated advertising (UGA) has been booming over the past few years as marketers have been actively seeking to enhance consumer engagement. Yet, our understanding of the implications, the importance and the potential of UGA from a cultural branding point of view remains limited. This study furnishes the conceptual model of consumer cultural engagement in order to appreciate in a more nuanced manner than afforded by consumer sentiment analyses how UGA contributes to fleshing out co-creatively a brand vision. To this end, a sociosemiotic approach is pursued by dimensionalizing the cultural resources employed in UGA along the interlocking layers of text/register/domain in a cline of instantiation. The conceptual model is exemplified by recourse to a UGA corpus from the 10th and final wave of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl promo mechanism, undergirded by a mixed methods research design that features a grounded theoretical procedure, facilitated by quantitative analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• user-generated advertising
• cultural branding
• brand communications
• social semiotics
• grounded theory

Notes on contributor

George Rossolatos (MSc, MBA, PhD) is an academic researcher, marketing practitioner and the editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics (Department of English, Kassel University, Germany). Major publications include the Handbook of Brand Semiotics (2015; ed. and coauthor), Semiotics of Popular Culture (2015), Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical |Semiotics (2012, 2014), //rhetor.dixit//: Understanding Ad Texts’ Rhetorical Structure for Differential Figurative Advantage (2013), Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research (2012), Interactive Advertising: Dynamic Communication in the Information Age (2002; ed. and coauthor), plus numerous articles in trade and academic journals. His research interests focus on consumer cultural research, new media and branding/advertising. Full CV is downloadable from http://bit.ly/1cnUnVT.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.