School Of Arts and Creative Industries

The Mass Protagonist in the

Contemporary Age
Social Segmentation and Social Media

Leire Martin de la Fuente

40295904
MA Motion Graphics 2017
Supervisor: Kirstie Jamieson
A Dissertation submitted to Graduate School of Edinburgh Napier University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts.
Social Segmentation and Social Media

The Mass Protagonist in the

Contemporary Age
Leire Martin de la Fuente

(n/a, n/a)

2
Acknowledgment
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you every person that helped during this course
to the obtaining and sharing of knowledge, patience and welcoming in every moment. Thank
you to the lectures of Advertising Roger and Chris, and special thank you to Kirstie for the
continuous support, encourage and empathy in every difficult moment and for the last-minute
track in the dissertation time.

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Abstract
P. Bourdieu has broadly noted the distinction in the midst of the social roles since the
Industrial Revolution. The dissertation addresses to the idea of the Contemporary Protagonist
in the Digital age. J. Kapferer, a marketing branding rhetoric, studies strategic brand
management developing new marketing ideas, and perspectives absent from the literature of
business with actual strategies, yet, reflected the social classes in the M. Aronczyk and D.
Powers book that discuss closely the idea of the protagonist. The book explores the
authenticity; value; and utility of the fiction in the promotional culture. I argue that
relationship between social segmentation and advertising, it has been influential at the time of
thinking about marketing strategies, and can be better understood by considering it within the
interaction of the technological behaviour building new social patterns. My dissertation
expands on the idea of the protagonist that the internet has built around the digital
generations. I argue the disassociation of the different historical moments when economics
and political factors cause one form of media to be valued over another: The different
perspective of traditional and contemporary periods revealing the change of patterns in
behaviour and needs with the apparition of the web 2.0.

Keywords
Branding, Social Media, Protagonist, Social Segmentation, Authenticity, Traditional,
Contemporary, Web 2.0, Digital, New generations, Generation Y, Generation Z, Baby
boomers, Millenials, Teens, social classes, bourgeois, middle-class, taste, influence,
storytelling, consumerism, media, promotional culture, intermediary, cool hunter, blogger,
vlogger.

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Index
Introduction ........................................... Pg. 6

Chapter 1
Social Segmentation and Social Media . Pg. 7
Literature ... Pg. 7
Models in society . Pg. 9
Traditional Media, Culture and Aesthetic . Pg. 10
Brands, not Products ...... Pg. 10
Taste, Media and Influence: The New Intermediaries... Pg. 12
Consuming the Protagonist ... Pg. 14
Summary ....... Pg. 17

Chapter 2
The Coolhunter as Media Protagonist ...... Pg. 18
Storytelling and The Protagonist .................................. Pg. 20
Axe (Lynx) ................................................................... Pg. 24
The Coolhunter Blogger .............................................. Pg. 27
The Future Protagonists ............................................... Pg. 30
SnapChat ...................................................................... Pg. 30
Periscope ...................................................................... Pg. 31

Chapter 3
Case Studies of The Media Protagonist ....................... Pg. 32
CASE STUDY ONE: Hinge ....................................... Pg. 33
CASE STUDY TWO: Tribe ........................................ Pg. 35
CASE STUDY THREE: UBER .................................. Pg. 38
CASE STUDY FOUR: Red Bull ................................ Pg. 40
CASE STUDY FIVE: WeChat .................................. Pg. 41

Chapter 4
Discussion .................................................................. Pg. 43
Chapter 5
Conclusion ................................................................. Pg. 46
The antithesis ............................................................. Pg. 49

Bibliography .............................................................. Pg. 50

Virtual Appendix .................................................... Pg. 52

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Introduction
The mass protagonist in the contemporary age has emerged exclusively from the public use
of media, reconsidering the traditional strategies of cultural promotion on advertisement, and
yet fundamentally concerning the role of influence of the media on culture and society. The
document inquiries about social theories specifically evolution of society during the industrial
revolution on the current social panorama of society, the development into technology and
the position of the framework that works various social phenomena inside the media
perception of marketing. Chapter one provides social segmentation and social Model theories
for the purpose of understanding the Social Models, Media, Society and the theories of
Cultural Intermediaries Tastes. Chapter two analyses the rhetorical tools that professionals in
Marketing and Advertising use to catch the attention of the public. Chapter three disserts the
media protagonist of the Contemporary Media with exemplar case studies. Chapter four
discusses the complex outcomes of the Cultural Promotion in Advertising and Marketing
followed by finally Chapter five which summarises the findings as a new tool of Strategic
Marketing in Advertising.

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Chapter 1
Social Segmentation and Social Media

Consumerism has developed various means of imagining commodities since the beginnings
of industrial capitalism (Wernick and Moor, 2010) and scholars have long recognized the role
of consumption in meaning-making, as well as status, class, and identity formation (and
contestation) (Wernick and Moor, 2010). The increasingly central role of brands in
contemporary culture considerably alters established relationships between identification,
commodification and acts of consumption. (Aronczyk and Powers, 2010). Throughout this
dissertation, I aim to explore how the media is implicated in the production of identity with
the broader intention of understanding how social media has produced protagonists as part of
the advertising apparatus.

The following chapters explore the development of media in consumer society through the
eyes of those theorists that have attempted to explain the behaviours, cultures and meanings
that an ever-changing media has brought to consumerism.

Literature
One of the most influential works of sociology to address issues of Distinction in relation to
culture and consumption is that of Bourdieus (1987) Distinction. This volume attempts to
understand the complex relations between society, class and taste. His study of Algeria and
France explores social classes, culture, and how the structures of knowledge determine
society through a habitus; that is, a class-based set of cultural tendencies, which he traces
through systems of formal and informal education that reproduce knowledge and power
through capitalist societies.

Therefore, Bourdieu the cultural/power nexus consisted chiefly in a conception of

culture as a possession an asset that some social agents have at the expense of
others that is mobilised to competitive advantage in a series of power-games played
in different fields whose relations are structured by the dominance of the economic
and political fields over the cultural field. (Bennett T., et al., 2009)

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The hypothesis he develops relates to the ways in which the possession of cultural capital of
high quality is directly related to the outcome of opportunities. Distinction is important as
Bourdieus theoretical and epistemological framing of questions of culture, value and
hierarchy (Frow,1995), has responded to a concept of culture as patterns of power that
explain class-based taste in arts, education, music, food, careers and lifestyle, which are
forms of capital that lead to a distinctive array of opportunities and signify membership of
certain groups made accessible only to members of particular classes.
The recognition of these relationships and the historical structures that produce distinct
cultural values in traditional cultures is important to the study of consumerism and the ways
in which advertising appeals to different segments of society. Identity, taste and consumption
today are related to new technologies and mobile platforms where reputational capital is
pursued through new marketing practices. Social media is a space where different
communication strategies are exploited for advertising. The strategies are most interesting to
the subject of taste and identity because of the way in which influence is organized through
virality and the culture of sharing. Social media provides a space where individuals become
more important to the brand image and their influence extends with the flows of shared
content. As a media platform, brands have been quick to realize that individual opinion has a
wide sphere of influences which transforms the social media consumer into what I am calling
a brand protagonist.
If we return to Bourdieus theory of Distinction, which argues that since the moment we are
born we are separated into categories by a socio-economic status that will have an impact on
our lifes pathway (Bourdieu, 1987), how should we understand this protagonist? It is
important to understand how the structure of the systemic classification of economic and
social statuses works to understand how symbolic tendencies and behaviours relate not only
to age groups but also to social classes. These tendencies reflect back on our society, but they
work somewhat independently from the power of social and economic influences.
Advertising aims to influence the way we dress, our values, our aims and in many ways the
kind of person we are within society or at least the social categories with which we identify:

... a collection of ads from many years and explains how their patterns illustrate how
our society objectifies women in the service of maintaining our definitions of
femininity and masculinity--and gendered power structures. (Raskoff, Thinking
Sociologically About Advertising, 2011)

Advertisement has been very influential in the development of gender, race and age specific
behaviours, and it has been a contributing factor in the delimitation of these categories and

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the creation of very distinctive borders between the kinds of behaviours approved and
expected by society that may be displayed by categorised individuals.

Models in society
Bourdieus classic text Distinction argues that bourgeois lifestyle presents unrelated and
even contradictory differences in consumption tendencies. These appear to develop
regardless of the expected tendencies traditionally linked to different socio-economic
statuses.

