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Around the mid-2000s, the first wave of young Thai women who attained fame organically on the internet emerged when their photos and profiles were widely shared by friends and fans in web communities and discussion forums. Comprising mainly of students, these women were known as “net idols” and celebrated primarily for their looks, as online conversations focused on their beauty, cosmetic and dressing skills, and overall pleasant appearance. Since then, some of these net idols have parlayed their online popularity into commercial exchanges and partnerships by advertising for clients, evolving into a commercial form of microcelebrity known as “influencers” (Abidin, 2016), while still others progressed into different forms of internet celebrity confined only to online fame as social capital without further tangible returns. In this chapter, we review the conceptual history of net idols and a subset of influencers known as “beauty bloggers” in Thailand, drawing on observations and content analyses of net idols’ Instagram posts, beauty bloggers’ Facebook posts, conversations from selected discussion boards, and popular sentiment about these internet celebrities in tabloids and online websites. Most of the content is originally in Thai and translated by the first author.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the use of beauty blogging selfies in conveying consumer authenticity. The authors used an under-researched consumer-based authenticity approach.

The authors adopt a practice theory approach to selfies as both objects and practices. The study combines depth-interviews with a review of the participants’ blogs and selfies.

This research shows that bloggers use selfies as records of product trial, success and failure via specific sub-types. These selfies function as authenticating consumer acts, intertwined with key life narratives and as records of communal events, where bloggers identify as a community.

This research is limited to beauty bloggers. Further research on consumer authenticity could be extended to other product categories and other media channels. The widened definition of selfies proposed enables further research on self-representational practices in consumption contexts. Likewise, the practice theory approach could be extended to other online contexts.

As social media and peer endorsement become ever more important to marketers, brands are seeking to leverage bloggers as brand ambassadors as well as the authenticity they convey. Maintaining this authenticity and credibility among peer networks and audiences is crucial for influencers and for marketers.

This study contributes to the understanding of consumer-based authenticity, self-representational practices using selfies and beauty blogging communities. Practice theories are applied in an online context, suggesting an opening for further research into mediated practices.

The purpose of this paper is to treat bloggers as human brands and applies self-congruity theory to explore how actual and ideal blogger-reader self-congruity, combined with the blog’s functional congruity, influences blogger-reader relationship quality (BRRQ) and the blogger’s informational influence, taking perceived interactivity among blog members as a moderator.

Using a survey of 372 female beauty blog readers, this study employs the structural equation modelling approach to investigate the proposed model.

The empirical findings indicate that readers’ perceived self-congruity with beauty bloggers raises the bloggers’ informational influence, mediated by BRRQ and functional congruity. Actual self-congruity has greater predictive power than ideal self-congruity in explaining bloggers’ informational influence. Moreover, perceived interactivity plays a two-sided role because it strengthens the positive impact of BRRQ on informational influence but weakens the positive impact of functional congruity on informational influence.

The findings should help marketers identify influential beauty bloggers through their presented image on their blogs to encourage readers’ acceptance of their opinions about products and services. However, when focusing on beauty blogs featuring high-perceived interactivity among blog members, marketers should carefully balance the facilitating and offsetting effect of perceived interactivity and identify bloggers equipped with superior BRRQ.

Using human brand and parasocial interaction perspectives, this study contributes to emerging research on human brands and blog marketing and demonstrates that perceived interactivity is a double-edged sword in stimulating a blogger’s informational influence.

Heightened public concerns for the global environment due to human overexploitation have given rise to many green product initiatives by businesses. Green cosmetics (GC) are products developed and marketed based on ecological sustainability and have shown increasing consumer appeal worldwide. The current research investigates the antecedents of green cosmetics consumption among Indian GC users, hitherto un-investigated comprehensively.

The study is a cross-sectional pairwise comparison of green evaluation criteria for cosmetics using an expert panel of thirty Indian cosmetic users using a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) and investigate the impact of a comprehensive list of antecedents on the multi-criteria category consumption decision.

