Bloggers as Brands and Self-Marketers: An ethnographic approach

Food is not only necessary for survival, it is also tied to individual identity, culture and society (Caplan, 1997). Food bloggers present and communicate their food choices which are closely tied to a sense of self identity (Bisogni et al., 2002), and are as varied as the diets found in the UK. Food photography and discussions are popular on social media where people “use food to find a sense of personal identity, and perform their identity on an ongoing basis” (J. Walter Intelligence, 2015, p. 3). Digital identities are dynamic and progressive (Kerrigan & Hart, 2016) and so online groupings of people are nebulous and shifting. Groups that share interests and congregate in communities online have been referred to as ‘small worlds’ (Patino et al., 2012).
While other studies have covered the value of bloggers to brands who partner with them to reach the blog readership, this PhD will examine the blogs and bloggers themselves as communication channels, entrepreneurial ventures and/or brands. This study will employ an immersive and multi-sited ethnography comparing multiple case studies of bloggers. Blogger motivations and methods for building blogs as communication channels, self marketing platforms, entrepreneurial ventures and brands will be fully described and explored against literature. The aim of the research is to define bloggers as self-marketers, brands or entrepreneurs in order to more clearly articulate self marketing and self-branding as valid