For some critics, the increased emphasis on making a choice between consumer
goods, which gives us the freedom to construct lifestyles, marks the end of traditional
social structures and divisions associated with production, leaving us free to play
with identity through consumption. For such critics, lifestyle is no longer related to
traditional groupings such as class and gender, but rather `connotes individuality,
self-expression and a stylistic self-consciousness' (Featherstone 1991a: 83), (Bell and
Hollows and Joanne, 2005).

Taste is a reflection of these choices and is at the heart of symbolic struggles, which go on at
all times between the fractions of the dominant class and which would be less absolute, less
total if they are not based on the primitive belief which binds each agent to his lifestyle.

A materialist reduction of preferences to their economic and social conditions of

production and upon the social functions of the seemingly most unfair practices must
not obscure the fact that, in the matter of culture, investments are not only economic
but also psychological. (Bourdieu, 1979:36)

According to Bourdieu, it is a condition of the capitalist society that the categorising and
labelling of behaviour in accordance with taste makes it understandable. We introduced a
spectrum of possible representative values that classifies us depending on household income,
used as a base tool to achieve status-defining goals such as owning property, having access to
education, and many other factors that condition our quality of life and the range of
opportunities made available to us. However, in the contemporary view of society and with
the influence of social media, part of labelling and classifying ourselves has entered into the
game of the twentieth century that is consuming the self.

Consuming the self-comes with three original patterns which are self-identification,
connecting and engaging. The behaviour of consuming the self could be likened to

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 warriors of old exhibiting particular scar patterns to communicate their conquests, or
hanging their coat of arms over their door. For all, creating a profile tells the
other members of the community who you are. You are identifying yourself.
(DragonSearch, 2010).

Traditional Media, Culture and Aesthetic

According to Bourdieu, everything comes from how we have been educated through this
systematic method of capitalist power relations:

the class distribution, this description of the aesthetes variant invites an analysis of
the class variations and the invariants of the mediated, relatively abstract experience
of the social world supplied by newspaper reading, for example, as a function of
variations in social and spatial distance ( with at one extreme, the local items in the
regional dailiesmarriages, deaths, accidents and, at the other extreme,
international news or, on another scale, the royal engagements and weddings in the
glossy magazines) or in political commitment ( from the detachment depicted in
Prousts text to the activists outrage or enthusiasm. (Bourdieu, 1987).

In this piece, Bourdieu rejects the idea of the invariants of the mediated media as a
consumer choice, arguing that media production is socially conditioned and descended from
particular content consumption tendencies determined by social class, tendencies that are
simultaneously used to maintain the distinctive boundaries between social classes. In todays
context of social media, we must think about a rather more complex system. For a system to
occur, ties have to allow communication or influence of some sort, otherwise, again, we
would just be discussing sets. (DragonSearch, 2010)

Brands, not Products

In the late 1970s, corporate brands began to seek ways to account for their brands as assets
on their balance sheets, over and above the physical assets of the company. (Lindemann and
Madden, 2010). Arnczyk and Powers argue that the recognition of such an intangible or
reputational capital made in a zero-risk globalisation exceeded the value of the material
and territorial value of the corporate firms of the 80s and 90s.

Outsourcing, downsizing, and other strategies of vertical disintegration which

encouraged organisations to divest themselves of accountability for their products
and forms of production while focusing on their brand images and marketing efforts.
(Klein, 2010)

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 This perception is relevant in the contemporary context of capitalism and the role of
the protagonist in social media advertising where in the process of transforming
values into value, promotional intermediaries displace the work of accountants and
others formerly charged with the monopoly of asset recognition to create a social
facility of their own. (Moor L. a., 2010)

In the act of putting communications to work it is the performative discourse of social

media communication that creates the kind of personal encounter with the brand that
reconfigures large companies and mass production as individuals whose lifestyle, taste
patterns and values are commodified as part of the product. The performative act needs to be
engaging as it is in a blog, forum, where the protagonist and her followers are a new type of
media audience whose consumption is complexly interwoven in material and immaterial
products; the brand which these consumers wish to buy into is followed shared and
owned through a series of dialogues.

This is what Arvidsson means when he refers to names as informational capital: Just
as valuation techniques create economic value for the brand, so do the
communicative exchanges consumers have about the brandeither face to face or via
online networks. These are apparent not only on brand fan websites or at clubs for
BMW aficionados but also on online platforms that are built specifically to use the
social communication of consumers as sources of economic value. Think of the travel
websites whose expert information about where to stay and what to provide to the
posts of frequent travellers, or computer hardware and software sites where ~ about
the product is performed by users or retail sites that solicit and implement costumes
ideas for new goods and services. (Schmitt, 2010)

(Dragonsearch Blog, YouMoz, 2016)

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 The internet has had a dramatic impact on pop culture. Every day, brands blow up
through social media, Youtube stars emerge, bloggers sign book deals and wannabes
strive for their big virtual break. In this fragmented digital universe, there is the
seemingly endless audience for new ideas and becoming a celebrity is within
anyones grasp. As Dick Penny, director of Watershed agency says: technology
allows people to choose between a more traditional, passive experience and more
active, participatory interaction Its amazing how regimented we have become in
our cultural habits. Take theatre, for example, you buy your ticket, have a drink, find
your seat, sit, the lights go down, you know its time to be silent. Companies such as
Punchdrunk, digital agency, have turned those concepts on their head. Rather than
devaluing the traditional approach, it just shows there is another way of doing it.
(Kutchinsky, 2014)

The digital audience becomes more refined through the amount of visual information we
receive every day, as we are bombarded by a myriad of messages that try and to captivate our
attention. Through social media behaviours of sharing and liking, these fans have evolved
to become brand protagonists with a certain power over the audience, which consumes those
values allied with a mediated lifestyle.

Taste, Media and Influence: The New Intermediaries.

Nowadays we are surround by brand in every scope of our lives, and sometimes we
do not perceive that, but as you see we have become, and we are consumers, and
humans have taken the advantage and transform our necessities to brands, companies
and values because we need them to survive, although we have converted unnecessary
items in essential making us live in a consumerist stage of our lives, and we are living
from and by brands. It is very interesting and genuine than the customer-based values
of the brand are created by the brand. These additional cash flows are the result of
the customers willingness to buy one brand more than its competitors, even when
another brand is cheaper. (Kapferer, 2012)

Lury and Moor (2011), describe the three new ways the values in brands are measured.

Brands give some indication of the increasingly diffuse set of ways in which value is
recognised in contemporary organisations and of the more multidimensional,
topological, space in which brands now operate. Basically, the brand is focused on
the gap in the market industry, and it seeks for new opportunities for value creation
and position branding itself as an enterprise focusing on identifying, measuring and
exploiting sources of value. (Moor L. and., 2011: 36).

There are many well-established companies on the web that can control through analytics the
engagement people have with their industry and tools to hit their marked target. However,
with the rise of blogs and other social media, both as part of and beyond the corporate
website, the focus is now turning towards tools that can generate community analytics.

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(Moor L. and., 2011:41). An evolution of this is the listening platforms that allow
organisations and companies to track discussions between users and identify key participants
that with time have become protagonists and intermediaries for the engagement of the
enterprise. For example, Harvest Report 2.0, one of the key tools of this type, claims to
deliver value to your business by helping [you to] understand the value and sentiments of
customer conversations to analyse what they are saying and know their tonalities. (Moor
L. and., 2011:41) . Customer conversations have power, not only in terms of influence and
shared flows of communication, but also in terms of validity and authenticity. The
conversations that take place can of course be curated and even owned by distinct companies
and this is where we can begin to think about social media as a platform for brand
protagonists. We can talk in terms of these protagonists as the new cultural intermediary.
Today cultural intermediaries serve pedagogic as well as consumer functions in our society,
tackling issues of social awareness as well as cultural life. They position themselves in the
flow of social consciousness and speak a sophisticated language that consists of words,
music, brands and social commentary. Bourdieu (1984) characterizes a section of the
middle-classes as cultural intermediaries because of their occupational positions which give
them a degree of cultural authority as shapers of taste and inculcators of new consumerist
dispositions (Nixon and Paul, 2010). It is useful to consider the brand protagonist as an
intermediary in the way in which they provide a symbolic service by creating a link between
a product and the consumer base by making use of their specific tools to reshape cultural
tastes. Bourdieu highlights control over the mass media (1984: 325) as a further
distinguishing characteristic of cultural intermediaries. The cultural intermediary is the agent
while mass media is the conduit for the strategic migration and translation of restricted
culture into the field of large-scale production. (Ozcacaglar-Touluse, Rinallo, and W. Belk,
2016)

The proliferation of goods is also signed by `aesthetic obsolescence', where an

increasing number of commodities are distinguished only by appreciative differences,
and where things are increasingly disposed of because they are `out of fashion' rather
than being used up, worn out or broken. (Lee 1993: 136), (David and Joanne, 2005).

