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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the representations and experiences of beauty amongst fat women to understand how females located outside of the normative ideal consume, express, challenge and resist “straight” beauty.

A netnographic approach is taken to analyse 922 blog posts written by five female “fatshionistas” who play a significant role in the Australian fat activism movement.

The research findings illustrate that fatshionistas (re)negotiate cultural notions of beauty through three performative acts – coming out as fat, mobilising fat citizenship and flaunting fat.

The study demonstrates how beauty is negotiated as a mode of praxis, a performance in the interaction of day‐to‐day life, whereby the possibilities for multiple and provisional beauties are highlighted.

Given the active participation of those outside of the idealised form in “mainstream” beauty consumption, practitioners should make visible multiple bodily representations that are not reduced to an unhelpful construction of what is considered to be “real”.

By emphasising the lived experience of beauty as something subjective, communal and resistant, this research poses a challenge to mainstream marketing that constructs beauty as normative, singular and conformist. The paper further calls for a “queering” of the gender research agenda within marketing to better interrogate the linkages between an individual's fluid and contested identity work, consumption and marginalised or excluded status within the marketplace.

Marketing literature views word-of-mouth (WOM) as unidirectional communication in which consumers transmit either positive or negative messages based on their consumption experiences. Becoming visible in online forums, however, are consumers who engage in WOM as part of interactions with other consumers. This article aims to investigate a phenomenon frequently occurring in these interactions: consumers who defend companies and brands against others' negative WOM.

The authors investigated the online defense phenomenon in its natural setting using an online ethnography, known as a netnography.

This study provides empirical evidence for the existence of six different defense styles, as well as details of the identified factors underlying consumers' choices of defense styles. Moreover, the authors' analysis highlights the different outcomes of various company- and brand-defending behaviors and illustrates that this consumer phenomenon can be effective in preventing the spread of negative WOM or in mitigating its impact.

Future research could benefit from further testing the effectiveness of the various defense styles as well as investigating how to stimulate this important buffer against negative WOM.

Companies are increasingly allocating resources to the monitoring of online conversations so as to be able to respond to criticisms in social media. The authors' findings indicate that other consumers frequently respond to these complaints before the companies do. These company and brand defenders could replace some of the resources companies currently devote to social media.

The present study identifies company and brand defending as a new WOM activity, thus extending the concept of WOM beyond praising and complaining. In addition, this study suggests that consumers who counter negative messages are not necessarily loyal, as previously assumed, but rather motivated by a sense of justice or a need for self-enhancement.