Racism in advertising in the beauty industry : emotional responses in social media during racism related crises

Abstract

This study discusses social media’s impact on crisis communication by analyzing the online communication around two different social media crisis situations. These two situations, around the beauty and fashion brands H&M and Dove, both deal with racism related discourse caused by the brands own products or advertisements. This thesis takes a look into how these two organizations handled the sudden crisis situations and how people reacted to the public statements released by each company on Twitter and Facebook. The cases were analyzed with the help of previous crisis communication theories and models, such as SCCT, SMCC, ICM and the social media crisis communication matrix. The research was qualitative and utilized critical discourse analysis. The findings of this study showed that, as predicted by the earlier theories, people expressed different emotions based on the crisis response strategies used by the organization, the origin of the crisis, and the level of responsibility attributed to the organization by the stakeholders. However, there were also vast differences in the emotional reactions between audience members, depending on how they interpreted the crisis. Unlike other crisis situations, such as faulty products, in racism-related crises the responsibility for the crisis is determined by whether the stakeholder believes racism was present or not. This caused some of the audience members to express anger and disappointment, while others expressed sympathy.