For Featherstone, it is with post-modernism that the consumer culture emphasises the idea of
the individuals' increased feeling of freedom through stylised consumer goods, which are not
tied down to traditional social hierarchies. Chaney (2001) calls these new consumers `post-
modern stand-alone subjects', precisely the subjects of lifestyle. (David and Joanne, 2005).

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Skeggs (2004: 49) argues that the individualised pursuit of lifestyle choices described by
theorists such as Giddens only `explains what exists for a privileged few and then suggests
that this is a perspective that applies to many others'. Rather than analysing contemporary
consumer culture, she argues, these critics reproduce the obligation to pursue individuality
constructed in `consumer market rhetoric' (2004: 57). Therefore David and Joan (2005), said
that we need to consider how an investment in lifestyles, far from being about individual
choice, may still be closely related to class relations and positions.

Consuming the Protagonist

The literature on lifestyle, whether concentrating on individuals or classes seeking distinction
or status through consumption, tends to underplay the value of `being ordinary' in many
people's everyday practices (see Taylor, this volume). Savage et al.'s (2001: 889) research in
the UK, for example, found that most of their respondents `chose to play down any cultural
distinction they may be able to make a claim to play up their ordinariness'. Rather than
seeing ordinariness as `beyond' class, this research demonstrates that the appeal of `being
ordinary' lies in people's attempts to resist being classified and identified as a particular class,
(David & Joanne, 2005).

The protagonist of brands is often a symbol of this ordinariness and of a collective we, a
totem of a cultural group and an approachable character. When we think that Teens today
are the first generation of consumers to have indeed grown up in an entirely post-digital era.
Beginning in early childhood, if they did not know an answer to a question, they were taught
to Google it or, even better, ask Siri. (Bakerly, inc. and futurecast, 2017) we can begin
to see how intermediaries and protagonists have taken hold of the digital consumer. The
protagonist emerged from social media platforms and immediately offered an alternative
mode of communication to videos and magazine formats. Bloggers became public influencers
of taste and excelled in the cult of the ordinary. Whether reviewing comedy, art, cosmetics,
politics or shoes the blogger's authority is in both her individuality and ordinariness.

Social media has shaped the flows of consumer navigation, how we see the world depends on
the flows of 'likes' and the hierarchy of behaviour and values. Consumption is not a
monologue online, it involves following and understanding the contexts within which taste

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and value play out - worn by who and where adds to the authenticity of an object's value.
Online we have the opportunity to question those protagonists and to consume other products
and platforms the protagonists have aligned with As a result, our market is now dependent
on a two-way conversation something that did not exist during the Baby Boomer years of
mass marketing (Huff, 2017).

Brands have changed strategies in order to reach media savvy consumers. It has been an
evolution since the emergence of Web 2.0, with a noticeable development of new forms of
marketing advertising. At this stage of the digital era, people are communicating 24/7 through
social media applications in their devices, being technology dependants. Hence, brands have
taken this opportunity to be in correspondence with the cultural tastes and practices of
millennials and Generation Z members. In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby
boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me
Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated (Stein, 2013). Millennials
and Generation Z are fame-obsessed, taking care to curate the perception others have of them
online. They share their identity through photography and written updates, and publish their
lives with their social circles, constantly reminding themselves and the public of their
individuality, maximizing the idea of the self as a protagonist of their own life.

Stein suggests that (see Stain article, this website) social media has emphasised individuality
and with that the protagonist has emerged as a sphere of influence in behaviour and
communication across technology. The Internet, urbanisation and the one-child policy have
created a generation as overconfident and self-involved. The information revolution has
empowered individuals to the extent of exclusivity. It also gives the commission of
competing against and in favour of organisations. The information revolution has further
empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge
organisations: hackers vs corporations, bloggers vs newspapers, terrorists vs nation-states,
YouTube directors vs studios, app-makers vs entire industries. (Stein, 2013) As a result, the
digital demeanour is a ubiquitous narcissism. However, it is a passive narcissism with
different determinations. For example, it can be observed in small gestures to boost the
author's self-esteem such as the curation of an experience that has been relayed to the public,
to make it more interesting and assuage the anxiety produced by the obsession with obtaining
likes, followers, shares, and other symbolic achievements that have developed value in their
digital reality.

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Interestingly, the Econsultancy research argues that today brands focus on personification
and the individuality constructed in the lifestyle which is "far from being about individual
choice, may still be closely related to class relations and positions (2017: 9). In addition,
new generations see themselves in advertising and feel the difference in the mediated
expression of individuality and style. According to Kapferer (2012) A successful brand
identity reflects peoples values and beliefs, and how they would like to see themselves.
However, without a clear, meaningful identity, a brand can quickly fade

(Kapferer, 2012: 125)

Against this theory, Kapferer divides the authenticity culture in its opinion about the future in
marketing where it is entirely accurate in the current social groups. The examination refers to
the effects on consumer and corporate behaviour in the future where he compares two
examples in different demographic continents (see Jean-Noel, this volume). Kapferer (2012:
125) argues that the traditional consumer segmentation it assembled within typologies.
Modern sociology recognises that mentalities do not change but add to. Hence, behaviours

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are inherited and contained in the four examples identified above, Each one with its value
hierarchy, mode of conduct, actions and type of relationship. Some of us have entered in the
me-us mood where we care about the deeper me linked with the collective of the us. Of
course, this is a mirror of Web 2.0, the social networks, but it also means that no individual
benefit can be fully experienced if it does not deliver mutual benefits shared with the
collective, too. The Me and the Us are once again in an alliance. (Kapferer, 2012: 126).

Summary

Although the distinctions between social groups are complex, it is the machinery of
marketing with its consumer categories and labelling that pursue strategies of authenticity in
order to 'master meaningful customer experience' (Kapferer, 2012, p. 125). This chapter has
sought to introduce the development of consumer culture in relation to social media and its
marketing and advertising strategies. The Pivotal Generation has grown up curating their own
identity through social media. Some of them take pictures evoking sentimental moments of
their life, their values, their persona and how they feel about life. Therefore, this generation
has developed a me, me, me narcissistic personality disorder which sustains an appetite for
personalization and the sharing of the 'self', which we see in the protagonist model of social
media marketing.

The digital Nisei are different: Technology has shaped not just how they navigate the world
but how they see themselves. Each generation imagines itself as rebellious and iconoclastic.
But none before has felt as free to call bullshit on conventional wisdom, backed by a trillion
pages of information on the web and with the power of the Internet to broadcast their
opinions. They have thrown off the shackles of received culturecompiling their own
playlists, getting news from Twitter, decorating web pages with their own art. (Adler, 2016)

Chapter 2
The Coolhunter as Media Protagonist

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 (Urban, 2013)

Since the mainstream use of social media, we have been sharing with others our immediate
environment of experience. Social Media has sanctioned the sharing of all kinds of
psychosocial contents and contexts. Through photographs, narrative, emojis and digital
shorthand emotional connections forged through forums and social media platforms. Social
Media has also brought with it the development of Coolhunting, which is the focus of this
chapter.

Coolhunting refers to the practise of influence young cultures with (Klein, 2011) form of
marketing associated with researchers who try to predict new trends, influential colours by
scouring emergent patterns of fashion and product use.

