Consumer Hegemony on Social Media in the Digital Disruption Era ()
1. Introduction
The power of social media plays a critical role in the digital disruptive era, whereby the consumer is empowered by unlimited media freedom. Thus, it promotes democratic ideals (Olaniran & Williams, 2020) whereby the individuals become authoritative in their behaviour on social media. The consumer ideologies thus have created a hegemony on social media in a different context such as political, cultural, tourism, and educational. This notion of hegemony on social media has reformed several political, economic, business, and societal conditions drastically, by allowing people to gather, organise and continue their ideologies. As discussed by Subawa and Widhiasthini (2020) , in this digital disruption era it has become easier for consumers to build hegemony on social media. Shared information about products or services on social media by consumers is the key reference for many customers to make their purchase decisions. Simply in this disruption era consumption is determined not based on their needs and wants in reality, nonetheless, the persuasion to purchase will be occurred through the ideas, reviews, and behaviours on social media by individuals and groups (Subawa, 2016; Lee et al., 2019) .
In recent times, it has been evidenced that the power of creating and even promoting a product/service brand. Using public figures such as politicians, actors, and athletes, organisations today lie in the hands of people empowered by social media. This was well discussed by Sinha (2017) in the case of PM Narendra Modi explaining the hegemony created using different social media platforms together with many public figures to dominate in the political context.
Accordingly, the hegemonic behaviour of customers will have different implications. Some incidents were recorded as legal or government interference to control unnecessary hegemonies. Fake news and negative impacts are some key negativities resulting from this consumer hegemony, where marketers face challenges to safeguard the brand name from this fake news. Thus, the purpose of this review is to understand consumer hegemony on social media in a digitally disruptive era, what factors contribute to the consumer hegemony, its positive and negative impacts, and the way businesses should rectify the hostility of consumer hegemonic behaviour on social media.
Aim & Objectives
The main aim of the paper includes exploring literature on how consumer hegemony modulates through social media in a disruptive era. This paper set to achieve qualitative research objectives as following.
• To understand the consumer hegemony in social media.
• To identify the factors contributing to consumer hegemony.
• To assess positive and negative implications.
2. Literature Review
2.1. Consumer Hegemony on Social Media
Hegemony refers to domination or leadership (Glassman, 2009) and was a popular discussion area in geopolitical literature. Antonio Gramsci made an enormous contribution to explaining hegemony theory and mainly discussed it as an attempt taken by powerful western capitalist countries to ensure political predominance (Rosamond, 2020) . It is the power of dominance and subordination of a dominant social group over others, where the others actively support the ideas of the dominant class. According to Agnew (2005) , hegemony is the power of one’s ability to convince, persuade and coerce others to exercise what he or she wants. As discussed by Lull (1995) , the concept of hegemony or power transforms differently from capitalist political dominance to social dominance through the advancement of technology. In the context of hegemony, mass media was prioritised to publicise wealth, power, status, philosophy, culture, and morality as hegemony is not only about social power, but also the art of obtaining and maintaining power.
The growing use of social media changed the marketplaces extremely and this paradigm shift has made the consumers more powerful by giving them more opportunities to interact with producers before they are making purchase decisions (Subawa & Widhiasthini, 2020) . Within the digital disruption era, the earlier producer/marketer-centric hegemony now has been transferred towards consumers, where they can manipulate the purchase decision of others. Digital democracy and the young generations’ technological dominance (Subawa & Widhiasthini, 2020) have major implications over marketing strategies made by organisations, and consumer purchasing behaviors while the consumers have become marketing agents. Chaker et al. (2022) explained this has turned consumers into “prosumers” who influence businesses through electronic word of mouth.
