The aim of this thesis is to get an understanding of how Daniel Wellington is using visual communication to communicate their brand identity on Instagram. It is also about how they use hashtags to engage their consumers into their brand community. The questions this thesis answers are “How does Daniel Wellington use visual communication to communicate their brand identity on Instagram?” and “How does Daniel Wellington use hashtags to engage their consumers?”. To answer these questions consumer to consumer marketing, influencer marketing, semiotics and snapshot theory have been used as a theoretical basis. Methods used for this thesis is a semiotic analysis with denotation and connotation. Through denotation and connotation, the chosen pictures have been carefully analysed to answer the questions of the thesis.             The results from the analysis shows that Daniel Wellington communicate their brand identity very good because the pictures posted on their Instagram represented it well. The sign of engagement in the hashtags turned out to be very engaging for the consumers to keep wanting to post pictures with and of Daniel Wellington’s products.

On Valentine’s day 2018, Swedish watchmaker Daniel Wellington posted a photo of a gay male couple followed by a caption celebrating the love between the two subjects. The photo was posted to the brand’s Instagram account reaching an audience of four million followers. The brand’s followers responded with great amounts of engagement ranging from excitement and support for featuring a same-sex couple, to almost equal amounts homophobic disapproval. This thesis, a case study of Daniel Wellington’s social media and social media staff, examines the effects of including same-sex couples in social media marketing. Previous research on LGBTQ+ representation in advertising has identified the polarizing reactions same-sex couples in marketing usually evoke. Using existing literature on the subject as a theoretical framework, this thesis analyzes the effects of including two photos of same-sex couples, one male-male couple and one female-female couple, in Daniel Wellington’s Instagram account. A statistical analysis of the reactions to these photos on Instagram will be followed by interviews with the brand’s social media staff in order to explore the corporate response to the reactions to the social media representations of same-sex couples. This thesis will suggest, partially in line with previous research, that the social media content featuring same-sex couples created a lot of engagement among its followers, with comparatively high levels of polarization. The data identified a significant difference between how the gay male couple and the same-sex female couple were evaluated. Additionally, the interviews with the social media staff suggest that, despite the high levels of negative reactions, including same-sex couples in their social media channels did not have a deterring effect on their commitment to include more types of diversity in the brand’s social media feeds. The interviews with the social media staff indicate that the experience of including same-sex couples in the brand’s social media marketing efforts had the effect of raising awareness of issues of homophobia among the staff members.

Engagemang och samskapande i symbios kan leda till samskapande av värde för samtliga inblandade aktörer. Studien ämnar att undersöka hur och varför företag arbetar med engagemang och samskapande på Instagram. För att undersöka detta har studien applicerats på företaget Daniel Wellington. Fallstudien bygger på semistrukturerade intervjuer samt kompletterande observationer på Instagram för att ge en bredare bild av hur företaget arbetar med engagemang och samskapande genom nätverk. Resultatet visar att samskapande och engagemang påverkar varandra. Genom aktörsengagemang inom nätverk på Instagram uppmuntras och skapas förutsättningar för samskapande av content. När dessa faktorer är i harmoni kan den så kallade “Daniel Wellington-effekten” förklaras. Effekten innebär att varumärket till viss del marknadsför sig självt. Det förklaras genom att företaget och externa aktörers samarbete leder till samskapande av content samt publicering på Instagram. Detta samskapande leder till ett ökat engagemang inom båda aktörernas nätverk.