道德企業的臉書粉絲團：社群對話與意義行銷 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國⽴立政治⼤大學國際傳播英語碩⼠士學位學程 International Master’s Program in International Communication Studies College of Communication National Chengchi University 碩⼠士論⽂文. 立. Master’s 政治Thesis. 大. ‧ 國. 學. 道德企業的臉書粉絲團：社群對話與意義⾏行銷. ‧. n. al. er. io. sit. y. Nat. Facebook Followers of Ethical Companies: Community Conversations and Meaningful Marketing. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. Student: Cara Elizabeth Busch 丁莉安 Advisor: Professor Sumei Wang 王淑美教授. 中華民國⼀一○四年五⽉月 May 2015 i .

(2) 道德企業的臉書粉絲團：社群對話與意義⾏行銷 Facebook Followers of Ethical Companies: Community Conversations and Meaningful Marketing. 研究⽣生：丁莉安 Student: Cara Elizabeth Busch 指導教授：王淑美教授 Advisor: Professor Sumei Wang. 學國⽴立政治⼤大學. ‧. io. y. 碩⼠士論⽂文. sit. Nat. 國際傳播英語碩⼠士學位學程. er. ‧ 國. 立. 政治大. al. n. iv. n the C h SubmittedU to Thesis engchi International Master’s Program in International Communication Studies National Chengchi University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. 中華民國⼀一○四年五⽉月 May 2015 ii .

(3) International Master’s Program in International Communication Studies College of Communication National Chengchi University 國⽴立政治⼤大學國際傳播英語碩⼠士學位學程 Master’s Thesis 碩⼠士論⽂文 Thesis Title (論⽂文名稱): Facebook Followers of Ethical Companies: Community Conversations and Meaningful Marketing 社群對話與意義⾏行銷. 學. ‧ 國. 立. 治政大道德企業的臉書粉絲團：. Name (姓名): Cara Elizabeth Busch 丁莉安. ‧. y. Nat. This hereby certifies that this master’s thesis has successfully passed the final defense.. er. io. sit. 茲證明本碩⼠士論⽂文業經⼜⼝口試委員審查通過. n. al. Advisor (指導教授). ni C hChengchi University National U engchi (國⽴立政治⼤大學). v. _____________________. Committee Member (⼜⼝口試委員). National Chengchi University (國⽴立政治⼤大學). _____________________. Committee Member (⼜⼝口試委員). Chinese Culture University (中國⽂文化⼤大學). _____________________. Director of IMICS (系所主任). _____________________ Date (⽇日期): _____________________ i .

(4) Abstract Fair Trade is for more than just coffee: Oliberté and prAna sell clothing, shoes, and accessories. Corporate social responsibility now takes the shape of business models. For each item sold, TOMS and Warby Parker give an item to someone in need. The present study takes a closer look at what is happening on these four brands’ Facebook pages with the focus on user-generated contributions. Observation of those pages during the 2014 American holiday shopping season identifies what people are posting. Depth interviews with active Facebook followers provide insight as to why people are posting about these companies and how they came to be brand advocates.. 政治大. The results indicate that though there are plenty of discussions about products,. 立. Facebook brand pages are not merely advertising channels. They are tools that the. ‧ 國. 學. greater ethical consumption community uses to strengthen and expand its values-. ‧. based groups of followers. People also choose Facebook over face-to-face conversation. y. Nat. to start tough conversations about consumer and political issues within their own. er. io. sit. networks because it is easier to present controversial ideas. The informants, regardless of voting frequency, reported being skeptical of government and large organizations.. al. n. iv n C Yet, they have faith in capitalism’s to carry out good around the world, and h eability ngchi U. they are an active audience for meaningful marketing. Finally, informants reported hating shopping. Yet, they invested time checking corporate websites, reading literature written by a brand’s founder, and sharing information about companies on Facebook. Websites and social media are essential to the shopping process today because they are spaces where consumers learn about and share brand stories.. Keywords: consumer culture theory, corporate social responsibility, digital ethnography, ethical consumption, Facebook, Fair Trade, marketing, social media i .

(5) Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Sumei Wang for her guidance, insight, and patience during my two courses with her and throughout the thesiswriting process. I am also incredibly grateful to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education via Boston’s Taipei Economic and Cultural Office for the scholarships that have made studying Chinese and pursuing a master’s degree possible. I would also like to express gratitude to IMICS. The professors, the department staff, and my peers have all shaped my graduate experience into something both educationally and personally rewarding. Furthermore, I am thankful to the IMPIS program’s professors and. 政治大. students. The courses that I took in globalization and human rights provided the burst. 立. of inspiration that I needed to begin forming my thesis topic. I would also like to. ‧ 國. 學. thank my family near but mostly far for their encouragement and interest in my. ‧. pursuits over the years. Last but not least, I am particularly thankful for my husband’s. y. sit. io. n. al. er. thesis.. Nat. support throughout our time together in Taiwan and his assistance proofreading this. Ch. engchi. ii . i Un. v.

(6) Table of Contents ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Inspiration and Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Background of Companies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. 政治大. 2.1 Corporate Social Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. 立. 2.2 Ethical Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. ‧ 國. 學. 2.3 Cause-Related Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. ‧. 2.4 Consumer Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13. y. Nat. 2.5 Marketing: Mass Media versus Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17. er. io. sit. 2.6 Social Media Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS . . . . . . . . . 23. al. n. iv n C 3.1 Research Questionsh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . U e n g c h i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3.2 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24. CHAPTER FOUR: SETTING THE ON-SCREEN SCENE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.1 Basics of the Four Brand Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 4.2 Five Categories of Ethical Brands’ Facebook Posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 CHAPTER FIVE: CONSUMER CONSIDERATION AND CITIZEN EVALUATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 5.1 Being Citizen Consumers: Quality versus Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 CHAPTER SIX: CAUSE-RELATED MARKETING ON FACEBOOK . . . . . . 66 iii .

(7) 6.1 User-Generated Content: Sharing Selfies and Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 6.2 Being Heard by Some but Not Always Acknowledged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 CHAPTER SEVEN: COMMUNITIES BEYOND SHOPPING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 7.1 Communities of Values and Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 7.2 Citizens of Earth: Global Mindsets and World Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 CHAPTER EIGHT: DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 8.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 8.2 Practical Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 8.3 Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112. 政治大. BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115. 立. APPENDICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124. ‧ 國. 學. Appendix A: Additional Informant Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124. ‧. Appendix B: Consent Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125. y. Nat. Appendix C: List of Interview Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127. n. al. er. io. sit. Appendix D: Transcript Excerpt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129. Ch. engchi. iv . i Un. v.

(8) List of Tables Table 1. Summary of Informants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Table 2. Breakdown of Most Pressing Ethical Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. v . i Un. v.