The study results indicate that perceived consumer effectiveness is the most critical factor for green cosmetics consumption in India, followed by brand trust, behavioural control, and environmental effectiveness. The least important factors are price and social norms.

As the GC category is at nascent stage in India the investigation is limited to the GC category innovators – a set of people high in intellectual and financial resources. The study is also limited to women users as the male cosmetic market in the country is still very small.

The study results can help marketers in designing and implementing GC related marketing strategies to deliver higher customer value to the target segment. Academicians can use the study results for better prediction of category related behaviour of consumers.

The study results will help promote GC category adoption and usage which can benefit the environment and consumer health.

The study contributes to literature and practice by assessing a comprehensive set of critical antecedents to GC adoption using a novel approach of F-AHP and an expert user panel. The study results offer insights to marketers that can be used to develop suitable strategies to convert non-GC users into GCs in India and similar markets, improving category penetration and benefitting marketers, retailers, users, and the environment.

The clean beauty phenomenon is gaining momentum and beauty brands are getting creative with on-pack sustainability claims. With the increasing focus on sustainability from both brands and consumers, sustainability communication has the potential to raise the profile of sustainable production and consumption. Further attention is needed on the creative approach behind on-pack sustainability marketing communications as companies no longer focus on single eco labels but instead use a bundle of claims to advertise their commitment to sustainability which finds consumers confused and brands open to accusations of greenwashing. This chapter explores on-pack sustainability communications in the beauty industry through the lenses of creative marketing communications which need to be both original and appropriate. This study contributes to the longstanding debate on the role of sustainability claims in marketing communications and addresses the role of on-pack sustainability claims design and creativity.

This study aims to explore passionate labour in the fashion blogosphere and addresses two research questions: How does passion animate passionate labour? How does the emotion of passions and the discipline of labour fuse within passionate labour?

This study presents a three-year netnographic fieldwork of replikate fashion blogger-preneurs. Data are based on in-depth interviews, blogs, social media posts and informed by the relationships developed across these platforms.

Throughout the findings, this study unpacks the “little passions” that animate the passionate labour of blogger-preneurs. Passions include: passion for performing the royal lifestyle, the mobilisation of passion within strategic sociality and transformation and self-renewal through blogging. Lastly, the cycle of passion illustrates how passions can be recycled into new passionate projects.

This study offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics.

This study raises implications for aspiring blogger-preneurs, luxury brand managers and organisations beyond the blogging context.

The contribution of this study lies in the cultural understanding of passion as a form of labour where passion has become a way of life. The theorisation of passionate labour contributes to existing research in three ways. First, this study identifies social mimesis as a driver of passionate labour and its links to class distinction. Second, it offers insight on how passionate labour requires the negotiation and mobilisation of emotion alongside a calculated understanding of market logics. Third, it advances critical debate around exploitation and inequality within digital labour by demonstrating how passion is unequally distributed.

This chapter explores food culture in social media. It focuses in particular on the affordances offered by social media platforms to create, develop and negotiate individual digital identities, which mediate personal, social and professional relationships with and investment in food, nurture and wellbeing. It examines the adoption of specific social media platforms for commercial and societal use, as well as the significant impact that the digitally curated food culture identities of influential others such as celebrity chefs, food bloggers, lifestyle gurus and self-styled ‘experts’ can have on their followers. There is, for example, Twitter’s role as a monitor of food choice decisions and a data source for food-related consumer behaviour research, and the use of Instagram by brands and companies in contrast to Facebook’s deployment as a community‑building social media tool where interest groups can share information, views and mutual support. The photogenic, young female lifestyle guru is the object of special scrutiny in which the apparent effortlessness with which they have achieved the self they present and their legitimacy to pronounce on health and nutrition is called into question. Finally, the chapter does not offer comprehensive nor conclusive findings on the experiences and exchanges depicted here which develop an overview of social media food cultures. Rather, it presents a flavour of the complex nexus of issues surrounding engagement with the topic in terms of reflections on society itself and on the role such interactions play in the creation of self-identity.