Gleason (2013) and Cook et al. (2014) argued that there is a growing tendency to use social media platforms to empower “disruptive voices, messages, or ideologies” on different philosophies such as political, cultural, and arts. Correspondingly Olaniran and Williams (2020) specified these social media platforms such as Twitter are being used by different individuals or groups to exaggerate or dominate their ideologies, and that can be easily manipulated as there are no prevailing journalist rules and regulations of screening and sharing news on social network sites. According to Moffitt (2016) , social media has become an excellent political landscape where many populists active roles such as actors to convey the political message to the target audience, and this is effectively practiced by Indian Prime Minister Modi, by creating hegemony in social media, to access and enroll different individuals and groups (Sinha, 2017) , and this social media campaign themed as “developmental sovereignty” resulted in him to become “the world’s most followed leader on social media”. In the process of creating the hegemony on social media, the required four characteristics have been explained by Jaques et al. (2019) as “(1) Seeks to naturalize the status quo, especially existing power relationships; (2) demonstrably functions to maintain this status quo; (3) functions against the best interest of the individual who adopts it; and (4) appeals to ‘common-sense’ reasoning or rhetoric”.
The hegemony excavates the concept of ideology, in this context Jaques et al. (2019) discussed, that in the hegemonic behaviour the acquisition of public consent and persuasion for the developed ideologies will be situated using political, cultural, and economic scopes to penetrate the domination. As highlighted by Subawa and Widhiasthini (2020) , hegemony on social media occurs not by forcing, nevertheless, it binds consumers through persuasion and dominant ideologies whereas Lund et al. (2018) explained the social mechanism formed by social media by enabling consumers to share their stories of different experiences on social networking sites, through which people connect and change their perceptions and purchase behaviours.
2.2. Social Media Dominance in the Disruptive Era
Disruption can be identified as a change that occurs using new patterns and ways. Largely, disruptions occur due to changes in information technology practices. Technology has reshaped the way consumers interact with brands. Digital disruption has gained momentum due to new business models and technologies. According to Rogers (2016) , digital disruption occurs when an existing industry faces challenges that may offer great value to customers which is difficult for the existing firms to compete directly. Similarly, Sindhwani (2022) identifies the importance of any business, industry, or ecosystem to master certain skill sets to embrace novelty. Since disruption unleashes the next wave of innovation, companies should identify strategies to disrupt their processes and products to attract consumers. Regardless of industry, education, travel, tourism, banking, IT, manufacturing, and retailing are transforming their business with digital disruption. Subsequently, disruption transforms old-market industry and technology to create an efficient and comprehensive novelty.
It has been revealed that human brain yet, due to social networking, the amount of information has increased. Social networking is crucial in the 21st century. Social networks are the social contacts made by individuals through connections or social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Google+, and LinkedIn. Significantly, there are more than 50 million registered businesses that have a Facebook page and 88% of these businesses use Twitter for their marketing purposes. Social media has become dominant in the disruptive era. It fosters relationships with followers and companies adopt social media for their marketing tactics as a form of electronic communication to create online communities by sharing information, providing personal messages, and creating video content to drive customer engagement. Similarly, Ajina (2019) posits that organisations can achieve their marketing objectives cost-effectively using social media marketing. Disruption helps to make quick decisions and due to the big data, information can be easily tracked, aggregated, and manipulated. For example, a shopper takes many paths to complete one purchase. They may browse items online, visit online stores, read others’ reviews, place an order, and post their experience on social media. Due to the massive amount of consumer data and marketing data available, brands use available humongous data and create value and insights by planning new promotional campaigns, planning inventories, and developing strategies (Sindhwani, 2022) .
According to a recent research statistic in April 2022, 4.65 billion people are active social media users while 5 billion people are active internet users (Statista, 2022) . Yet, in 2019 only 2.95 billion people were active social media users worldwide and it increased to 4.54 billion active internet users in 2020 among 59% of the global population (Statista, 2020) . Moreover, it was revealed that 66% of the world uses mobile devices, and 91% of social media users access social platforms via mobile devices (Purcărea & Purcărea, 2017) . Hence, marketers are required to adopt a mobile-first strategy. Going beyond general marketing techniques, social media should cater to increasing the brand’s online experience. However, Parise et al. (2016) highlight marketers’ challenge of the crisis of closeness to meet customer needs by personalizing content, providing expertise, and providing solutions in real time. Yet, digital technologies such as location-based cellular applications, argument realities, and video conferencing can create an immersive and highly personal medium to allow a rich exchange of information and interaction between consumers and brands.