Another much discussed example is the practice of cool-hunting and bro-ing as developed
by consultancies such as Sputnik, The L. Report and Bureau de Style. Bro-ing is the name
given to the practice of giving prototype shoes and clothing to selected individuals in black
inner-city neighbourhoods in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago by Nike marketers in
order to evaluate their likely success. (Klein, Brands: Markets, Media and Movement, 2011:
157)
Celebrities and digital protagonists are constantly updating their profiles, which communicate
taste and set hierarchies of whats cool and whats not. Bloggers speak to their disciples;
audiences that consumer the immaterial and material assets of protagonists. Social Media

18
facilitates the capability of empathically connecting and identifying with people across the
world as well as enabling close contact with the common herd like ourselves. Key to this
sharing of selves is the act of curator of the self and the consequent consumption of one's self.

The expressivist/self-promotional cocktail is a fundamental aspect of the Facebook

experience. The site may also be an excellent platform for activism, a site for new
kinds of interaction, and certainly an efficient way to reconnect with old friends. But
also a calculated authenticity machine, where we are asked to curate our identities
carefully. (Aronczyk and Powers, Facebook and the Consuming Self, 2010: 83)

(Hopf, 2012)
In this way Alura (Weaver, 2017) explains all social media interaction is performative.
Online, there is a space to enact a character more interesting, more successful and more
communicative than in other social spheres. Adopting the perspective and identity of a
character, people are also removed from their daily routine and mundane life, another crucial
part of being entertained. Identification is thus a vital component of audience involvement in
television and radio serials, movies, and video games, and has also been shown to be an
important condition for the effects these media have on their audiences. By sharing
perspectives and creating new understandings, one develops deeper and more meaningful
communication. - The protagonist is the main actor of the story that engages you as it was a
hero, but protagonists are not always heroic.

They are ordinary people, living in a regular world but the circumstances of his/her values,
life, point of view, pull this person into a heros journey to extraordinary situations and
benefits. This authority that you have then can be used to persuade your audience to buy or

19
adopt solutions you recommend. The point of view from a protagonist it is crucial for a
company as your testimonial and your leadership in audiences. As an influencer is a good
story of how your product or service solved problems for your customers. The mass, the
audience, in this case, will be able to put themselves in the protagonist perspective as a
relatable character.

It is not just your perspective of life but how you tell others about it with an engaging
narrative that connects with your audience.

When you create a great brand narrative with a familiar, relatable voice for your
audience, they wont want to tune you out. (Weaver, 2017)

Storytelling and The Protagonist

Storytelling has become a favourite device for brands, as it is an effective marketing
technique that moves beyond the mechanics of a simple product selling and leads to deeper
brand trust.

Without stories, our big-headed, massive-brained, furless, two-legged species

couldnt survive infancy. While other critters have built-in behavioural instincts to
contribute to their survival, human beings are hard-wired to create narratives to
navigate through life. (Weaver, 2017)

Aluras (Weaver, 2017) article about copywriting and the trigger that persuades peoples
attention recognised that storytelling is psychological narrative technic that includes
perception, understanding, knowledge, memory, criticism, empiricism, creativity and many
other factors that will create a story that will communicate effectively with other people.

Story telling originates an effect in people as it triggers the human attention, memory and
persuasion. The most important artefact of a story it is not falling the standard of writing
were someone tell something with beginning middle and end section. (Weaver, 2017) It is
obviously that for a good understanding of the narrative, you want to publish in any form:
video; song; writing, it need to have a good story behind with the main key elements of the
story that will engage your public. With a good fluency of the story it is possible gain

20
understanding and audience, even though, the audience will be loyal to the feed If the
protagonist connects emotionally.

As the cult of sharing spreads and the everyday lives of bloggers becomes a distinct form of
consumption we also see the rise of the ordinary in relation to marketing. Ordinary
people that have something to explain to the audience with their own perception,
individuality, values, style, problem solving, and the most important with a relatable human
voice., if you apply a storytelling framework to conversion-focused copywriting, you can
inspire people to action and keep them hooked in a long-term relationship with your brand.
(Weaver, 2017)

When discussing promotional culture and its development, clearly the bloggers situate
themselves in the position of the protagonist of the digital media. Influencers have curate
their self-branding and made their space in the different digital platforms with a high volume
of audience because of the discussion, the voice, perception and mostly trendy people acting
as a coolhunters of their own brand.

Jonathan (Gray, 2010: 307) discusses that traditional promotional culture as marketing and
advertising it is reduce to exploitative, propagandistic, and an essence of superficiality.
Saying further, as viewers we rarely examine promotional culture as a culture as reflective,
artistic, worthy of engagement, and as perhaps contributing positively to the media sphere.

Influencer marketing, non-digital, is one of the most traditional advertising

channels, and rightfully so, as 94% of those who used influencer marketing believe
its an effective strategy. Its so popular now that brands must evolve to stand out and
avoid blending in with the competing social media promotion its becoming very
crowded. This practice stands out from traditional digital advertising, with 47% of
online consumers in the 18-24 demographic using ad blockers, it gives brands, even
more, the reason to explore influencer marketing. (Patel, 2017)

The new influencer in digital marketing goes beyond this, as it is always on top of the trend
curating his/her self-brand producing with effort an art work for the audiences building
engagement, reflection, interest, meanings, and adding interpretive context.

21
 Our brains have evolved to empathize, remember, and make decisions as a result of
hearing a story. Its neurologically impossible to resist the persuasive power of a
well-told tale. (Weaver, 2017)

As mentioned above, the media savvy generations have grown up as natives of social media
technology and are now experts in the language of sharing and curating identity.

It is interesting to think how traditional advertising can launch a campaign with a super
model as a main character, and it is no longer as efficient as an ordinary the Vlogger.
Commonly, traditional marketing has focused on desire and fantasy. New digitally native
generations seek instead for a story that they can identify with.
For example, the new campaign of Axe (Lynx) deodorant that has focused in the
individuality of the person converting into attractive strategy for the young people. Give a
glamorised view of male beauty. In its place, it aims to shift perceptions with a new global
campaign to help male consumers work on their personal and individual style. (Miles, 2016)

(Melideo, n/a) (Kendall, 2016)

This are the visual examples of traditional advertising, where the storytelling it is visual and
imaginative, with sexual and fantasy tendency. In this case Kemp (2017) explains the strategy
of these kind of case studies. The idea of the Lynxs CEO was, sex can sell anything.

22
 (No Bull Blog School, 2017)
The difference between the advertising and the blog it is that the blogger it has a human
approach and it engages the people because it is a subject that engage the public. The blogger
it speaks from its self-experience, in the other hand, the Lynx advertisement it does speaks
visually in other superficial context where the values are sexual, humoristic, and eye catching

23
for the public. However, the advertisement language it is changing from a one-way
conversation, to the two ways conversation. This advertisement it is considered tasteless
and sexist in the digital era.

Storytelling in this advertisement corresponds to the needs and values of new digitally native
generations. The stories mystify individualism, and capitalise on the usual and stereotypical.
Joseph (Campbell, 2014) describes the elements of the hero storytelling that it is used in this
advertisement as

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been
taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or
permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of
adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover
some life-giving elixir. Its usually a cycle, a coming and returning. (Campbell,
2014)

Axe (Lynx) deodorant that has focused in the individuality of the person converting into
attractive.

In this example, we can find the heroes that are the protagonists of the advertisement with
different styles and acting with different personalities that denote different personalities, and
prominent features as any other ordinary person in the world. It is also remarkable that in
the advertising are both genres although the target audience here are men principally women
have a part of protagonist as a symbolic attracted genre that it is reversible as they can
become the secondary target of the product in a distant point of view. This protagonist is
relating a story through the minutes of advertising in different quotidian scenarios that the
target can rely on them. The life-giving elixir it does reference to the product that wants to
be sold as the magic deodorant that makes the protagonist bold, happy, full of live, self-
confident and sexy. It is the denotative that barely you cannot see. It takes a third party in the
advertisement.

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 Video link - https://youtu.be/WzTSE6kcLwY (Amsterdam, 2016)

Kemp (2017) reveals that the old strategy that the brand was following was not effective. The
brand was selling sex and the power of men over women in sexuality realising that today sex
it is a game of equals. While sales remained robust, Unilever felt that the brand was not fit
for the future. While it was still growing across markets each year, critics argued that the
brands objectification of women increasingly belonged to a bygone age, and a surge of new
entrants meant it was losing market share. The brand was losing market in the digital
platform as the feminine public was not sharing their content.

The company 72andSunny Amsterdam executed a marketing research finding. The brand was
not corresponding with the digital essence of cultural promotion with an equity decline from
the feminine side because how they portrayed the women position of an object.