(9) List of Figures Figure 1. Kleenex’s original Facebook post from 5 November 2014 and two responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Figure 2. Google Books Ngram result for “human rights” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Figure 3. Oliberté’s profile and cover photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Figure 4. prAna’s profile and cover photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Figure 5. TOMS’s profile and cover photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Figure 6. Warby Parker’s profile and cover photos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Figure 7. The “About” sections of each brand’s Facebook page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34. 政治大. Figure 8. Core company ethics posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34. 立. Figure 9. Featured product posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35. ‧ 國. 學. Figure 10. Sales promotion posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37. ‧. Figure 11. Related interest and cause posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38. y. Nat. Figure 12. Partnership and collaboration posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40. er. io. sit. Figure 13. Self-referential posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Figure 14. Other social media outlet posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42. al. n. iv n C Figure 15. Company culture posts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 h e. .n. .g. . c. . h. . i. . U Figure 16. Group interaction on Warby Parker’s post from Figure 15 . . . . . . . . . . . 45. Figure 17. Praise for products and services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Figure 18. Focusing on the product, not the cause . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Figure 19. Widespread website problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Figure 20. Identifying with ethical causes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Figure 21. Skepticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Figure 22. User photos of products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Figure 23. Brand information with commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 vi .

(10) Figure 24. Paying it forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Figure 25. Explicit support of business model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Figure 26. Praise for company values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Figure 27. Businesses promoting businesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Figure 28. Cross-brand humanitarian concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. vii . i Un. v.

(11) Chapter One: Introduction Inspiration and Interest After seeing the milk brand’s Twitter handle on the carton, Thurlow (2013) questioned why he should want to follow his milk on Twitter, yet found out that over 200,000 people had already done just that. Before reading his article, my interest in social media marketing began similarly. I had to visit Kleenex’s Facebook page for a public relations assignment and was intrigued not just by the number of followers they had (over 300,000), but also by the user-generated content they were soliciting. Some were logical, such as when Kleenex asked for people’s home remedies for allergies.. 政治大. Others were more surprising. For Halloween, people posted photos of seasonal crafts. 立. that used tissues. Around the time of New York fashion week in 2014, Kleenex put. ‧ 國. 學. out a call for fall outfits they could match with a Kleenex Brand Slim Pack. Dozens of. ‧. followers complied, getting ‘likes’ and comments from Kleenex and other users. y. Nat. (Figure 1). Although I myself have had a Facebook account since 2005, I produce very. er. io. sit. little content of my own, and I usually only ‘like’ things when friends send Facebook requests for me to do so. Personally, I have never felt compelled to reach out to a. al. n. iv n C brand on social media. Yet, being h einterested n g c hin ithisUphenomenon, I wanted to. research the consumer end of these marketing conversations. I sought to find the patterns in what Facebook followers of brands were doing and why they were doing so.. Figure 1. Kleenex’s original Facebook post from 5 November 2014 and two responses 1 . .

(12) My personal lack of participation on brands’ Facebook pages should not be confused with contempt, but there are those who lash out against social media marketing. An online article entitled “Brands Are Not Your Friends” published by Gawker Media represents this mindset. The author slams the way companies are using social media, saying, “the prevailing online marketing strategy for brands in 2015 is to blend in with the children, become just another bae to fave and retweet” (Biddle, 2015, par. 3). He continues to claim that corporations “exist solely to distract, deceive, and manipulate us out of money – and in the case of Coca Cola, freely dispense diabetes and obesity” (par. 11). The logical end to this argument seems to be. 政治大. that organizations of people (corporations) are always evil, and it is every person for. 立. herself out there in the cruel world. I find this opinion to be indefensible and think. ‧ 國. 學. that Biddle does not give social media users enough credit. When forming the idea for. ‧. this thesis, I did not think people think that brands are their friends per se, but I. io. er. role social media has in this type relationship.. sit. y. Nat. wanted to find out how people actually do feel about their favorite brands and what. I knew I needed to narrow the focus of my study in some way. A recent trend I. al. n. iv n C had noticed were for-profit companies made giving back central to their brand h e n that gchi U identity. They seemed similar to Fair Trade companies, but they went about their ethical missions in different ways. I was thinking about this at the same time I was. doing a lot of reading about human rights and how commonplace human rights news and rhetoric has become. A Google Books Ngram Viewer result, as seen in Figure 2, shows a massive spike from 1980 to 2000 in the percentage of literature that includes the term “human rights” (Michel et al., 2011). Human rights went from being a governmental concern to something that now exists as an everyday dialogue, with NGOs warning about the dangers of globalization and encouraging the expansion of 2 .

(13) fair trade (Hafner-Burton, 2009). Today, a government must at least pretend to have human rights goals in order to be seen as legitimate by the international community (Donnelly, 2007), and we are seeing increased expectations for businesses as well. We should pay attention to this because there is evidence to support the possibility of major corporations extending more influence in the places they operate than the local governments (Anderson, 2012). They can act more swiftly and with greater precision than bureaucracies. Plus, the cumulative effect of smaller businesses with humanitarian concerns is nothing to ignore either.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. io. sit. y. Nat. n. al. er. Figure 2. Google Books Ngram result for “human rights” (Source: http://books.google.com/ngrams). Ch. engchi. i Un. v. This paper uses ethnographic methods to examine the marketing norms of the following four relatively young companies that have made humanitarian aid one of their core missions: Oliberté, prAna, TOMS, and Warby Parker. Observation of their Facebook accounts reveal that product quality is still important to consumers, but the Facebook community is centered on shared values. Depth interviews with their active Facebook followers demonstrate a global mindset that triggers a search for smaller, transparent companies driven by moral missions.. 3 .

(14) Background of Companies The companies’ websites provide their histories, missions, and insights into their business models. We can sort them into two groups. The first includes TOMS and Warby Parker, which both use a buy-one-give-one model. In 2006, TOMS was the first company to establish the buy-one-give-one model, and it uses the slogan one for one in its marketing material (Joyner, 2014). They began selling only footwear, but they now also offer eyewear, coffee, and accessories. Warby Parker followed TOMS’s lead when it opened for business in 2010, but its success is likely due to its disruptive business model that produces eyewear independent of the “single company that has. 政治大. been able to keep prices artificially high while reaping huge profits from consumers. 立. expensive than traditional brands in the United States.. 學. ‧ 國. who have no other options” (par. 3). Warby Parker eyewear is considerably less. ‧. For every product a customer purchases, TOMS donates a similar item to. y. Nat. someone in need. They started practicing this very literally with shoes. For each pair. er. io. sit. of shoes someone purchased, TOMS would give a pair away. The concept has since become more abstract with eyewear purchases helping fund prescription glasses and. al. n. iv n C sight-saving medical treatments.hOther products support e n g c h i U TOMS’s initiatives related to improved access to water and birth support in developing countries. Warby Parker’s eyewear donations do not go directly into the hands of people who need them. Instead, they donate money to a nonprofit, which buys an equal number of glasses (at a wholesale rate) to pairs Warby Parker has sold. This nonprofit then trains people living in developing countries to prescribe and sell glasses to people in their communities. These salespeople then sell the donated glasses at an affordable rate to the end consumer. Warby Parker justifies this method of donation because by simply giving glasses to the end consumer themselves, they would run the risk of creating an 4 .