2.3. Positive and Negative Implications of Consumer Hegemony
Significantly, non-traditional innovative techniques create a venue for effective communication, transcend both time and location constraints, and alter the customer decision-making process (Chen & Ku, 2013; Dessart et al., 2015) . This has created a multitude of new touchpoints which generate a disruption leading to a new creation of omnichannel marketing that allows consumers to interact with products and retailers at various locations and times (Kotarba, 2016) . In the same study, it was noted that the creation of omnichannel reshapes consumers’ shopping experience and limits consumer choices. Consumers’ attention mainly lies with their purchase decision on the specific brand, rather than the other available brands within physical stores. It leads consumers to form an impression regarding a specific brand. Technological disruptions such as Amazon’s Alexa and Messenger’s Bots have caused consumers to forgo the selection phase by influencing customer loyalty to a certain brand (Farah & Ramadan, 2017) .
The growth of advanced technologies and the evolution of online communities created a significant change in the consumer journey. Consumers have become marketing agents and market references since they post personal information, upload photos and videos, send messages, receive messages, and join groups (Pookulangara & Koesler, 2011) . They no longer recognise them as captives of brands with which they transact rather they are voluntarily involved in social networking to provide their opinions on a particular brand. Contemporary consumers are greatly demanding, expecting rapid gratification cost-effectively, and requesting continuous innovation (Hota, 2012) . This has influenced brands to innovate their products and services through customer co-creation. Furthermore, digital disruptions influenced customer expectations of instant gratification that enable consumer purchase behaviour and impulsive buying behaviour (Farah & Ramadan, 2017) . Consumer impulsive purchases are profitable for businesses. Additionally, when the marketing competition moves from the physical environment to the virtual environment, information flows freely and barriers to entry become less significant (Tiwana et al., 2010) .
However, consumers are obtaining more information from social media sites which may spread misinformation that may lead to social disruption. Particularly, during COVID-19 social sites spread false information and information with uncertain authenticity and factuality (Iizuka et al., 2022) . Additionally, Chan et al. (2017) state that when there is a reason to believe misinformation, the influence of corrective information can be lessened, and more detailed corrective information is needed to correct individuals’ misperceptions. Moreover, social media sites such as Facebook adopt a different structure that shares content among followers without using any fact-checking, third-party filtering, or editorial judgment (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2016) . According to Iizuka et al. (2022) , the spread of misinformation can be prevented in two ways: 1) disseminating correct information by correcting the perceptions of individuals who believed the misinformation, and 2) detecting its spread. Due to the limitations and challenges in the digital disruption era, governments are regulating products and services sold on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to protect consumers.
In the study of social media and the effect of recommendations by Stoica and Chaintreau (2019) described, albeit multiple viewpoints are presented in social media recommendations, the attractive alternative has resulted in a hegemony that reaches the greatest attention of a large audience among all the controversial viewpoints. In this context, organisations are subjected to face pressure both internally and externally with their presence on social media platforms (Subawa & Widhiasthini, 2020) . As a result of consumers’ electronic word of mouth (eWOM), a platform for false information has been created on social network sites (Borges-Tiago et al., 2020; Chaker et al., 2022) which certainly impact consumer attitude and behaviours adversely. For an instance due to this consumer hegemonic behaviours, the popular brand “Kellogg” was backlashed by forcing it to stop its sponsorship, and “Pepsi” dropped 4% of its stocks merely for some viral false information about those brands on social media (Berthon et al., 2018) .