According to the research man were performing a fake masculinity attitude copied from other
popular influences and characters, normal guys were with fear of being themselves because it
could cause rejection in society. Contrasting the point of view of men, 90% of women said
they liked men who were themselves with their own security and not making fake statements
about their personality or appearance.

At the end, the agency started working in an advertisement works toward a world free of
limiting stereotypes and social injustice, as a key source of creative inspiration. The hive it
boosts the individuality, diversity and encourage the consumer to be themselves positioning

25
themselves in a influencer marketing of a big brand. "What sex would give us in the past was
provocation, but if you want to change, you have to continually provoke and recognise
what it is to be an individual now. The advertisement was successful because of the narrative
showing the understanding of the target using a familiar tone. It also the video and story
relates to new movements of millennials and generation-z engaging emotionally with them. It
meets with the values they accept, fighting stereotypes and changing the masculinity of the
product to convert it into a diversity and equal brand.

"What sex would give us in the past was provocation, but if you want to change, you
have to continually provoke and recognise what it is to be an individual now."
(Kemp, 2017)

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The Coolhunter Blogger.

(n/a, The cool Hunter guerilla Marketing: You have been cool huntered, 2011)

The Coolhunter definition by the Urban dictionary (Wyon, 2008) concept arose in 1990
where the market research methodology sought to predict the future trends of the youth
culture to inform the corporate product development and marketing. It is a research
process that implies observation and detail to the changing phenomenas.

However, as it has been mentioning before, with the influence of technology everything it
is changing. It does not mean that researching markets has already changed, but it is
easier to elaborate within the technologies and the networking sphere. In this chapter it is
argued how technologies, people and the Web 2.0 have caused an evolution to the
coolhunter and how it becomes an influencer, a protagonist and sometimes a celebrity
from the ordinarity to the extraordinary.

The Cool Hunter talks a good game. It claims to be the "internet-based hub for the
best and coolest of everything the benchmark reference point for trend spotting and
cultural awareness of 'the now'. (Lanyado, 2017)

27
Fashion designer Markus Gogolin (LiveWire, 2006) he says that he loves the influence on
internet about society and trends. "Before the internet, a designer would have had to buy
hundreds of magazines to keep in touch with what was happening in fashion design around
the world. Today they just take a look at 20 or so blogs each day and get the best information
anyone can get."

Present customs made coolhunters a people who have three virtues: To be a good coolhunter
you need to be a social person able to speak with everyone in a party, extrovert; you need to
be easy going and like going out all the time to different places, altruist; and you need to have
the ability of speaking about your thoughts and sell your product aesthetically with
companies that like your work in a very professional method, high-standard professional. The
internet has helped people with these qualities to rise up their profiles and characteristics
turning into influencers through the medium of blogs, where you can perceive the qualities of
altruism, adventurous, aesthetics and professionalism throughout the mean this person is
using for their own promotion and self-branding.

But she is also a ''cool hunter'' -- a person whose taste is so ahead of the curve that a
trend analysis firm pays her a $200-to-$500 bounty for helping to identify the Next
Big Things to sweep popular culture. (Furchgott, 1998)

The digital promotional culture cool hunter of the contemporary age is an influencer on the
websites as mind-set of the term cool, actual, trendy. It means that it creates a pattern in style,
emotion and storytelling converting this person in a ordinary protagonist of ordinary
audiences. It converts this person to a trend-spot-hunter for companies that might use this
influencer as a protagonist and in an extremist case they will create a celebrity with the
influencer for the engagement and success that drives with his/her own image.

The trendsetters are the ones breaking new ground in consumer product areas, and
they give you insights into what will be widely developed down the road,'' said Janet
Taylor, director of college marketing for Sprint and a client of Youth Intelligence, a
firm based in New York. (Furchgott, 1998)

The description of the trend analyst for companies in the creative trend hunting (Furchgott,
1998) consider firms not requiring sophisticated analysis of the cool of the product from
their hunters. It is just make it look cool with all the pack of a good history, a good gallery,
a great storyteller of visual and speaking stories that can engage people because of their
authentic flair.

28
For example, the real case of Lilly Singh. She started her blog in a moment of her life where
she was in a crossroad in 2010. She did not know what to do with her life, her parents pushed
her to join for a masters course when she finished her undergraduate studies, and in
following summer before the course started she felt that she wanted to start a blog of humour
inspired by Indian culture and music from their perspective of a two-sided different cultures
between Canadian and Indian. She just liked it and made her feel good with herself, in the
meantime she was having fun and something she really liked. She said, "to create the kind of
content that I didn't think existed anywhere else." (Google, 2015)

Lilly was persistent and kept going with the blog for 6 years improving every aspect of the
comedy of the blog.

After six years of bi-weekly uploads, Singh has developed a strong, reciprocal
relationship with her fans. She transformed herself into more than a YouTube star
she became a trusted friend. Recently Singh spoke at YouTube Australia's Brand cast
event, touching on her relationship with her fans, why investing in YouTube is
essential for brands that want to connect with an increasingly loyal and passionate
audience, and why success should no longer be measured by impressions but rather
by interest and brand love. (Google, 2015)

Today she is an influencer and celebrity that was born on YouTube, expanding content as a
vlogger, comedian, writer and actress and converting her to the celebrity she is now.

Video link of one of the most influential entertainment protagonist - https://www.forbes.com/top-

influencers/2017/entertainment/#48487ee3ec6e (LLC, 2017)

29
Think with Google website (Google, 2015) wrote from Lillys video that for her earning
viewer love is more important than racking up view counts. She gained 6.8 subscribers and
fan base offline followers without any advertisement. (Uber, 2017)

The Future Protagonists

This increased investment may well be driven by emerging platforms as well as new
marketing solutions offered by existing social platforms. Almost one-quarter of
internet users (23%) are now on Snapchat, a huge jump from 12% in 2014.
Meanwhile, Instagram has also experienced a surge in popularity, with global usage
jumping to 42% in late 2016, up from 24% in 2017 marketers can expect social media
platforms to continue offering new formats for advertising in 2017. (Adobe, 2017)

SnapChat

Snapchat created an application that transforms the ordinary person, the individual in the
storyteller, is the PROTAGONIST of their own life, making his/her friends in their followers
and audience and engaging part with the filters, plus histories and advertisement. It was the
only one, not even Facebook, Tweeter or Instagram had this opportunity. They smashed it.

Speaking regarding advertising, it is fascinating that you could upload a current, ordinary
video with the filter and some activity it was happening on the screen with your face and the
brand. The engagement in here and the millions of viewers it was these game, the
commitment to making the individual the protagonist and share it with their group of friends.
They also had the geolocalisation for advertisement to focalise the target, and this tool has
been a strong filter for clients of the application and a boost, for example, the case of the

30
dating app mentioned before hinge . Currently, Facebook and Instagram as other secondary
applications have got the section gallery where you can upload your videos of a current
situation that last for some hours and see the others activities and with filters.A legitimate
copy of the original idea of Snapchat, although Snapchat still being the pioneer and it has its
generational public, as Instagram and the less audience in this new tool it is Facebook as their
users are a bit older and with less social anxiety, at the moment.

Periscope

Periscope is an open window to your private life. It does not matter if you are music, painter,
you have got a problem and are looking for solutions, you just are watching TV, sitting in the
living room of your house with your couple, you like attention, you think you are the new TV
presenter or infinite possibilities. You can easily connect your mobile phone using its camera
and broadcast live for other people. The only problem they can only text you and of course,
conversation it is limited, except you are very good at being an influencer and prodigy
protagonist with storytelling skills.
To the end, it looks like this kind of applications are the future of broadcasting live with the
opportunity to share in any other social media platform. As it is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
and it is currently popular in the USA to share live news as you were watching the TV news
program, 24 hours, influencers and people are starting to make their gap in this new
application. It is revolutionary again for this world and making oneself, again the protagonist
of their own story.

31
Chapter 3
Case Studies of The Media Protagonist

The aim in this chapter it is to consider whether and how big brand companies have had to
change media strategies, as the Axe campaign showed in the previous chapter, in order to
engage with new demographics, technologic tools and human marketing to build a brand
through new rhetorical approach to digital marketing strategies.

Amy (Cook, 2017) claims that marketing companies are taking the initiative of investing
more in what she defines as blog tours.

