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