That's the Press, Baby! How journalists co-create family business brands meanings: A mixed method analysis

Drawing upon the thriving brand co-creation perspective, our study explores the co-creation of family business brand (FBB) meanings with external stakeholders. Through a mixed method analysis that combines structural topic modelling and interpretative grounded theorizing, we analyse 12,039 newspaper articles, covering a period of 30 years, to show how journalists co-created intended and unintended family business brand meanings. Our findings reveal seven unique FBB discourses, and a set of five discursive strategies (echoing, educating, narrativizing, unveiling and reframing) embedded in two discursive mechanisms (FBB meanings consolidation and FBB meanings unravelling) that journalists actuate in their press coverage of family businesses. Thus, our paper contributes to the family business and brand co-creation literatures theorizing and contextualizing the role of an overlooked actor in the FBB ecosystem, promotes a way to methodologically apply big-data-friendly analysis in the family business field, and offers managerial implications.