Celebrities are expensive and with the rise of traditional celebrities on social media,
popularity can shift quickly. Having your brand associated with just one big name
could be risky, explains Woollard. Though Fun Kids Radio does not use micro-
influencers, Woollard has noticed their rise. You are spreading the word about your
brand through lots of different every day people in a seemingly organic way. (Tait,
2017)

This social tour campaigns from companies use to market their product by the use of
influencers, in addition influencers leverage their platforms to promote the sponsoring
brands. Furthermore, Amy states that the Federal Trade Commission sent an advice to
influencers to trade with brands,

In continuation, I am going to exemplify visually different companies that have developed

mobile applications to facilitate the access to their business. This method of study it is a
general idea of the content based on images, feelings, emotions and usability, therefore as the
characteristics of the analysis, it is not enough data collected for its reliability in this study.
The case studies, mainly deal with the benefit of the citizens of their existence and how
identifies the company's facts with a personal need, also linked to commodity and taking an
essential place in a routinary day.

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CASE STUDY ONE: Hinge

A current example is the news APP in the industry of dating or live broadcast. Being media
savvy does not mean that you need to develop a system where people can see your
advertisement in a VR disposition as not everyone has the last device to reach all your target.
What it means it is to use the tools technology has put to supply and intelligently use them.
The Hinge dating app, for example, created Snapchat geo filters for singles attending
weddings across the USA instead of investing in advertising on Facebook as Snapchat it is
having better results in the audience, engagement and spreading the word. Abramowitz said, -
part of that is because it is trying to find new ways to get people chatting about the app at
weddings or brunch. - (Swant, 2017)

Hinge as a dating APP declared, (Abrams, 2016), that millennials in the midst of a dating
apocalypse somehow make dating apps feel worthwhile? Hinge researched the competition
finding that people using these applications were not changing their status of single, never
exchanged telephone numbers and only the 18% of the users found significant the
application, the rest were endlessly swiping.

(Marketing, 2017)

The strategy of Hinge is different to Tinder and similar applications. This one application, its
focus in the interaction of the user sharing hobbies, music, updating current status that other
people with a similar profile of the survey you are asked to do in the first instance have
similarities within. The other dating app they focus in hot or not hot and swipe to like it or
unlike it giving a hey as a boost of the conversation that luckily you will engage with this
person, the thing that never happens.

33
A recent update of the application was to show if the person you were getting in touch with
hazard, it was already in a relationship. The application was sharing all the content of your
Facebook, and they said that the 3.6%, (500 people), of men, uninstalled the application. This
action from the side of the company it was a good bet for the traffic in their application as
they were betting for the real situation and security of the authentic love seekers.

(Marketing, 2017)

According to the company's research, only 3.6 per cent of Hinge users are off the market
meaning that, in theory, only a small number of users should have concerns about the
apps latest update. (Townsend, 2015)

Apart from the efforts of the company in upgrade the software with new strategies to show to
the client that they are creative and loyal they are also implementing other ways of
promotion, also inside of the cool hunter approach.

With a Snapchat campaign deployed to 25 weddings in eight states across the U.S.,
dating app Hinge created custom filters for every wedding specifically for those
sitting at The Singles Table. The filterslaunched on July 22 and 23featured a

34
 baby blue table in the lower left-hand corner next to the phrase Wheres my date,
Hinge?. (Swant, 2017)

The campaign was a hit as it was seen for more than the 60 percent of the increase in one
hour. Hinge played a smart strategy which was formed by a demographic survey asking
people of an upcoming wedding event. They focused on the core wedding of the single table
to let the linked users of the momentaneum protagonist where they were and their status. So
they relayed partially on users informing the app where they were going to be and the
selected wedding to have the crash.
To the end a sound knowledge of the trends in social media and invest in new features
available for everyone it gives the best result never expected. Everything is changing so fast,
and we need to move at the same rhythm and be in the flow to succeed.

CASE STUDY TWO: Tribe

Referring to their website, Tribe describe a new strategy that gives exposure of brands
through blogs. They work like a blog where brands and influencers join, then the influencers
follow brands. When a brand need an influencer, it works like an award price where brands
publish a brief and influencers create an artwork for them. Afterwards the brand picks the
artwork it suits its needs purchasing the piece.

The aims of the company it is to create a creative and fair place where brands have the
facility to find the influencers and the influencers get sponsorship with authentic advocacy
(Tribe, n/a) for their blog creating a fair professional connection.

Its encouraging to see that over half (51%) of respondents plan to increase and
spend on personalisation. Only 5% say that they will decrease investment in
personalization. The value of using personalisation, such as an improved ability to
connect customers with the most relevant offer or content for them, which leads to
increased engagement and loyalty, is widely recognised. There is also growing
evidence that revealed that the vast majority (96%) of organisations rate
personalisation as a highly or quite valuable method for improving conversion
rates (Adobe, 2017).

There are companies that they have seen the advantage of this can of advertising and had
built up an expertise agency of influencer marketing. For example, the TRIBE and their
convincing video of how effective it is the influencer marketing. They state that they have
done 2800 campaigns with 15 000 influencers and they have completed 100 000 pieces of
content. They define them like TRIBE is an actual marketplace. One that begins with

35
Brands posting a brief to an Influencer segment aligned to their product. If an Influencer is a
fan of the product, they'll submit a lovingly crafted post for Brands to purchase, or politely
decline.

Since Brands only pay for the posts they purchase, it costs nothing but a few minutes
to cast the net and watch the submissions roll in. - (TRIBE, n/a)

(Tribe, n/a)
The briefs they developed are visual eye catching, following a beautiful pattern of light
elements, wood table, and organisation on the picture giving a central and harmonic picture.
It is a cute photo, where the influencers show the product and some development with it.

I.e., If we are speaking about food, they will make some receipt with it and show the final
piece of this dish, in a table, with a bowl, plate, fork, knife, maybe a glass and the product
almost behind of everything, the only branded object. The picture will look like current
trending in an ordinary situation.

36
 (Tribe, n/a)
Other use of the picture it is with graphic design skills where the person will develop a kind
of a holiday postal with graphics and emphasising the product.

(Tribe, n/a)
All these pictures from influencers have a look like a prop of graphic design.
For example, when the designer has finished a logotype for a client, and it uses the logotype
in a real scenario embellishing the whole picture. That will look better than the ugly
presentation of the book of the brand with all the guide lines and the brand in a plain white
piece of paper without putting it in context. Honestly, no one will pay for that if they cannot
see it working in real life. So, same rules apply for influencers, they are the Graphic
Designers of the audience. They engage with the public because they are charismatic people,
with something to tell all of us, and we find in our need and advantage of following them and
being their audience because of the need. But to reach to the protagonist influencer you need
a skill set to complete and find the gap, explain something that no one is doing it and
captivate your public.

37
CASE STUDY THREE: UBER

The values of the company UBER (Uber, 2017) it is defined by Creating possibilities for
riders, drivers, and cities. The company was thought in a snowing Paris where the two
CEOs had to share a taxi and they came up with the idea of getting a cab from an APP with
only pressing a button. Whether its a ride, a sandwich, or a package, we use technology to
give people what they want, when they want it.

(Uber, 2017)

Darshan contrasts the exit of marketing of Uber (Shankar, 2013) with the several strategies
they launched to gather the public. The first marketing strategy of the company is basically
generating demand and tempting the press coverage with the company apparition to a new
place, even though, they fanfare about their launch in this city. Another strategy Darshan
mentions it is the political press coverage, with the story example of David fought Goliath
theme in the New York City.

Apart from media coverage Uber engage with people with referral marketing as it is always
rewarding users and new users with the technic of applying discount codes for each referral
being both sides, the user and the new user, awarded for the sharing. There are other
companies that have the acknowledge that users like to be prized for an action in favour of
the company. A good example of this in the United Kingdom it is the mobile company Giff
Gaff.

Uber every time it promotes it does it big and speaking directly to their users creating a
healthy link that as a consequence gives them a good spread word about the company
positioning them in one of the first most successful business of this contemporary digital
media era.

