Clarifying the concept branded content and its institutional logics?
(A2026-134218)

AUTHORS

BJOERN ASMUSSEN, Oxford Brookes University

ABSTRACT

The concept of branded content has emerged as one of the new managerial paradigms in the advertising and marketing communications industry. However, exactly what the concept of branded content means is still highly contested. To help address this issue, we used an innovative collaborative management research (CMR) design to investigate the different competing institutional logics of branded content discourse through an integrative review of 528 documents. This review helped us to develop a systematic typology of branded content and to analyze its four competing institutional logics. This typology contributes to the advancement of advertising and marketing communications discourse by (1) systematically clarifying for the first time the different general perspectives on branded content adopted in the industry, and (2) providing evidence that branded content needs to be delineated from the concepts of advertising and content marketing to improve the clarity of all three concepts.