True, fake and alternative: a topology of news and its implications for brands

Abstract

Purpose Berthon and Pitt (2018) recently highlighted the symbiotic relationship between fake news and brands. This paper aims to draw on semiotics to refine the fake/real news dichotomy to a fourfold typology. Design/methodology/approach First, the authors turn to semiotics and review Greimas’ (1966) semiotic square. Second, they use this framework to refine the fake/real news dichotomy into a four-fold typology. Third, they illustrate each type with a news report on the topic of climate change. Fourth, they apply this framework to reveal four types of brand: real, fake, empty and ironic. Findings Given that brand communications are heterogeneous, the authors suggest that the typology can be reconceptualized as dimensions and brands communications decoded accordingly. They conclude by exploring further opportunities offered by the semiotic square for interpretive investigation. Originality/value The value of the paper lies in the novel use of the semiotic square to shed light on both news and brand communications.

Fake news or true lies? Reflections about problematic contents in marketing

“…Such differences may seem small, but they are important for getting a thorough understanding of the issue (Jack, 2017). The different shades of disinformation seem to appear along a continuum concerning the truthfulness (Berthon et al, 2019) and intent (Levi, 2017). At one extreme of the continuum, there is disinformation entirely created without a factual basis (i.e., fake news) but able to amplify and reinforce previous beliefs.…”

Fake news: a classification proposal and a future research agenda

“…Clickbait and partisan fake news fit this category. Scholars have detected many types such as false brand and marketing communication (Berthon et al , 2019; Chen and Cheng, 2020), intention to deceive by non-media actors (Finneman and Thomas, 2018) and media actors (Kirner-Ludwig, 2020; Leeder, 2019) and false information to gain politically or financially, increase readership, biased public opinion (Meel and Vishwakarma, 2019; Zhang and Ghorbani, 2020) to name a few. Final approach is to consider the main characteristics of digital communication which enabled the rapid, vast and untrue information into our daily lives.…”

“…Therefore, a definition irrespective of objective reality must be proposed. (Mourão and Robertson, 2019) Some brands communication could be considered as fake news which are purposely designed to obfuscate or mislead the consumer Marketing, branding (Berthon et al, 2019) News articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers but need more elaboration Politics Democracy, journalism (Buschman, 2019); information management, journalism (Montgomery and Gray, 2017) Fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent designed to mislead or gain profit online or offline Digital journalism, conceptualization (Lazer et al, 2018); Consumer research, social media (Chen and Cheng, 2020); Marketing, corporations and branding (Weidner et al, 2019); Politics, human rights (McGonagle, 2017); academia, college students, (Leeder, 2019); information management, journalism (Finneman and Thomas, 2018); conceptualization (Molina et al, 2021;Zhou and Zafarani, 2020) Fake news arises whenever the process of information is defective and/or disguised as true online or offline Internet and mass media, internet as a platform (Floridi, 1996); Politics, social media (Shin et al, 2018); Social media, sharing behavior (Talwar et al, 2019) Misinformation that involves information that is inadvertently false and is shared without intent to cause harm, while disinformation involves false information knowingly being created and shared to cause harm Social media, classification algorithm (Wang et al, 2019) A subset of false information and is False information spread under the guise of being authentic news usually spread through news outlets or internet with an intention to gain politically or financially, increase readership, biased public opinion Information management, internet and social media (Meel and Vishwakarma, 2019); Politics, Western democracies (Humprecht, 2019) Fake quoting is a form of fake news, or miss-quoting is a process in which a text is taken out of context and deviates the audience from the original topic Politics; social media (Kirner-Ludwig, 2019) All false information published and spread through internet which are aimed at intentional misleading, deceiving to gain monetary, political or other benefits Social media, conceptualization (Zhang and Ghorbani, 2020) The phenomenon of information exchange between an actor and acted upon that primarily attempts to invalidate generally-accepted conceptions of truth for the purpose of altering established power structures Academia, faculty and academic staff…”

“…Since the fake news can be exchanged for money, it is extending into marketing domain and practice. Even some scholars suggest that to some extent, branding communication can be considered as fake news (Berthon et al , 2019). But despite this prevalence of fake news, still there is not a consensus on definition of fake news or even the term itself, and unlike the past, the concept no longer refers to the untruthful information (Molina et al , 2021).…”

Guest editorial

“…We start with three conceptual papers that come from different theoretical perspectives. Drawing from semiotics theory, Berthon et al (2020) create a typology of fake news that they test using climate change news items and then develop four types of branding communications: real, fake, empty and ironic. Then, Ferreira et al (2020) investigate the role of power structures to develop a fake news typology based on the factualness and the source of the content, which they illustrate using four examples.…”