Further, as argued by Mahdi et al. (2022) , the spread of fake news on social media platforms threatens to market landscape, thus marketers struggle with the growing challenges of false news. In the context of communication in the post-truth era, social media are considered a dominant medium (Jaques et al., 2019) which provides fast and widespread emotional content on social media platforms (Bene, 2017; Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013) . The extent of novelty and the emotional reactions are heightened, and those false news stories are viral faster, deeper, and wider than the truth on social media (Vosoughi et al., 2018) , further Craft et al. (2017) ; Devine (2018) stated that resulted in a strain between real and deceit. Likewise, the consumer hegemony on social media negatively impacts organisations’ sales immediately and gradually diminishes the consumers’ brand trust and reputation or image of the brand (Mahdi et al., 2022) . As a result of hegemony, the journalism sector in Nigeria allowed citizens to become reporters (Olubunmi, 2015) , providing an opportunity to share unedited stories on social media, which resulted in growing criminal and harassment cases.
Some companies act as purveyors of false or fake stories about their brands, focusing on high reach, and brand popularity disregarding whether the news is true or fake (Berthon et al., 2018) , nevertheless it further proposed, that brands should manage them on social media in this post-truth era. According to Olubunmi (2015) , internet bans and restrictions were imposed by the government to control hegemony, whereas Mu’tamiroh & Suyanto (2021) specified, that the brand should increase its social media presence on platforms such as Instagram, and dominate the media by sharing many images, content and “celebgrams” endorsement. Further, carefully managing social media interactions, focusing on the milieu of interaction, enhancing brand public relations, and encouraging consumer participation in branding are some strategies to restrict or avoid consumer hegemony in social media (Berthon et al., 2018) . Carr et al. (2019) suggested that the government should provide necessary legal and social assistance to handle and conceptualised fake information.
3. Methods
The study starts with an analysis of the identified database, followed by data collection based on the search strategy. The authors attempt to analyse the retrieved literature on a qualitative aspect while the data were extracted after recognising and choosing an appropriate database. This was tracked by running a search question using the appropriate mix of multiple keywords. Once the data is recognised using the inclusion and exclusion measurements. The data set was analysed using analytical software. Initially, a descriptive analysis of the data in terms of sources, documents, and authors is conducted.
The literature was in consideration for the choice of research sites, changes in consumer behavior as a global change that affects the social context. Higher utilisation of technology, in the millennials and Gen Z, is high. The analysis technique in this paper uses descriptive qualitative and a brief bibliometric analysis to prove the connection between consumer hegemony on social media in the disruption era. The objectives of the authors in this study use goal-directed techniques, precise judgment, and accessibility through the process of reviewing the recent literature.
The connection between the consumer hegemony, and social media in the digital disruption era is illustrated by the instrumentality of the bibliometric techniques. This bibliometric analysis was performed after a vigilant selection of the papers in the google scholars core collection database, which was selected based on the quality of the information extracted and the significance of the research published in this.
Simultaneously, bibliometrics utilise statistical approaches to analyse the trends that arise in the publication of the document. The structural analysis approach will include a systematic reproducible evaluation of a wide body of knowledge. Many researchers use bibliometric analysis in different fields such as Management, marketing, healthcare, and artificial intelligence.
Focusing on the bibliometric technique, this paper intended to focus on the following objectives.
• Understanding primary knowledge fields concerned with concepts of consumer hegemony in social media in the disruptive era.
• Reviewing the year of publishing to analyse the growth rate and influential publishers of literature articles on the selected topics.
• Assessing the category of research and quotations acquired from the list of findings.
Selection Process
Preceding steps have been applied in this research paper:
• Initially, the author identified and searched for keywords chosen for analysis, consumer hegemony, social media, and disruption era in the publish and perish database, using the links between them. This selection generated 454 papers.
• The second exclusion criteria implied filtering the selected by document type. Only the articles and conference papers and excluding duplicates were selected as a result 368.
• The third step was on exclusion of 138 records, limiting the publication year of the chosen papers to the period of 2010-2022 and this resulted in 230 papers.
• The fourth step 76 records excluded based on mismatching of variables and 48 based on grey literature, which resulted in 106.
• The final stage intricates filtering the outcomes built on the subject area of the finding. There were selected google scholar types of number of publications and the resulting list contains 106 documents that were analyzed in this research.
