Things Fall Apart: The Dynamics of Brand Audience Dissipation

Abstract

Much prior work illuminates how fans of a brand can contribute to the value enjoyed by other members of its audience, but little is known about any processes by which fans contribute to the dissipation of that audience. Using longitudinal data on America's Next Top Model, a serial brand, and conceptualizing brands as assemblages of heterogeneous components, this article examines how fans can contribute to the destabilization of a brand's identity and fuel the dissipation of audiences of which they have been members. This work suggests that explanations focusing on satiation, psychology, or semiotics are inadequate to account for dissipation in the audience for serial brands. Moreover, the perspective advanced here highlights how fans can create doppelgänger brand images and contribute to the co-destruction of serial brands they have avidly followed.

Conceptualizing the Value Co-Destruction Process for Service Systems: Literature Review and Synthesis

“…Value is measured by the system's ability to adapt to the environment [19]; thus, value being co-destructed may lead to different service systems fitting differentially into their environments, and for one service system, the interaction may co-create value-in-use, while for the other, it may cause value destruction-through-misuse [8]. For example, this was what happened with audience dissipation in relation to the America's Next Top Model show [32], where the self-branding efforts of the participants of the television show resulted in contradictions in perceived value by the television viewers. Contradictions in value co-creation outcomes can be interpreted from findings and discussions of some reviewed articles [51,65,66] and a duality in value co-formation has been recognized [8,32,66].…”

“…For example, this was what happened with audience dissipation in relation to the America's Next Top Model show [32], where the self-branding efforts of the participants of the television show resulted in contradictions in perceived value by the television viewers. Contradictions in value co-creation outcomes can be interpreted from findings and discussions of some reviewed articles [51,65,66] and a duality in value co-formation has been recognized [8,32,66]. For instance, football hooliganism could be converted into commercial opportunities, achieving value co-creative outcomes from value codestructive process attempts [66].…”

Brand selfies: consumer experiences and marketplace conversations

“…Following this logic, we theorise a brand selfie as an assemblage that comprises content or material elements, specifically the person, the brand (the product or the logo), the surroundings in which the selfie is taken, and the technologies of distribution that allow the selfie to be shared. As a collective mainstream Web 2.0-enabled phenomenon, the selfie further contributes to the understanding of brands as social assemblages (Parmentier and Fisher, 2015 The concepts of territorialisation and de-territorialisation (DeLanda, 2006) help explore the stabilising/consolidating and destabilising/dissolving (respectively) processes of the brand selfie as an assemblage. Territorialisation is the process that defines or sharpens the spatial boundaries of material territory of the brand (i.e.…”

Market system dynamics

“…To theorize these multi-level relationships, Market system dynamics researchers have routinely drawn on actor-network theory (Giesler, 2012), assemblage theory (Canniford and Shankar, 2013;Parmentier and Fischer, 2015), institutional theory (Dolbec and Fischer, 2015;Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015;Humphreys, 2010a, …”

“…This long commitment of marketing researchers to substantive metaphysic has led to a wealth of scholarship treating marketplace reality as composed of stable material substances that only change their qualities and a paucity of knowledge on process and change (Siebert and Giesler, 2012). To address this variance bias, research in the Market system dynamics tradition embraces a decidedly dynamic ontological view by problematizing the boundaries between market systems, marketplace actors and time and by addressing questions about how and why markets and their associated actors, institutions and meanings emerge (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015;Giesler, 2012;Giesler and Veresiu, 2014;Humphreys 2010a;Martin and Schouten, 2014;Press and Arnould, 2011;Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013), evolve (Giesler, 2008;Vikas et al, 2015) or terminate (Parmentier and Fischer, 2015), often but not exclusively using longitudinal data.…”