(15) unsustainable dependency. Instead, they are promoting better eyesight and small businesses around the world. The other two companies, prAna and Oliberté, are linked by their Fair Trade practices. The 22-year-old prAna “helped pioneer Fair Trade Certified apparel and became the first major company in North America to produce and market Fair-Trade Certified styles” (par. 4). Oliberté became “the world’s first Fair Trade Certified™ footwear manufacturing factory” (par. 2) in September 2013 after four years of smaller-scale production that had not yet earned Fair Trade certification. Now, fairly treated employees make all Oliberté’s shoes, which have a lifetime guarantee, at their. 政治大. factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. One important note to make about prAna is that. 立. although Fair Trade is mentioned a few times on the Our Story page of their website,. ‧ 國. 學. only nine Fair Trade Certified items were available for purchase on 13 November. ‧. 2014. The present study will analyze the ways in which humanitarian rhetoric is being. y. sit. io. n. al. er. their goals.. Nat. used by for-profit companies and their Facebook fans, not necessarily the scope of. Ch. engchi. 5 . i Un. v.

(16) Chapter Two: Literature Review Corporate Social Responsibility These brands’ actions, messages, and goals are nestled in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a tradition that has been heavily practiced and researched. In a 2012 paper that reviewed 181 articles on CSR (Aguinis & Glavas), the authors found that CSR research is very fragmented because almost all studies chose one level of analysis and applied different theories. To address the knowledge gaps that Aguinis and Glavas labeled the “microfoundations of CSR,” this study pursues the foundations “that are based on individual action and interactions” (p. 956).. 立. 政治大. Before going on, I need to define CSR; however, Dahlsrud (2008) found 37. ‧ 國. 學. disparate definitions used between 1980 and 2003. He did find some similarities,. ‧. though. At least 80 percent of the definitions contained the non-mutually exclusive. y. Nat. dimensions of responsibility toward stakeholders, social causes, economic issues, and. er. io. sit. the voluntariness of their actions. Definitions including an environmental aspect were present but less common. For the sake of clarity, I will use what Dahlsrud found to be. al. n. iv n C the most frequently used definition, by the Commission of the European h easnwritten gchi U Communities in 2001: “A concept whereby companies integrate social and. environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis” (p. 7). With Oliberté’s outspokenness about Fair Trade, prAna’s sustainability goals, TOMS’s motto being one for one, and Warby Parker’s buy a pair, give a pair mission, these companies’ CSR activities are the core of their identities. More recently, Matten and Moon (2008) discovered that when we talk about CSR, especially in the United States, we usually mean explicit CSR. If a company is 6 .

(17) acting perfectly responsibly but not communicating this or making it part of their brand identity, then that is implicit – and often goes unnoticed. Explicit CSR has always been favored in the United States, and it is becoming more popular in Europe. Just as consumer demand can change what products come into fashion, so can it alter the ways in which companies behave and communicate their behavior. The brands that I am studying seem to be part of the next wave of CSR, where it is so explicit that the brand could not exist without it. This can also be termed the enlightened selfinterest model of CSR, as described by Cadbury (2006), where brands differentiate themselves from others in the market through their CSR. Companies like this do not. 政治大. see CSR as having the social responsibility simply to follow the law but instead. 立. aggressively give back. This runs counter to what Campbell (2007) theorized when. ‧ 國. 學. looking for why corporations behave responsibly. He believed that how healthy a. ‧. corporation is in relation to the economy and how much competition the corporation. y. Nat. faces is related to the chance that it will engage in CSR. Yet, this is devoid of the. er. io. sit. ethical, emotional, and political elements highlighted by other scholars. So, why has CSR come to the forefront of so many consumers’ and company. al. n. iv n C leaders’ minds? In their book, Globalizing (2011), Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, h e n gResponsibility chi U and Malpass say that it is because alternative forms of political participation have. popped up alongside traditional ones, such as voting in public elections. They suggest that ethical consumption, which is dependent on CSR-driven companies, is best conceptualized as a political trend, not just the market adapting to changing consumer demand. This study examines whether there are additional reasons consumers are interested in supporting companies with such clear CSR ambitions. Finally, we come to another important aspect of CSR, the one that is at the core of my research: communication. First, there are different aspects of CSR that a 7 .

(18) brand must communicate. They have to express their commitment to the cause, show how their actions are making an impact, prove that they have good motives, and demonstrate that their cause is an appropriate fit for the company (Du, Bhattacharya, & Sen, 2010). These authors also elaborate on the pros and cons of corporate social media use. Consumers can rave about a brand, which is free publicity. However, they are also free to rant, which can be a surprise attack. This is frustrating whether or not the rant’s issues are based in truth. Lindgreen and Swaen (2010) add to this by saying that communicating CSR initiatives can also backfire if stakeholders are skeptical of the results or intentions. This can be particularly damaging when the company’s. 政治大. whole identity is built around being socially responsible. Other common mistakes that. 立. companies make when taking on CSR strategies are as follows: having an incomplete. ‧ 國. 學. vision, lacking management involvement, or being short of participation from. ‧. employees and the surrounding community (Chawak & Dutta, 2014). Thus, there are. y. Nat. multiple dimensions of CSR that a company needs to communicate in order for it to. er. io. sit. be successful. Ward and Wylie (2014) found that social media allow consumers and other stakeholders to affect a company’s CSR choices and goals, and they suggest that. al. n. iv n C marketers encourage this behavior use social media to deepen the relationship. A h eand ngchi U preliminary observation of Oliberté, prAna, TOMS, and Warby Parker’s Facebook. pages showed that their marketing teams were operating accordingly by posting about different dimensions of CSR, eliciting consumer participation, and continuing the conversations by replying to and ‘liking’ consumer posts, comments, and shares. Ethical Consumption The term ethical consumption is used in a number of the articles I reviewed (e.g. Goodman, 2010; Ponte & Richey, 2014), so I will use it here to describe the act of buying products that are perceived by the customer to have been ethically produced. 8 .

(19) It is sometimes casually referred to as voting with your dollars. This is not to be confused with the general term consumer ethics, which includes all points on the ethical spectrum and may or may not result in the purchase of an ethical product. When it comes to certain causes, even consumers who are sympathetic to an initiative and wish to make a difference may have trouble finding ways to do so in their daily lives (Evans, 2011). Ethical consumer products are opportunities for people to apply their morality on a daily basis. There is an ethical component to all products, but ethical consumption occurs when the brand is believed to have paid special attention to fair treatment of the environment and/or the workers who made the goods. There is another. 政治大. dimension of ethical consumption in which people boycott certain products or brands. 立. that they find to be reprehensibly unethical. My research focuses on consuming,. ‧ 國. 學. rather than abstaining, though I anticipated some informants talking about instances. ‧. where they have boycotted certain brands.. y. Nat. In Vitell’s (2003) comprehensive review of the consumer ethics research. er. io. sit. published between 1990 and 2003, he found a few factors that have consistently determined consumers’ levels of ethics in consumer decisions across multiple cultures.. al. n. iv n C These were 1) how actively or passively made her choice, 2) the h e n ga consumer chi U. perception of the production method’s legality, and 3) how much perceived harm there was to the seller. Furthermore, what types of ethical judgments people made sometimes had to do with demographics. Some more recent studies concentrate on the Millennial generation, which is particularly relevant today because they are a strong global market for ethical consumerism (Bucic, Harris, & Arli, 2012) and heavy users of social media. Bucic et al. found it useful to break Millennials down into three subgroups: 1) reserved social conscience, who were very aware of the benefits and potential inconvenience of ethical consumerism, 2) indifferents, who lacked strong views, and 3) 9 .

