What’s Mine is Yours

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study is to research how consumers adopt discourses to make sense of their experiences with brand co-creation on social media platforms. We wish to bring forward how the interactions of the stakeholders involved in the co-creation process affects the consumers, through the theoretical lens of governmentality and exploitation. The literature review outlines the conversation that relates to social media platforms, brand authenticity and co-creation. Moreover, the literature review delineates the critical studies that concern co-creation. The research design consists of a discourse analysis through the empirical context of the social media platform TikTok. The empirical material was gathered through semi-structured qualitative interviews with content creators on TikTok. Further, the material was analyzed in accordance with the literature and by using categorical reduction to identify discourses. The findings show that, from the perspective of the consumers, brand co-creation occurs passively and is directly facilitated by the social media platform. From this, we contribute to the critical literature stream of co-creation by identifying the relationships and power dynamics in play between the stakeholders.