Content Marketing: Practical Enactments and Performative Ideas : an inquiry into what constitutes content marketing in Sweden

Abstract: This thesis presents an inquiry into the concept and phenomena of content marketing and its corresponding market in Sweden by attending to its constituent practices. By adopting a practice based approach to markets, influenced by recent developments in economic sociology, it utilizes a constructivist  view of markets as constantly forming and emerging. This allows examination of a concept that is novel, ambiguously defined yet increasingly popular by focusing on its practical enactments along with actors' conceptions and ideas in order to study what constitutes content marketing. By archival analysis of trade media, examination of industry media and in-depth interviews with content marketing practitioners the paper highlights the formatting effect of ideas on practice, the existence of multiple and conflicting definitions and enactments of content marketing and the implications thereof. It also shows how different categories of content marketing practice are connected and interlinked, before arriving at a definition drawing on practitioners descriptions, enactments and ideas central to the market. The thesis contributes with an inquiry into content marketing where academic research is scant and also provides an empirical application of theory from the growing research tradition concerned with a practice approach to markets.