38
 Ubers marketing strategy in India was never once about large media spends or
traditional mass marketing methods like TV, Print & OOH. It was never even about
huge digital spends. Uber stuck to basics, always. The Uber team focused on building
a good product, putting it out in the market and speaking about it in a language that
instantly built a connect with the consumers. The idea was to convince the consumer
to try out the product once and Uber was confident that the consumers would come
back again. (Malpani, 2015)

Uber imagine what the consumers want using it in their marketing. Darshan (Malpani, 2015)
explains some case studies of their marketing strategies with a common pattern within all of
them, connecting with people answering and fulfilling the need of the public. For example,
Uber run several seasonal campaigns. Over the summer they run the #icecream campaign
where the heat was intense, so they launched an ice cream delivery to the localisation of the
client only tapping the button on the app. The #Christmas campaign it did not get back as
taxis were collecting presents from the clients that wanted to donate presents for the most
needed children in the USA, collecting 60 000 toys. Another seasonal marketing campaign it
was the #Valentines Day where clients could deliver through the application roses to their
partners.

The company Uber marketing strategy it is consistently get in touch with the client and
facilitate their service. Them differentiate from the competitors with the quick accessibility to
the client when this ask for a taxi with an easy payment method that it goes straight to the
bank account instead of looking in your pocket for money.

Uber, it is one of the companies that has used technology to help and improve the experience
of the client in a wise way and use the word-of-mouth as the main approach.

39
CASE STUDY FOUR: Red Bull

Red Bull is one of the most innovative brand for a food and beverage product of an energetic
drink. The company clearly sells an energetic drink and promotes high end action sports and
youth culture-oriented that the CEO Dietric Mateschitzs describes to Terressa (Teressa
Iezzi, 2017). The company describe itself as a master in creative vision and communication
with brand expression. The company uses traditional advertising altogether with digital
media, a company in full.

When launching a product called an Energy Drink and named Red Bull, a product
that stimulates body and mind, it is a short step to the roots where Red Bull came
from. (Teressa Iezzi, 2017)

The drink message is Red Bull give you wings which means that it gives you the strength to
achieve what you want to.

(Teressa Iezzi, 2017)

The marketing strategy of the brand at the beginning they were cartoons that communicate
the message in a humours way and at the end after drinking the beverage they filed away with
the wings the drink proportionates them. The denotation of the advertisement were the values
of the brand that had just started their empire.

In the meanwhile, they were doing advertisement in every possible media they started to
develop the stage two of their brand which was support extreme sports, F1, football and
sports in general. The company also created media advertisement and started to develop
competitions and geographical proves for towns like races, jumps, etc.

40
As Gerhard (Gerhard Gschwandtner, 1998-2017) describes the marketing strategy as a buzz-
marketing that pushes customers to exclusive and exciting events with media coverage
world-wide.

Red Bull has created a no end of advertising but what it connects with the people it is the
humour, full coverage in all the media, and the engagement with adventurous souls as a
freewheeling corporate culture. It is nothing similar to the Uber marketing strategy the Red
Bull one, although it is successful as because of the values of the CEO that implemented in
the company and the insane activities it is the engagement with some of the market, another
engagement it is the support in sport and the innovative way of showing content.
Red Bull stand out in communication and creativity mixing sport and an energetic drink.

CASE STUDY FIVE: WeChat

We chat it is a mobile application like Whats app, Facebook Messenger or Snap Chat that is
used to communicate with your friends group. Tencent (Tencent, 2017) mission is to improve
quality human life through Internet services.

(Shangai, 2016)

Shangai (Shangai, 2016) describes the application Tence as the third application in the
Chinese culture in popularity. The mobile application it is something else than a messenger
application as you can do anything from there. The developers of the application observe that

41
China was one of the countries were internet reached through the internet. Although China
has got a Internet app access limited with governmental barriers, WeChat has demonstrated
be a winner against their competitors, directly in the same continent network and Facebook
and SnapChat, as society it is very distrustful. WeChat developed a series of services through
the app in order to facilitate the life of their users as they observe people had many apps in
the mobile phone.

The innovative application let you associate your bank account to an internal site called
pocket. From this wallet, you can pay a bus, order a taxi, get your flight tickets, and
purchase almost anything (10 m market associated with the app) with the application
integrating all the mobile services imaginable into one single digital identity.

The service included three years ago the red packet service were WeChat users were able to
send money for the Chinese New Year to their family in a customary digital red envelop
converting it in a exciting game. The application also it has a geographic and demographic
system of advertisement without upsetting the user.

WeChat, it is a clever technological solution for the amount of different applications we have
got in the device as a needed to facilitate the life of humans. Consumers that life between the
Western, America and Europe confirm than coming back from China and consumers admit
that coming back from the Western it is like stepping back in technology. Inclusive
Facebook, admitted being an inspirational app and already has advice that is working in
expand the messenger possibilities like them. WeChat has changed in a easy way the life of
Western people solving problems for its users, and it is delights them with new and
unexpected offerings.

42
Chapter 4
Discussion
Since the Industrial Revolution, and following the Second World War, society has been
changing. The introduction of industrial employment has facilitated economic stability, which
has, in turn, led to increased consumerism. Wemick and Moor (2010) said that consumerism
developed previously unattainable attributes such as better status, class and identity as a
result. As the years go by society, culture, politics and the economy are all changing.

Class structure, together with the historical methods of distinction, have divided the
population through social segmentation when it comes to culture. The consumerism in the
Industrial culture and capitalism denoted and put together the fact of in a meaning-making as
a status. According to the research of Bourdieu (1979), the general outcome of capitalism
from a social perspective was symbolized by material possessions, the value of which were
directly related to both the opportunities available and the values of the individual.
Advertising and marketing took advantage of this social segmentation, and through social
media, exploited them, implementing strategies based on identity, taste and consumption.
Today, this demographic segmentation is linked to mobile and web communication
strategies. Due to the potential of having a large community as an audience, brands tend to
exploit the over-use of social media by using it as a place for publicity. It is true that the
sphere of social media can be considered as a shared community. Looking at these facts, I
would argue that it is highly likely stereotypes and patterns within social behaviour have
developed as a direct result of the massive influence of advertising.

Nevertheless, the discussion of the promotional culture as an insight of culture with society
and media and with the behavioural influence of the new social tendency of being the
protagonist of our lifes. People have been curating the their own authenticity since the online
profiles appeared obliged by the design of the site, as introduction of ourselves (Myspace,
Facebook) like presentation letter of themselves.
Social Media accepted, as a mundane part of life, creating the activity into conventional.

'Research is now accepting that the internet is not a space to escape everyday life but
a space in which we continue to project and live daily life via new modes and new
mediums. (Dyer, 2016)

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Technology and Social Media has helped the industry understand customers, and their
patterns and emotions. This creates an affection, which pushes them to have a desire to keep
consuming. However, Bourdieu (1974) and Kapferer (2010) studies conclude that the
distinction of our social classes is inherently maintained by conditioning of the regular social
classes. Jean, (1974), argues that demographic studies with the four different social
mentalities show individuals are influenced by the close circles surrounding them, and
develop within them. In addition to this analysis, an individuals own values and social
criteria are a digital fingerprint, and acknowledge the inclinations of the individual. This class
fragmentation is emerging as a social model in a specific demography; it realises how
advertising segmentation shapes groups of consumers, a diversification of an idiosyncratic
lifestyle related to class and position. Skeggs (2004: 49) rhetoric about influence explains the
existence of groups, suggesting that individuals will adopt their perspective and apply it to
themselves. Seeking the factor of social segmentation in marketing to differentiate people for
gender for example, tends to decline in the ordinariness response of people, attempting to
resist the labelling of classes. In advertising, the protagonist usually plays the role of the
ordinary member of the public.

Teens are the first generation growing up with such widespread technology, and are exposed
to the digital era in which communication discloses different perspectives about taste, values,
culture, and yet, are perceived as individual authorities of ordinariness. Social media has
shaped the point of view of consumption in two-way-conversation and the authenticity of the
individuality as the most visible facts.

Storytelling is helping marketers by establishing and nurturing customer connections:

Influencer marketing, non-digital, is one of the most traditional advertising

channels, and rightfully so, as 94% of those who used influencer marketing, believe
its an effective strategy. Its so popular now that brands must evolve to stand out and
avoid blending in with the competing social media promotion its becoming very
crowded. This practice stands out from traditional digital advertising, with 47% of
online consumers in the 18-24 demographic using ad blockers, it gives brands, even
more, the reason to explore influencer marketing. (Patel, 2017)

Harry (Dyer, 2016) discusses one feature of Social Media as the authenticity of the real
individual, and the emphasis of the differentiation of the imaginary individual inside the
network. Whilst, discussing the context with the chapter three and the need of responding to
the public like they are the only client to satisfy with exclusivity. Therefore, there is the need

44
to position ourselves in an environment which enables us to achieve the protagonist through
selfies and self-brand identity. In the meantime, we share it through stories and summarise it
in websites like Instagram and Facebook.

