Challenges of Self-Presentation and Athlete Branding Among Saudi Female Exercisers: An Auto-ethnography of a Muslim Saudi Personal Trainer Instagram User

Abstract

Some athletes have attracted millions of audiences, even if being namely recognised. Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar JR., and David Beckham have the most Instagram followers on a global scale. Online Social Networks (OSN) allows users to establish their profiles to communicate with others through actions such as follows and comments. Currently, athletes prefer to utilise Instagram for self-branding purposes. Therefore, many studies have examined their practices. From the rising of Model of Athlete Brand Image MABI offline practices to the development of online athlete branding consumers’ engagements on social media, all studies have concerned three main categories to build athlete brand image, namely Athletic performance, Attractive appearance, and Marketable lifestyles. As a Saudi female personal trainer who uses Instagram to build a brand image, this auto-ethnography aims to reflect on my personal experiences, including cultural aspects that affect athlete branding strategies. Athlete branding studies have not focused on cultural differences yet. Most Muslim Saudi women are culturally conservative; they cover their bodies in public as a religious practice. This qualitative study describes my own experiences and Instagram visual content selections. It attempts to understand the motives, outcomes, and online self-presentation challenges and strategies of Muslim female exercisers who aim to build their athlete brand image. A key result indicated that Attractive appearance category was not applicable in the self-presentation of a Muslim female athlete in her athlete branding strategies. The trainer encountered some cultural challenges, for instance, religious values such as veiling and gender segregation, which conflict with the ability to rely on the self-characteristics for branding. Therefore, other strategies were applied, such as presenting body composition before and after test results and testimonials for clients.

Personal Branding on Instagram: The Challenges Encountered by Saudi Female Fitness Trainers

“…It is also clear that the participants raised similar challenges as the researcher found through analysing her personal experience (Basabain et al, 2021). Most of the exercisers' families expect roles from them as women are stereotyped in relation to their religious values, customs, traditions, and conservatism level.…”

“…The findings in this section were categorised into four main themes. Three themes are adopted from (Basabain et al 2021), coded as: " Family and social traditions, Followers bullying and Religious values". Husband's jealousy was raised as a cultural challenge encountered by the participants.…”

“…For my descriptive qualitative research, I aim to understand the online personal branding challenges, such as privacy, veiling and gender segregation. I already built an initial understanding of the challenges that I encountered in my branding practices as a Saudi woman through my personal experience on Instagram (Basabain et al, 2021). In his book The Body Silent, the cultural anthropologist Robert Murphy ( 2001) advocates the need to connect auto-ethnographies with existing theories to build an initial understanding of the research problem.…”

“…The findings in this section were categorised into seven main themes. Three themes are adopted and modified from (Basabain et al 2021), coded as: "Faking personality, Low skills and Low commitment". The findings were demonstrated in table 2.…”

“…One is categorised as professional challenges, and the other was challenges related to the type of sport. One of the themes under the category of professional challenges was adopted from (Basabain et al 2021), coded as: "Lack of sports facilities". The findings were demonstrated in table 3,4.…”