The residual 106 documents were further analyzed using VOSviewer, a computer program that creates, visualises, and explores bibliometric maps of science to analyse selected papers to illustrate the total number of papers with co-author networks and citations. In the field of consumer hegemony, social media, disruption era, and presenting the research distribution on journals and conference volumes.
4. Results
The study reveals the qualitative objectives are achieved as per the evidence obtained through literature, the first objective aimed to understand the hegemonic presence on social media, and it is evident that social media act as an element of hegemonic battle (Jaques et al., 2019) . This struggle can be theorised as philosophical because many positions uncritically adopt positions that serve the attention of current power relations. Secondly, the literature and through the following bibliometric analysis identify consumer presence on social media has a significant impact on consumer hegemony. According to the findings, the most article reflects a positive relationship between consumer hegemony in social media. Therefore, according to the article researchers’ findings, this creates a positive as well as a negative impact on society. As hegemony in any political situation is certainly delicate. It requires assertion through obtaining power. But hegemony is not having a perpetual state of affairs, but it has to be secured in every situation.
According to the findings of Antonino Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, it is a monopolistic attempt to assure the power of dominance (Rosamond, 2020) . It is another way of persuading or convincing others. Literature review claims that using social media is an effective way of promoting the public. It is revealed that consumers express a higher level of engagement through social media interaction, while people have become subjects of online consumption and methodical scrutiny. Therefore, Digital disruption has established a new platform for new business models. As highlighted in the literature by Rogers (2016) as a result many businesses that are now facing challenges in their industry business are compelled to identify innovative strategies to attain sustainable growth. As per our first objective, this paradigm shift has allowed consumers to be powerful by having the opportunity to interact with producers (Subawa & Widhiasthini, 2020) .
Marketing flow which starts from manufacturers of products and marketers who sell products and services, all take benefits from social media by connecting diverse price strategies and exhibiting the interesting images and content that they offer (Subawa & Widhiasthini, 2020) . An image, post blog, or video content are as given examples in the literature. Disruption is not an ordinary transformation; it is a novel concept that evolves through young entrepreneurs. This confirms that the presence of dominant marketers has shifted to electronic marketing as an optional channel for approaching customers as the development of value chain theory. Some results propose new trends in marketing, based on websites, e-commerce purchases are nurturing relationships with marketers through the utilization of information technology.
As identified by Jaques et al. (2019) , social media acts as a viable factor in consumer hegemony, as these platforms play a critical role in any communication. Furthermore, in contrast with other methods of media, social media are featured with minimal control and encouraged feedback to rise content engagement (Jaques, 2019) . Disruption era acts as the second factor to strengthen consumer hegemony. Big data support making quick decision in business due to the availability of a massive amount of marketing and consumer data. One of the powerful tools to collect, trace and manipulate is social media (Sindhwani, 2022) . Moreover, Disruption has given birth to various platforms such as the usage of the internet as per the statistics provided in the literature review.
The third objective is to explore the positive and negative impacts of consumer hegemony, the positive implications are, 1) the information can be accessed by everyone in various social systems, 2) awareness of different life activities, 3) the communities exposed perspectives on the efficient use of technology and information, 4) timely information is updated with consumer requirements (Wifkil-Mutamiroh, 2020) . This can be adopted by major businesses with a strong competition involving social networking to convince consumers shopping experience. Hence as a negative implication, information-savvy consumers no longer act as captives of the brand with their independent interactions in social networking. This caused businesses to encounter greater demand for innovation and consumer co-creation. Also, social media can quickly spread fake information to misdirect consumers (Iizuka et al., 2022) .
4.1. Bibliometric Findings
Initially, the analysis was made on important types of research articles that block the analysis of the link between consumer hegemony on social media in a disruptive era. According to the information filtered in the Google scholars collection through publish and perish literature search tool. It is visible that articles and conference papers are common publications in this area. Over 95% of the results are indicating articles of the overall publications, this is because the field investigated is relatively a novel concept in consumer behavior, and article and conference papers are published quicker than books.
It is frequent the eagerness of researchers for this area in novel recent times because since 2018 more than 15 papers have been published each year. In the recent five years, more than 50% of overall publications approached the concepts of Consumer hegemony, social media, and the disruption era (Table 1).