(20) the committed, who were very aware of the benefits of ethical consumerism and did not think that inconvenience was an excuse when making ethical consumer choices. Given the increase of social media use and ethical consumption across all generations, better understanding how people in these categories communicate and consume will be an important contribution to the literature. The ethical themes related to consumerism may be environmental sustainability, human conditions, or a combination of both. In many cases, people are willing to pay more for ethically sound products, especially those related to humanitarian aid (Tully & Winer, 2014). Still, there remains a gap between ethical. 政治大. awareness and ethical consumption. Even those like the reserved social conscience cohort,. 立. who ideologically support purchasing products that have a Fair Trade label or that. ‧ 國. 學. donate to a humanitarian cause, may ultimately choose to ignore their ethics because. ‧. of other factors such as price sensitivity, cynicism, or loyalty to another brand. In fact,. y. Nat. when ethics were at the forefront of a brand’s image, the respondents in one study. er. io. sit. assumed that this was to compensate for the product’s relatively low quality (Bray, Johns, & Kilburn, 2011). Thus, I am interested in discovering how consumers of the. al. n. iv n C four brands in this study evaluate the quality of theUcompanies’ products and customer he ngchi service versus their ethics. Cause-Related Marketing I will move my focus to the cause-related marketing systems I mentioned earlier: the buy-one-give-one model and Fair Trade. Ethical consumerism and causerelated marketing are difficult to separate. Indeed, cause-related marketing would be of little use without the advent of ethical consumerism. Barnett et al. (2011) termed this relatively recent spike of spreading the word and significance of shared responsibility for the places that produce goods that are consumed locally Fairtrade 10 .

(21) urbanism. Twenty-five years ago, however, cause-related marketing was a novelty (Marquis & Park, 2014). It has since become “the most common form of philanthropy” (Peloza & Shang, 2011 p. 120). Traditional forms of cause-related marketing use a purchase-contribution link, in which a percentage of sales is donated to a cause, usually to an established non-profit organization (Ponte & Richey, 2014). TOMS added their own twist on this by pioneering the buy-one-give-one model. Warby Parker’s donating scheme is a combination of purchase-contribution and buyone-give-one. They use “buy-a-pair, give-a-pair” language on their website and in their podcast advertisements, but they do not donate their own glasses. As mentioned. 政治大. earlier, they donate the monetary equivalent of a pair of glasses to a separate non-. 立. profit organization.. ‧ 國. 學. TOMS and Warby Parker’s success depend on what Gerodimos (2012) called. ‧. “a consumerist approach to citizenship” (p. 227). People want to help, and they need. y. Nat. to buy things. Buy-one-give-one is consumerism that feels like charity. As with any. er. io. sit. brand, customer loyalty is essential. At least the appearance of customer loyalty is apparent on TOMS’s Facebook page. As of February 2015, TOMS had over 3. al. n. iv n C million likes – about the same ashNike Women. A U e n g c h i single Facebook post of TOMS can get over ten thousand likes. Marquis and Park (2014) suggest that companies like TOMS and Warby Parker currently have some novelty factor that sets them apart in the market, but this will wear off with more companies adopting the buy-one-give-one model. Nevertheless, they have found this model to be a successful form of social entrepreneurship. Despite more companies adopting the model, buy-one-give-one is not universally praised. It has been criticized by some for contributing to the cycle of poverty, as opposed to addressing the causes of poverty by creating long-term solutions. This research will not evaluate the effect of this model on aid recipients, but 11 .

(22) instead how the Facebook followers of the four brands feel about buy-one-give-one and Fair Trade. Fair Trade does not offer separate aid. Instead, it is a business model that adequately compensates people on all levels of the supply chain, not just those at the top. The Fair Trade logo has become a visual marker indicating worker livelihood and transparency (Goodman, 2010). When the concept of Fair Trade certification was still in its infancy, it had to generate its own market by promoting the idea of social value in addition to the product’s worth (Linton, Liou, & Shaw, 2004). Today, Fair Trade has a more established base of consumers. The identity of each brand as a. 政治大. whole is still important, and Fair Trade is not a substitute for quality. In a study of. 立. consumer choice and coffee (De Pelsmacker, Driesen, & Rayp, 2005), brand was the. ‧ 國. 學. most significant feature of the product. Fair Trade is just one aspect of a brand. One. ‧. ongoing issue with Fair Trade is that consumers cannot tell whether the certification. y. Nat. standards are being honored (Castaldo, Perrini, Misani, & Tencati, 2009). This is. er. io. sit. where social media and other communication becomes key. In the case of prAna and other companies that sell a combination of products that come with and without Fair. al. n. iv n C Trade certification, the issue becomes complicated because, even though Fair h e nmore gchi U Trade is a part of their overall brand identity, some of their products are not Fair Trade. Socially responsible brands have to develop a trusting relationship between themselves and the consumer to show that the company is being true to its values. (Castaldo et al., 2009). Therefore, a successful Fair Trade brand today must cultivate trust as part of its marketing plan. A Fair Trade label alone is not enough. What TOMS, Warby Parker, prAna, and Oliberté have in common is that their cause-related marketing schemes are central and permanent features of their respective brands. Cause-related marketing suggests that the world has many 12 .

(23) problems, but consumers can be the solution as long as they vote with their values and their dollars. In order for buy-one-give-one and Fair Trade brands to be successful, they need to be aligned with their consumers’ identities and value systems (Joyner, 2014). Therefore, I will explore how the brands’ Facebook followers find their ethics embedded in the brand’s products and ideas. Consumer Identity This brings us to the issue of consumer identity, which falls under consumer culture theory (CCT). In brief, “CCT explores the heterogeneous distribution of meanings and the multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings that exist within the. 政治大. broader sociohistoric frame of globalization and capitalism” (Arnould & Thompson,. 立. 2005, p. 869). Therefore, it suggests that there is social meaning in the dynamic. ‧ 國. 學. between social resources and material resources. It is also the network of individuals,. ‧. groups, products, and identities on the consumer and commercial sides, all of which. y. Nat. culminate in the formation of our environment. An individual has a multitude of. er. io. sit. identities that are activated in different situations: daughter, doctor, tennis player, vacationer, environmentalist, caretaker, etc. Brands appeal to these various. al. n. iv n C characteristics through identity h marketing. For example, e n g c h i U Whole Foods Market appeals to the politically motivated consumer who wants to eat better. In one of many studies of Whole Foods and other ethical food brands, Johnston and Szabo (2011) found that although the customers they interviewed were aligned with Whole Foods’s values, they shopped there because it was a wonderful experience. Still, the customers were reflexive and made choices based on more than their own interest. How and to what degree it was present varied from individual to individual, signaling that multiple identities were at play even within a shopping experience at one store. Because of this multiplicity, identity marketing can backfire when messages are so obviously 13 .

