My friend Kånken : A qualitative study about expressing idenity trough exposure of brands on Instagram

Today, individuals is faced with many choices about how they want to live their lives and which way they should go. Their own identity and self-expression have become important in the modern society. Individuals are offered many different methods for creating and expressing themselves and one of them is consumption of brands. Social media is at the same time taking up an increasing proportion of people's everyday lives and previous research shows that people work to a great extent with their self-representation online. The current problems concerning the climate can partly be traced to over-consumption. This have aroused interest in further research in how individuals express their own identity online by exposing brands that they consume. This way of self-expression is done by letting different brands image and associations tell others and the individuals themselves, who they are. The aim of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of identity-creating expressions and how they could take shape in private individuals in a consumer society, through exposure of brands on their social media and how these could contribute to re-interpretation of different brands. In order to provide answers and investigate the purpose of the study, a qualitative method have been suitable, which have created a deeper understanding of the research area. The study confines itself to Instagram, which is an image sharing service, which justifies the use of semiotic analysis beyond that it is the method that fits the questions. In addition to this, we have chosen to analyze the backpack Fjällräven Kånken from the brand Fjällräven and how it is exposed by its consumers on Instagram. The brand has been interesting to investigate because of its environmentally conscious profile and that it seems to be popular to depict on Instagram, something that can be seen by the fact that a large number of pictures on Fjällräven Kånken are gathered under hashtags on the platform. To answer the study's purpose, an general question was asked, "How do individuals present themselves, with the help of exposing Fjällräven's backpack Kånken on Instagram?". Then three related sub-questions was created that will circle the main question and the purpose, through these we could make interpretations that indicate that Fjällräven Kånken is used for self-representative purposes on Instagram. In a larger selection of 147 posts, we were able to identify three different ideal types of representations of the brand, which were then analyzed in greater depth in 10 sample images. The ideal types are "Kånken as fashion gear", " the travel companion" and "the practical backpack", these are three different identity-creating expressions and interpretations of the brand. The results shows that interpretations primarily confirmed the brand rather than going beyond the brand's own image. Overall, we could see that exposure of brands online works as a form of identity creation, because the brand that is exposed raises a number of associations with the recipients that consigners then can be identified with. Keywords: Identity-creating expressions, brands, consumption, Instagram, Fjällräven Kånken