The importance given by the authors of the world to the aspects related to consumer hegemony on social media in the disruptive era is reflected by the number of publication outcomes from various authors in a similar field. Based on the focal information from the goggle scholars collection, it was found (Figure 1) that except for Subawa NS and Milan S, other authors have published only one paper in this area, this is due to the novelty of the concept. While Allcott and Burges are the highly cited authors respectively (Figure 2).
The most influential journals and publishers were further analysed in Figure 3 and Figure 4 respectively. It was found that most research on consumer hegemony, social media, and the disruption era has been published in journals such as Industrial marketing management and media international Australia. Also, the distribution of results on the influential publishers within Sage publishers and Taylor and Francis. Therefore, the most significant publishers approached the issues related to consumer behavior and business focused on consumer hegemony, social media, and the disruption era.
4.2. Co-Authorship Network with Citations
Grounded on the data, the full counting co-authorship network has been calculated using VOSviewer software. In mapping, each circle denotes an author and the dimension of the circle characterize the number of citations of the corresponding author in the field of consumer hegemony and social media. The range between circles shows the potency of the co-authorship link between the corresponding citation whereas the closer two circles are situated to each other, the stronger the co-authorship link connecting the citation. A total of 109 authors have published one or three articles after 2017. This is due to the novelty of the concept in marketing research. there were nearly 106 publications, and the maximum number of authors per document was selected, and the threshold levels were set as minimum citation per article as none, as there were new articles, were included with no citation. In this mapping, there were 106 clusters with all the subjected authors. Most popular cited authors are represented with grey nodes. The results showed that Subawa, and Widhiasthini had ranked top as a greater number of papers co-authored with scholars, it indicates their relationship in consumer hegemony research.
4.3. Future Research Recommendations
Future research studies are important in identifying the concept of consumer hegemony, role of social media platforms in shaping consumer behaviour, ways of minimising negative impact of consumer hegemony, the impact of digital disruption on consumer behaviours and the role of influence and power in consumer behaviour. When analysing consumer hegemony on social media in digital disruption era, it is crucial to examine the role of social and cultural norms on consumer hegemony and the impact of ethics and responsibility in consumer behaviour. Additionally, the role of AI and machine learning in consumer hegemony should be studied. Researchers could use mixed-methods approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Longitudinal stuies are recommended to recognise consumer attitude and behaviour overtime to explore how consumer hegemony is evolving in the digital disruption era.
5. Conclusion
In conclusion, this study reviews through the literature and concludes that there has been a hegemony over consumers in this era of disruption, which is adept through the domination of marketers through social media. Furthermore, this paper identifies that the paradigm shifts of social media, digital democracy, and young generations’ technological dominance within the digital disruption era, influence major implications over marketing strategies made by organisations. Significantly, innovative digital techniques create a venue for effective communication, transcend both time and location constraints, and influence customer co-creation to introduce innovative products and services. Yet, the negative implications of consumer hegemony in the digital disruption cause to spread false information and information with uncertain authenticity and factuality. Hence, social media interactions require to be effectively managed by enhancing brand public relations and encouraging consumer participation in branding. Moreover, governments should provide necessary legal and social assistance to handle incorrect information.
The most cited article is on fake news in 2016 with 6103 citations election published by American Economic Association. Systematic studies in this field are elusive due partly to the complication of the freedom and hegemony concept. However, due to the novelty of the concept, most authors constrained their publications to a minimum of one paper. Access to most of the articles is limited to abstracts due to the validity and reliability of the publication. More studies need to be carried out to standardise the definition of consumer hegemony and assessment of the influence of consumer hegemony on the social media then the results can be applicable across countries and industries.
Acknowledgements
We thank Mr. Gladwyn Victor, Associate Vice President & Head of Academic Quality Assurance and Mrs. Ananthlakshmi Mahadevan, Incharge Research Department and Senior Faculty in Business Management at the Nest Academy of Management Education UAE for their support during the project.