(24) appealing to an identity that it is understood as challenging free expression or agency (Bhattacharjee, Berger, & Menon, 2014). This builds upon Miller’s (2005) assertion that we cannot extract the consumer from her personhood, and if we study consumption as an identity, we are missing how a person’s many identities are a part of it. Therefore, my research looks for a web of identities and how Facebook brand pages appeal to them. Ethical consumption is a unique area of marketing research because it is inherently sociopolitical, and many people believe that the rate of consumption in wealthy places is unsustainable (Newholm & Shaw, 2007). I take these authors’. 政治大. suggestions for future research by examining the informal consumer communities. 立. (Facebook brand pages) “within which the practices of ethical consumption are. ‧ 國. 學. negotiated and developed,” (p. 264). Some studies have tried to break down. ‧. consumers into different groups. For example, Niinimäki (2010) labeled a subgroup of. y. Nat. ethical consumers ethical hardliners, who made ideology the most important factor when. er. io. sit. deciding what to purchase. This was a marginal group, however, with most people prioritizing other aspects of items they might buy, such as quality, aesthetics, and. al. n. iv n C price. Another study found thathsocial motivators provoked ethical purchasing more engchi U than personal ideology, suggesting that consumers as a whole may become more socially conscious. In a society of consumers, consumer identity can, at times, be at the forefront of one’s self-image. Bauman (2013) believes this is because consumers have become commodities themselves and what people consume is more important than what they produce. Where Bauman may differ from other authors I have cited (e.g. Barnett et al.), is that he believes people are foremost consumers, with citizenship being a faraway second. If this was the case, ethical consumerism may hardly exist at all. 14 .

(25) Whether or not it is true, there are some sectors of society that seem to believe that consumerism makes citizenship difficult. One study of the dumpster diving community in New Zealand (Fernandez, Brittain, & Bennett, 2011), for instance, found that some members took on a “hero identity” that set them apart from mainstream consumers. Yet, their practice was totally dependent on the excess created by the consuming majority. Another study supports this narrativization of consumer identity. Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler (2010) called this the “moral protagonist myth,” where a consumer is at the center of her ethics-driven story. The present study explores how social media drive these stories as they go from being individual ones to a collective.. 立. 政治大. Papaoikonomou, Valverde, and Ryan (2012) have also studied how ethical. ‧ 國. 學. consumers behave in groups, after finding that much of the previous research focused. ‧. on the individual. By focusing on a responsible consumption group, they discovered. y. Nat. more evidence supporting ethical consumption as a way for people to express their. er. io. sit. ethical selves, saying, “members see the cooperative as a space where they can express their real ethical self. In other words, they see their participation as a means of. al. n. iv n C constructing their self-identity” h (p. 23). Additionally, e n g c h i U the authors found that socializing with the group changed individual member’s ideas, thoughts, and actions, which they hypothesize could lead to the ethicalization of mainstream products in the future. Actually, this has been happening since before their article was published. McDonald et al. (2007) wrote about how the national healthcare system in the United Kingdom was ethicalized through media coverage of medical shortages, sending the message that people should be thinking of others and only using the healthcare system when they really need to. My research focuses on this expansion of ethical products into clothing and accessories. 15 .

(26) Lifestyle branding is one way to reach a certain consumer identity. This has become more popular in the 21st century with the rise of customization and selfexpression (Chernev, Hamilton, & Gal, 2011). It is a more extreme type of identity marketing, one that often has a visionary leader, much like TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie. Media consumption is now part of the lifestyle as well with people choosing what media they want to consume. This is especially the case with Facebook brand pages. When users decide to follow a brand on Facebook, their friends can see that they have made this choice. Furthermore, the brand’s posts begin to appear on their feed, sandwiched between friends and family’s. The more that users interact with. 政治大. these brand posts, the more likely future brand posts will continue to appear on their. 立. news feeds. This is like the inverse of fast-forwarding through the commercials when. ‧ 國. 學. watching a recorded TV program. One possible reason Facebook users choose to. ‧. follow ethical brands is because of the gratification they get from supporting a. y. Nat. company that is giving something back. This was a finding in Jefferess’s (2012) study. er. io. sit. of Me to We, a Canadian company that sells ethical items and services, and donates half its profits to charity. The real benefactors were the North American volunteers,. al. n. iv n C who became happier by giving h back. By participating e n g c h i U in an online community, the Facebook user of the brands I am studying does not necessarily need to give back. monetarily on a regular basis, but she has other ways to support and associate herself with the cause. Before concluding this section, I want to mention another study led by Papaoikonomou (Papaoikonomou, Ryan, & Valverde, 2011). They found that the three most prominent categorical trends from the past 20 years of ethical consumption research were “profiling the ethical consumer,” “modeling the ethical consumer,” and “understanding and exploring the ethical consumer” (pp. 199-200). A frequent 16 .

(27) conclusion was that ethical consumers act out of their own ethical authenticity and are less concerned about creating change. I will take one of their suggestions for future research, which is to explore how consumers create their identities through ethical associations and disassociations. Marketing: Mass Media versus Social Media Before talking about social media marketing specifically, I would like to reflect on how previous literature differentiates it from mass media advertising and how the mass media have changed over the past decade or so. With these changes have come more competition and challenges. First, advertising is not the leader of mass media or. 政治大. consumerism, so it is most successful when it works together with what else is out there. 立. (Hirschman & Thompson, 1997). Advertisers cannot assume that the audience will. ‧ 國. 學. dutifully watch commercial breaks as they would their favorite program. This is. ‧. especially the case when the advertising feels like spam (Rotfeld, 2006). Another. y. Nat. difficulty that Rotfeld points out as being one of the most pressing and ongoing. er. io. sit. challenges for mass media advertisers is the rapid increase of media options. The number of cable television stations continues to increase, and terrestrial radio faces. al. n. iv n C competition from satellite and Internet Even mass media have become h e n gpodcasting. chi U more niche, and the audience for each outlet has shrunk. Before the media landscape was like this, niche markets were usually reached with relationship marketing, which can be defined as “an integrated effort to identify, maintain, and build up a network with individual consumers and to continuously strengthen the network for the mutual benefit of both sides, through interactive, individualized, and value-added contacts over a long period of time,” (Shani & Chalasani, 1992, p. 34). In the past, this was usually done using databases; however, today, this definition overlaps nicely with the goals of social media marketing. This research explores what value Facebook users get 17 .

