Vem säger vad? En kritisk diskursanalys av promotion i modebloggar

Sammanfattning: An emerging tool within public relations is the use of bloggers as spokespersons because of their ability to act as influencers. This study investigates how fashion bloggers present products and services they receive from companies in their blogs. The research questions address how discourses are manifested and how independence is expressed in the texts. Based on Fairclough's theory of discourses, a critical discourse analysis has been conducted on fashion blog posts to identify power relations between companies, bloggers and readers. The results present that blog posts are interdiscursive by including different genres and discourses in the fashion blog order of discourse. In order to highlight the bloggers independence, the fashion blog posts are tailored to three intertextual strategies, rendition-, FAQ- and narrative strategy. Furthermore, the blogger identifies with the selected products and services presented and formulates the relationship with companies with subjective modalities and mixed intertextuality. As a consequence, the blogposts does not clearly convey who the sender is and the readers are thus tricked into accepting companies’ communications as the blogger's personal communication. This study shows that the use of influencers results in insufficient transparency which becomes ethically controversial for public relations practice, where the sender is always to be made clear.