Influencer Transgressions and Community Repair: How Online Brand Communities Renegotiate Personal Brand Meaning in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The alignment between brands and online brand communities through co-creative practices offers value but is fragile when faced with brand transgressions. While these co-creative practices and collaborative processes in which brands and consumers jointly create meaning and identity provide important relational benefits, they can be difficult to sustain. Building on this tension, this study examines how brand transgressions impact communal brand relationships rooted in co-creation. Using a processual approach and qualitative inquiry, including netnography and semi-structured interviews, the study explores community members’ responses to two controversies involving the influencer-founded brand Djerf Avenue: copyright enforcement and workplace misconduct allegations. Findings reveal how the brand community navigates crisis through four overlapping coping stages of instigation, distillation, mobilization, and remembrance, and subsequently employs four interrelated repair strategies of aestheticizing, norm-alizing, trivializing, and personalizing to reframe symbolic meaning, manage identity dissonance, and collectively restore legitimacy. Overall, this study contributes to marketing, public relations, and crisis management literature by offering new insights into brand transgressions, consumer coping, and legitimacy repair, while emphasizing the fragility of personal brands and the co-creative power of brand communities in shaping, challenging, or restoring brand meaning.