Consumer mischief as playful resistance to marketing in Twitter hashtag hijacking

Abstract: While both brand advocacy and protest have long been theorised as key facets in consumers' behaviour, we submit that in the participatory culture of social media, where consumers are free to create and publish their own content, the mischievous play has also become an inevitable form of online culture that brands must deal with. Drawing from Caillois' sociology of play and the cultural power model, we explore how consumers may playfully hijack brands' User‐Generated‐Content (UGC) hashtag campaigns. Based on a non‐participatory netnography, we observed consumers' tweets to unpack their playfulness in responding to brands' marketing communication messages on Twitter and then theorised how consumers use mischief as a form of resistance against marketing practice rather than brands themselves

Imagining responsible marketing in the digital economy

The  proliferation  of  digital  technologies  has  become  one  of  the  key  drivers  of  social and economic growth in the past few decades. While there are bound to be measurable benefits for productivity and efficiency for both corporations and consumers  as  new  markets  and  processes  are  introduced,  limited  attention  has  been  paid  to  business  responsibilities  in  the  digital  economy  (Grigore  et  al.,  2017, 2018). [Opening paragraph]</p