Applications like Facebook let people construct their persona every time they need to,
through familys photos, albums, likes, universal values and interaction with our friends;
giving people that chance to retouch the content in privacy to maximise self-promotion.
However, in this social-digital place, the level of performance is high. This can cause a
secondary issue of rejection in real life, because it is too obvious that people are trying to be a
false persona hiding behind the digital profile they hold online. Meanwhile, Facebook is a
social networking tool that helps telling stories about our life. There are also a range of
applications like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr and many other sites, where people pin
and upload photographs to curate an aesthetic style, trying to look appealing, that does not
mean it is this person if not a wish item in the basket, in baskets shape or photographic
gallery (Aronczyk; Powers, 2010). In this case then, taking from Aronczyk and Powers
(2010) argument, they speak about individualism as it is on Facebook, and how it will be a
common network that connects through a story you publish and people can link because of
the attachment to the person or the engagement with the subject.

New technologies give companies opportunities, adopting new marketing tools to refine and
focus on their target via the internet, and not spending money trying to reach a wide
demographic of the public, the majority of which will probably will not be even interested in
what the campaign is about. As (Marketing, 2017) technology has become helpful for
companies, Kapferer (2012) said, they are reducing unnecessary costs and investing in
communication. Moreover, Kapferer (2012) also suggests that brands accumulate advertising
in societies who have seen necessity as a consequence of investment for innovations and
renovations. This necessity creates a link with the targets engagement and personal
individuality, and is therefore an excellent opportunity to strongly re-establish the brand in
public.

45
Chapter 5
Conclusion
Since the Industrial Revolution and the growth of Capitalisms and developing marketing
technologies, companies have been wanting to identify themselves as brands from their
competitors, by placing more significance on the capacity of consumption in meaning-
making as status and class.
While marketing has a long history of using fantasy and celebrities to sell everything from
shoe polish to cars, there is a recent turn to the mundane and the rise of the protagonist on
social media.

The growth of the protagonist has been discussed throughout this dissertation, and the
evolution across the affordances of social media has been explored. The findings of the
protagonist steams from the social media culture where it has swapped the behaviours of
teens altogether with the social distinction.
The current situation depicts that, with the influence of social media and the accessibility of
the internet as a limitless tool, which has emerged a new methodology of thinking and
communication, in particular, the approach of individual presentation as a distinguished
person.
Since the moment of different digital networks, it shifted the traditional introduction and the
thinking tendency to becoming much more narcissist, to the opposite angle in the digital era.
This influence declined a change in the stratagem of marketing and advertising as well.
Because of the already existing exhibition to the massive advertisement, teens are more aware
of strategies codifying the outcome of marketers.

Consumers have slipped from being the advertising industrys prey, to became bloggers and
authors of lifestyle.
People in a 'naive' inclination started to building up their self-confidence sharing and meeting
their own needs. As an example, the cool hunters; bloggers that create contents for the
general public, or in personal preference and directing topics in any virtual shape to the
fulfilment of the individual requirements, for example, social awareness; building up self-
confidence; diaries; or promotion of the self-brand. Which led to the point, where we are
making, almost obliged, a self-brand in a virtual space by the design of the platforms.

46
In the meantime, we live a real ordinary life, apart from the virtual fictional facet, outside
the technology converting each self to a true-to-life individual, meaning that probably the
class distinction at this stage conveys people with similar needs. However, the eccentric
picture of the situation pushes promotional culture to meet general needs in personalised
messages because of the connotations in digital social networks and our behaviours towards
them.
A part of the individuality of each person, a critical methodology of engagement has been
refined with the apparition of the influencers, in a conventional personification with
connections. Through the communicative tool of storytelling, marketers can approach the
public with a personal framework that inspires people with values, style, problem-solving and
humour that catches a long-term relationship with the self-brand, brand or/and target.

In order to change stereotypes, and appeal to the younger audience organisations have made
use of the kind of authenticity, that it is prized through social media. Digital generations
refuse the attempt of social labelling in consequence of retrograde characteristic that does not
define the authenticity of the individual; instead, it gives a broad overview as the social
distinction did.
'Authenticity' suggests the individual creative performance, which also has flourished closer
with narcissist patterns of behaviour in consumerism.
The features of authenticity in the Social Media are the imaginative idea of a real individual
inside the network with an emphasis on the differentiation of oneself. Oneself leads as the
self-brand that is curated by this person seemingly as an influential daydream protagonist.

So technology is improving the demography and psychography of the marketing target with
segmentation, although with this segmentation and again, people are more aware of the
advertising culture with the option of skipping ads in any moment.

This again, is an excellent opportunity to re-establish a notice the brand in public and create a
connection with the public, that can achieve a diverse shape of strategy engagement
corresponding to the target and their needs.

If we take SnapChat as an application that has led the idea of protagonist very clearly with
its functionality. The application is basic, it consists of a video recorded application with
some filters. However, teens that are the target of this application use it to narrate their lives

47
and activities often during the day. Like take a snap with the camera, and let's chat.
However, predominantly the application has used the new trends of protagonism and
marketing and also the playful mixing and creative advertising tool. Its characteristic
distinction is the playfulness of the filters and the time limitations of the publications, leading
to imaginative uses of the application and engaging people to update their daily activities
shared with their close circles. Apart from that, it has taken a big step in front of Facebook
and Instagram as the top ranking application for teenagers, that are the target for this
application, because of the different demographic advertising that the application disposes
apart from the video.

Uber, Asics and WeChat are innovative consumer applications in the social media. They
stand out of the competition because of the wise use of the technology, with the need of the
individual. Each one of these is different, but the functionality is tap and get it. The
contemporary digital culture is understood and applied by these companies, as the answer of
usability and making the individual feel unique.

Hinge as a dating application has stood out with the competitors because of the research of
the issues in this kind of applications with the consumers. They developed and updated the
application constantly from the perspective of the client, in which they engage the user as
they look forward to reliability. For example, as the competition only focuses on the
aesthetics, Hinge instead took a step out and offered to their clients the chance of aesthetics
and the personal values in a diverting story telling of the profile you are looking at.

Finally, this is has been a good marketing strategy for advertising to reach the public which
compromises diverse factors to make it successful. In my point of view, it consists of a
human narrative and a good storytelling; if influencers speak about it, it is a successful
research of the marketing demographics, psychographic segmentation; wise technological use
of the media that wants to be applied so it focuses on how it can be easy to use and in making
a change of the current market and to also engage people with some reward in any shape
that will create the word of mouth to mouth; It is never late to redefine and adapt to the
different digital interfaces.

48
The antithesis
Of course, the antithesis of the research is that, being in the social media this social
promotion cultures a phenomenon that spreads with an incredible speed of time. But it is
important to consider that how it could develop further. Is this digital-culture model destinies
of survival? We can make a hypothesis that people might start being tired of too much public
sphere of (digital) social life? We have recently assisted to a new phenomenon of internet
digital suicide which is an example of this. It happened to celebrities tired of fake profiles
treating them and it happened to people who are embarrassed when someone looks for them
with the searching tool Google showing all their profiles. Another finding has been
referenced to Bourdieu (1974) and Kapferer (2010) and the study of the patterns of behaviour
which is developing different profiles of the use of the media, with a passive almost inactive
performance - the viewer.
Or again, as we are already being analysed; people have started using ad block that
provides us information about customers growing awareness to the massive hype. The
overuse of cookies, advertising control system, in which many applications provide you the
ad free option when you upgrade your profile like Spotify for example.

Google has developed a strategy of 5 second ads in which they support that contemporary
generations to not pay attention to more than 5 seconds in any message given if it is not
relevant. So that, Google is developing in YouTube a new strategy of 5 second adverts
aiming for short engaging stories.

Who is using who in advertising? The brand promoting is its products or the target as a
protagonist selecting the products?

49
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Virtual Appendix
https://maresearchdigitalandmedia.tumblr.com

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