(28) by being active on brand pages and to what degree Facebook users feel like they are being heard by the company and fellow followers. The concept of being heard has become popular across different fields. For instance, studies have assessed how employees are being heard by managers (Burris, Detert, & Romney, 2013), whether student evaluations are being heard by higher education administrators (Blair & Valdez Noel, 2014), and to what degree disabled patients are being heard by the medical system (Järvikoski, Martin, Autti-Rämö, & Härkäpää, 2013). The idea of being head is especially relevant in social media because listening and responding serve as the foundation of socialness. Being heard is. 政治大. important to the ethical consumer groups because it contrasts convoluted political. 立. systems that often ignore the average person’s voice (Papaoikonomou et al., 2012).. ‧ 國. 學. The present study researches how consumers are being heard by brands and other. ‧. consumers. I look for evidence of this in Facebook behavior including the following:. y. Nat. brand ‘likes’ of user-generated contributions, detailed brand comments on user-. er. io. sit. generated contributions, and consumer-consumer comment discussions on brand posts. In interviews, I ask my informants why they post to brand pages in order to. al. n. iv n C evaluate the degree to which they and care about acknowledgement and h eexpect ngchi U feedback.. European companies have had to work their way around restrictive mass media advertising laws and therefore rely on different marketing channels. One example of an alternative, presented by Joachimsthaler and Aaker (1996) that is particularly relevant to this study, is the UK-based Body Shop. With the Body Shop’s brand identity fully encompassing the CSR trade not aid idea, it was an early example of how a brand can become internationally successful without using mass media to shape its brand identity. Instead, the Body Shop does the identity. Likewise, Facebook 18 .

(29) today is a place for brands to do their identities on a daily basis, not simply advertise. Users can consume the brand identity separate from the company’s products. Mass media have not disappeared. Even if online platforms, such as Hulu and Netflix, have changed the ways people watch television and movies, major networks and film studios are still producing incredible amounts of content. Meanwhile, social media have grown at an explosive rate, and media diets have changed enough for Smith (2009) to call it a revolution. This author highlights the increase of watching user-generated content and media related to our personal lives. Both of these are consumer-driven phenomena. In terms of future research, Smith suggests focusing on. 政治大. community building through social networks, so I talk to my informants about the. 立. degrees to which they see Facebook brand pages functioning as communities.. ‧ 國. 學. Just as social media have reshaped the media landscape by reconfiguring the. ‧. power between traditional journalism and citizen journalism (Quan-Haase & Young,. y. Nat. 2010), so has it restructured marketing. Companies give their products to high-profile. er. io. sit. bloggers and vloggers to review, for example. Quan-Haase and Young also note that traditional media outlets have been mimicking social media ones. For instance, all. al. n. iv n C major newspapers have blogs on television networks use YouTube, and htheir e nwebsites, gchi U major network programs report on and mimic social media memes. Thus, the line between social media and mass media can get blurry. There are specific reasons people use social media, though. A primary one is to stay connected with friends and peers (Quan-Haase & Young, 2010). Additionally, people try to get information about things their peers are doing and find news stories relevant to them. In my study, I look at what users are sharing related to brands and find out how these contributions, unique to social media, add to a sense of community on brand pages.. 19 .

(30) Social Media Marketing Traditional marketing remains important, but social media marketing is now essential. Organizations that do not use social media will get left behind (Chary, 2014). Social media marketing is a subset of interactive marketing (IM), which encourages consumers to reach out to companies. Ten years ago, IM was already the fastest growing sector of marketing with brands focusing their attention to online advertising, email marketing, and online promotions (Barwise & Farley, 2005). Accordingly, a review of the last 20 years of Internet marketing research (Pomirleanu, Schibrowsky, Peltier, & Nill, 2013) showed a strong trend in literature about Internet. 政治大. strategy and social media. These authors’ primary suggestion for future research was. 立. “to observe what is happening in terms of internet usage and then research that area”. ‧ 國. 學. (p. 180). This study’s approach follows their recommendation by first observing the. ‧. Facebook brand pages and then enriching those findings with depth interviews.. y. Nat. If we believe that ethical consumption is one way a consumer pays heed to her. er. io. sit. conscience, then the marketing component is an extension of this moral behavior. Companies that use social media effectively have the opportunity to become part of. al. n. iv n C their consumers’ daily routines.h After all, half of Facebook users check their feeds at engchi U. least once a day (Duggan, 2013b). This is a significant number of people, with almost three-quarters of adults who use the Internet belonging to at least one social networking platform ("Social Networking Fact Sheet," 2014). Another way in which social media and marketing are conjoined is in storytelling. One of the most compelling things about social media is the dominance of user-generated narratives (Myers & Hamilton, 2014). Likewise, storytelling is at the core of Web 2.0 marketing, with strategists believing it to be essential to the long-term relationship between company and consumer (Franco, 2014). 20 .

(31) In order for these stories to be successful marketing techniques, they need to encourage participation. “Engagement is the key to social media” (Howard, Mangold, & Johnston, 2014, p. 658), and organizations can no longer treat marketing as a way of talking at consumers. Customers wish to be part of a conversation (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011), which is not just a company-customer relationship but also customer-customer (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). Customers add to the conversation by responding to company-generated content and by creating their own. Over half of Internet users are creators, meaning they post original images or videos on social media sites (Duggan, 2013a). Just as trust is important for the goals of. 政治大. cause-related marketing, users who engage with social media marketing also find trust. 立. essential (Greenberg, 2010). This includes companies trusting their social media. ‧ 國. 學. followers to interact with them publicly and their followers having faith in the. ‧. company to respond quickly, in some cases almost immediately (Howard et al., 2014).. y. Nat. This new landscape means companies have less control over brand image than they. er. io. sit. used to – to the extent that managing customer relationships has been compared to a game of pinball (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). While this may be a frustrating reality. al. n. iv n C for marketers, it is great for researchers can see the game being played on the h e n gwho chi U. public stage of social media. Hence, my research looks at both the ways brands are interacting with consumers and how consumers are having conversations among themselves. Ponte and Richey (2014) mentioned the importance of TOMS’s online community to the brand, pointing out that thousands of Facebook users have uploaded their own photos and videos to the page. These authors examined different aspects of a certain flavor of cause-related marketing they termed Brand Aid. This includes features such as international development, celebrity endorsement, and 21 .

(32) purchase-contribution links. They also concerned themselves with the differing degrees of Brand Aid campaign success. My research deepens this area of study by looking at the specifics of the user-generated contributions on buy-one-give-one and Fair Trade Facebook brand pages. Ponte and Richey were not the only authors in this review to use the term community. For example, brand community was used by Marzocchi, Morandin, and Bergami (2013) in research about an international gathering in Italy of a motorcycle brand. Olsson and Svenson (2012) used the same term, in addition to consumer community, to describe active users of a Swedish digital photography website and Facebook group. Papaoikonomou et al. (2012) focused on consumer communities that. 政治大. met offline to support responsible consumption. Community is an incredibly broad. 立. term, and the studies I have reviewed focused a few dimensions of behavior within. ‧ 國. 學. them (e.g. commitment, communication, loyalty). Whether these consumer. ‧. communities exist online or offline, they are built around interaction. Because the. y. Nat. present study grapples with the informants’ different conceptions of community, the. er. io. sit. observation and interviews focus on the ways in which companies and users communicate on Facebook brand pages, one online space of a brand communities,. al. n. iv n C rather than evaluating a certainhdefinition of community. e n g c h i U Informants were invited to talk about their lives online and offline and to discuss community as they understood it.. 22 .

(33) Chapter Three: Research Questions and Methods Research Questions Many of the studies cited in the previous sections responded to Miller’s 2005 call for new consumer research: “We await the kind of qualitative studies that could show whether the key consumer imperative retains continuity with older concerns for thrift” (p. 34). This study will add to others that have shown there is much more to a product than price. I also take Miller’s suggestion for approaching consumption research by delving into people’s daily lives and being observational, intrusive, and analytical. I do so by focusing on people’s daily digital lives and observing Facebook. 政治大. communications, asking informants pointed questions about their values, and then. 立. analyzing these two sets of results to find commonalities, contradictions, and. ‧ 國. 學. conclusions.. ‧. New consumer research tries to comprehend consumption in multiple senses,. y. Nat. not predict future behavior (Belk, 2005). The senses being explored in this analysis are. er. io. sit. as follows: the ways in which corporate social responsibility are being communicated and interacted with on Facebook brand pages, how ethical consumption and cause-. al. n. iv n C related marketing appeal to people’s as consumers and citizens, and what h e nidentities gchi U types of community involvement there are on Facebook brand pages. In the previous chapter, I mentioned my aim of looking at how ethical consumers gauge a company’s products and moral missions, including the overall business models. Previous studies have suggested a consumer belief that brands emphasize their ethics to compensate for low quality, but I suspect the consumers I am studying think differently. Therefore, my first research question is as follows: 1. Quality and ethics: How do Facebook followers evaluate the brand’s products from consumer and citizen standpoints? 23 .

(34) In my literature review, I also stated a few dimensions of communication I wish to explore. By examining what users are posting to brand pages, I can learn more about the narratives consumers are telling, and how they relate to the brand’s stories. Furthermore, I observe behaviors that constitute listening, and I interview informants to understand the level of importance consumers give to being heard. This brings me to my second research question: 2. User-generated content and being heard: What user-generated content do Facebook followers post to brand pages? Do they feel as though they are being heard by brands and fellow followers through posts, comments, and shares?. 政治大. Finally, I have stated a number of inquiries I have in terms of community and. 立. identity. I want to know what parts of a consumer’s web of identities makes her. ‧ 國. 學. support a company with such clear CSR goals, and why she is drawn to its Facebook. ‧. brand page. Exploring this entails making connections between consumer values and. y. Nat. brand values, while keeping in mind that some values a consumer shares on a brand. er. io. sit. page may not be held by the company. Furthermore, I look out for ethical associations and disassociations that stem from what the informants’ believe are the. al. n. iv n C most pressing ethical concerns today. my last research question is the following: h e nThus, gchi U 3. Community and individual identity: In what ways do active Facebook followers feel brand pages can act as communities? How do these pages and the products themselves relate to their personal identities? Methodology CCT studies experiences, identities, and sociocultural elements of consumption, which cannot be measured through simple surveys. Qualitative methods are more common, as are multimethod studies (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). The Internet is a messy web connecting online material with the offline world, 24 .

(35) but the ethnographer’s narrative can untangle this web by finding common threads (Postill & Pink, 2012). Even though there have been some scholars who believed online studies would never become mainstream within ethnography (Beaulieu, 2004), there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that this is becoming less true with each passing year (e.g. Ardévol, 2012; Masten & Plowman, 2003; Steinmetz, 2012). Horst and Miller (2012) point out that it is illogical to believe that face-to-face sociality is more authentic than computer-mediated communication because all communication is mediated through many different filters. Take culture for example. There is even a strong argument that treating Web 2.0 as inherently different than Web 1.0 is an. 政治大. illusion (Thurlow, 2013). Media ethnography has progressed from being used. 立. communication studies (Nightingale, 2012).. 學. ‧ 國. exclusively within anthropology to a more common audience-research method in. ‧. The Internet is not a special case. Instead, it is just one of many ethnographic. y. Nat. places where we can use existing methods of ethnography (Pink, 2012). Qualitative. er. io. sit. methods are appropriate for the present study because marketing today is centered on storytelling, something that cannot be measured on a Likert scale or in a codebook.. al. n. iv n C The research questions I pose work learning more about the interactions h etoward ngchi U. between marketers and Facebook users, and using “[e]thnography allows us to find out how people behave,” (Cooper & Evans, 2006). This aligns with what Belk (2005) describes as being the new perspective in consumer behavior research. The nonpositivist approach focuses on cultural and emotional aspects of consuming, which are best measured through qualitative methods such as the digital ethnography in this study. I collected my data using two techniques: observation and depth interviews. Observation. This study takes a similar approach as West and Trester’s 2013 study of Facebook. They broke down different types of conversation and 25 .

(36) explained social norms on that platform. Because their study required access to individual users’ personal Facebook pages, they had over sixty specific informants, many of whom were Facebook friends with each other so the researchers could observe interaction between the friends as well. Instead of limiting myself to a certain number of individual Facebook users, I am only focusing on TOMS, Warby Parker, prAna, and Oliberté’s Facebook pages. The user-generated content includes likes, comments, shares, and posts to page from millions of individual users. Posts to page are the most rich with opportunities for analysis because of the broad range of media (e.g. news articles, selfies, remarks about customer service) and attitudes. These sites. 政治大. were observed during the following four-week period: 27 November 2014 (American. 立. Thanksgiving) to 25 December 2014 (Christmas). I chose this block because it is when. ‧ 國. 學. American consumers are spending more money, buying gifts for other people, and. ‧. hinting to loved ones what they themselves would like to receive. It is also a time when. y. Nat. people donate money or engage in other charitable acts. It is reasonable to expect that. er. io. sit. all companies selling consumer products increase their marketing activity during this time. I archived some of this activity by taking screenshots and storing them on my. n. al. personal computer.. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. One might be tempted to use the pejorative term lurking to describe this part of my methodology. This has been admonished by some authors (e.g. Murthy, 2008; Steinmetz, 2012); however, I am aligning my study with Crawford’s (2009) philosophy that lurking should really be replaced with listening. The methods used do not fall into the category of covert research, which includes activities such as recording using a hidden camera (Pink, 2001). This is because when users interact with companies’ social media sites they understand that their contributions will be seen by many others, whether or not it is acknowledged with a like or comment. I do not analyze or 26 .

(37) cite any privately communicated material. In any ethnographic study, primary ethical concerns include possible harm to informants and the right to anonymity (Pink, 2001). There is virtually no risk to the subjects of this study because I will protect their anonymity by blurring their photos and including only their initials in my results. In order to be as transparent as possible on Facebook, the social media platform that currently expects the highest degree of interaction, I changed my privacy settings so my page could be viewed by anyone with a Facebook account. I also included a brief description of my research project in my profile. Before beginning this study, I ‘liked’ all four companies’ Facebook pages, an action that is recorded and visible to all. 政治大. Facebook users who visit my page.. 立. Depth Interviews. Studying the Facebook pages alone cannot answer my. ‧ 國. 學. research questions because without direct dialogue between the Facebook brand. ‧. followers and me, my conclusions would be speculative (Nightingale, 2008). To. y. Nat. complete this ethnographic study, I followed up my observations with depth. er. io. sit. interviews. I asked my informants directly about their personal ethics, their feelings toward ethical brands, and why they use Facebook in the ways they do.. al. n. iv n C While observing the Facebook I recorded the names of active followers h e npages, gchi U. who were advocating for the brand. To qualify, they had to have done one of the following things: posted something positive about the brand to the brand’s Facebook page, made a supportive comment of at least two sentences on the brand’s post, or shared a post the brand made in an affirmative way with at least one sentence of their own. I reached out to 60 of these users via Facebook message and 10 of them agreed to phone or Skype interviews. I followed Holstein and Gubrium’s (1997) suggestions for active interviewing by asking questions that were focused on the whats and hows. In the results, I deconstructed the interview data as opposed to summarizing it. To 27 .

(38) protect the anonymity of my informants, I gave them pseudonyms and redacted any identifying information about themselves or their families by using brackets and replacing certain proper nouns. Limitations. Before continuing to the results of this study, there are a few limitations to mention. Foremost, this project is identifying different forms of action, so it cannot claim to represent the whole (Baszanger & Dodier, 1997) of all buy-onegive-one or Fair Trade companies’ social media marketing. Also, it does not include all social media platforms that these companies use because that would have been an overwhelming amount of material to examine independently. Thus, other leading. 政治大. platforms such as Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, and. 立. YouTube were excluded entirely.. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. 28 . i Un. v.

(39) Chapter Four: Setting the On-Screen Scene West and Trester’s (2013) ethnography of Facebook focused on the interactions between friends, but there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis of Facebook brand pages in their current form. This is likely because they have been a Facebook feature for less than four years. Given the lack of brand page literature to cite, I would like to take this chapter to describe the basics of the spaces I have studied. A Facebook user may not find this particularly enlightening. However, I do not want to assume that all my readers are Facebook users, and there is the possibility that Facebook brand pages in the future will be significantly different from their. 政治大. current form. Chapters five through seven, the majority of my results, are dedicated to. 立. the consumer end of Facebook marketing. First, here is the context from which the. ‧ 國. 學. data comes. I will briefly describe each company’s brand page and then give examples. ‧. of five different types of posts that were most common across all four brand pages. y. Nat. during the observation period.. n. er. io. al. sit. Basics of the Four Brand Pages. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. Figure 3. Oliberté’s profile and cover photos The number of Oliberté’s likes remained stable around 27,500 during the observation period. They used the same profile and cover photos the entire time, which you can see in Figure 3. The man in the profile picture holds up a handwritten sign that says “TRADE NOT AID.” This solidifies the brand’s image as a company 29 .

(40) that strives toward sustainable solutions, not donations. Oliberté posted 23 times, with most posts receiving a dozen or two likes, a few shares, and several comments. Most days had one post, but a few days had two. Oliberté’s posts favored sharing different pages of its website, which had information about the brand. Every post contained at least one image, often something from the company website. None of its posts included other media, such as videos. As far as posts that other users made to Oliberté’s page, Oliberté was slower than the other companies to interact. Sometimes, it took a brand manager over a week to ‘like’ or comment on other people’s posts, with some going ignored. 政治大. altogether. This was their page’s primary weakness. The other three companies were. 立. better at showing their followers that they have been heard and even sustaining. ‧ 國. 學. dialogue through comments on posts. My follow-up observations of this in January. ‧. and March show that Oliberté’s page managers were quicker to interact, ‘liking’ or. y. sit. io. n. al. er. with at all.. Nat. replying within a day or two, but they were still picky about which posts they interact. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. . Figure 4. prAna’s profile and cover photos During the observation period, prAna had about 175,000 followers. It had the same profile and cover photos, as shown in Figure 4. Much like Oliberté’s, there was a natural backdrop. By having someone doing yoga outdoors in their cover photo, prAna shows that they sell both yoga and outdoor gear. With 51 timeline posts during 30 .

(41) the four-week observation, prAna posted more than twice as much as Oliberté. The posts’ popularity varied greatly. Some only had a handful likes, no shares, and no comments. However, nine posts each had thousands of likes.. 政治大. Figure 5. TOMS’s profile and cover photos. 立. Compared to the other brands, prAna shared many more articles not directly. ‧ 國. 學. related to the company. For instance, on 23 December a listicle from treehugger.com entitled “10 Stylish and Sustainable Ways to Wrap Gifts” was posted. On 21. ‧. December there was an article from npr.org about how some European grocery stores. Nat. sit. y. are reducing food waste by selling ugly produce at a reduced price. prAna’s caption. n. al. er. io. on that article was “Shouldn’t every market do this?” Furthermore, leading American. i Un. v. supermarkets, including Whole Foods and Walmart, were tagged in the post. These. Ch. engchi. posts were not prAna’s most well-‘liked,’ but they demonstrated the brand’s values extended beyond its own actions. Also, they were positive. Instead of sharing antiwaste articles, they aligned themselves with positive reusing, reducing, and recycling ideas. This was the brand’s strongest point, as there was a well-fostered and engaged online community with shared interests beyond prAna products. One of the ways prAna nurtured this community was by being quick and generous with ‘likes’ and comments on user-generated contributions. This showed that prAna employees were paying attention to all feedback, including customer complaints.. 31 .

(42) TOMS has considerably more followers than the other three brands in this study. In 2015, TOMS’s page surpassed 3 million followers, but there were 2.9 million during the observation period. Figure 5 has the company’s profile image and cover photo used for the whole holiday season. The profile image is simply the company logo with the slogan “One For One” written at the bottom. The cover photo features some small non-TOMS items, such as pinecones, candy canes, and cookie cutters, that add a holiday feel. It reminded me of a creative window display you would see in a store. TOMS posted a total of 49 times, about the same as prAna, but on a more. 政治大. consistent schedule. There were only two days without posts: the Saturday after. 立. Thanksgiving and 23 December, which was the day after guaranteed delivery for. ‧ 國. 學. Christmas from TOMS’s online shop. On all other days, TOMS posted between one. ‧. and three times. Most posts got over a hundred likes, with the vast majority of their. y. Nat. posts featuring a specific item or product line. Commenting was much more common. er. io. sit. than on the other brands’ pages. Users often expressed their adoration of the featured product and tagged one of their friends in the comment, presumably because the user. al. n. iv n C thought their friend would like the or because they wanted their friend to know h eimage ngchi U that they liked it themselves, perhaps hinting that it would make a good Christmas gift. One characteristic that set TOMS’s replies apart from the other companies is that one of the page managers usually signed his or her name, making the interaction more personal. This was a nice touch that made the brand page seem more personal. In contrast, with many of their posts just featuring products, there were points during the observation the page looked like a catalogue. Warby Parker’s number of followers stayed around 380,000 during the observation. Just like the other two companies, they used the same profile and cover 32 .