Between Exclusivity and Accessibility: An Analysis of Instagram Branding at Two Nordic Opera Companies

“[It’s about] being instead of saying, like… maybe showing opera as if we had an extra stage. I guess that's the vision in a way, [to do that] instead of just talking about what we do in the house.”¹ For Frida Edoff, communications officer at the Swedish opera house Folkoperan, social media entail a shift in focus from talking to showing, from saying to being. This quote illustrates the challenges faced by arts marketers in the digital age, especially in the sectors traditionally regarded as “high culture.” In the era of print media, cultural institutions were understood to have the potential to structure representations of aesthetic experiences, including the ability to define cultural and aesthetic objects as highly valuable; in the digital age, however, talking about the product is replaced by showing the product.² Similarly, in the wake of what commentators have termed “omnivorous orientation,” recent literature on arts marketing suggests that cultural organizations can no longer portray their products as “high art.” Rather, the audience, no longer, as Bonita Kolb puts it, “socialized to view high art as inherently more valuable than the popular culture that has been the shaping force of their lives,” is now considered to create its own meaning from engagement with the organization.³ As a result, the definition of cultural value relies less explicitly on established institutions and more on a combination of spectators’ subjective judgment of taste and the particular logic and orientation of a given media platform.⁴

At the same time, showing opera through digital media has become more and more common as cultural policies, both nationally and internationally, advocate the digital distribution of opera to offer access to culture.⁵ Recent opera research suggests that such “screenification” of performing arts has impacted on production practices, as every detail is transmitted in high definition, while also introducing pressure for higher quality standards, because audiences have access to world-class performances digitally.⁶ Moreover, the evolution of media technology has challenged the norms of spectatorial engagement, introducing an understanding of spectatorship rather as collaboration than passive experience—“the traditional lines between spectatorship and collaboration have blurred,” as Christopher Morris puts it, “thanks to devices and software that allow for manipulation, and platforms that allow for dissemination and commentary.”⁷ As a result, opera companies now find themselves torn between portraying opera as, on the one hand, exclusive and, on the other, accessible on digital platforms.⁸

Although the composition and behavior of contemporary opera audiences has recently attracted some scholarly interest, the role of marketing practices at opera institutions in the digital age has received less attention.⁹ In this article I examine the marketing of opera in social media, demonstrating how a “high-culture” brand is shaped when opera is promoted simultaneously as valuable and challenging yet accessible. Focusing on posts on Instagram by two Nordic opera companies—Folkoperan (Sweden) and the Savonlinna Opera Festival (Finland)—I consider marketing activities aimed at building a brand in social media as a discursive practice in which a certain image of opera and the operatic institution is construed. How, I ask, are the cultural status and appeal of opera negotiated in the social-media branding practices of contemporary opera institutions?

I begin with a discussion of branding as a way to establish an online image for the institutions with regard to cultural hierarchies before moving on to consider the norms and affordances of the platform—its “platform vernacular”—and its effect on the marketing practices of the organizations. I conclude by examining branding as a means to control the changing power relations between institutions and audiences. Working from the premise that social media marketing reflects and shapes contemporary society, the article seeks, that is, to show how traditional arts institutions participate in the wider negotiation of cultural value in the digital age.

High Art, Social Media

At some point, all art marketers face the question of cultural hierarchies and the dichotomy between art and commerce that adheres to them.¹⁰ Researchers such as Bruce McConaghie, Lawrence Levine, and Paul DiMaggio in a North American context, John Storey in the United Kingdom, and Michela Ronzani in Italy have shown how opera was deliberately fashioned into high art for societal elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹¹ The structural approach of their respective studies sheds light on the connections between cultural hierarchies and social status groups or classes, affirming that the powerful in society needed opera and operagoing as a tool to distinguish themselves from the other classes. Recent research in the field of opera studies suggests that the same mechanisms continue to shape the ways in which opera is perceived in the present day in the United Kingdom and in Nordic contexts.¹² Studies devoted to the processes through which sets of meanings and values for opera are produced and reproduced in contemporary society are, however, underrepresented in opera scholarship. In an increasingly digitized and marketized context, branding on social media becomes one of the focal points for opera’s public image and the management of its perception.¹³ With two billion active users every month (as of 2024) and sixty-nine percent of its users aged between thirteen and thirty-four, Instagram offers a forum in which institutions can reach out to audiences with no prior experience of opera. No surprise, then, that opera managers consider it an effective marketing channel when attempting to expand the audience and develop the general accessibility of the art form.¹⁴ As a participatory platform, Instagram enables cultural practices that researchers have characterized as typical of contemporary, often digital, environments—for example, creative consumer participation and remix practices—while also fostering a vernacular visual culture.¹⁵

The empirical material of my study consists principally of interviews and observation of online activity. I have conducted semi-structured interviews with communication officers at the case study companies—Frida Edoff at Folkoperan and Jannika Vahvaselkä at Savonlinna Opera Festival—about branding and audience outreach on social media, particularly Instagram. I have also observed the Instagram accounts of the two opera companies throughout the 2022–23 season (including the summer of 2023), a period during which the organizations published over two hundred and thirty posts. The material further includes the organizations’ annual reports and a brand handbook made by the Savonlinna Opera Festival for the marketing team’s internal use. Focusing on social media marketing practices aimed at creating and managing a certain image of opera, rather than on individual images and videos, I have analyzed the material using a critical discourse analysis approach. In particular, branding, in this study, is understood as a semiotic activity, defined by Alon Lischinsky as “a complex ensemble of practices of semiotic design and integration, intended to manage the perceptions and dispositions of the audience toward the organization and its products.”¹⁶ In other words, I have framed the ways in which organizations describe their marketing practices and present themselves for social media audiences as a question of how certain sets of meaning and value are discursively ascribed to opera. Although this is not a visual methodology, my approach has been influenced by multi-modal critical discourse analysis, particularly the view of communication consisting of several building blocks rather than linguistics alone.¹⁷ I have combined close reading of interviews and texts with observations of Instagram accounts, placing the practices of the institutions at the center of the analysis. Implicit in a critical discourse analysis approach, too, is attention to power and control (or in the case of branding, the managing of audience’s dispositions); this is in line with Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as “an action upon an action.”¹⁸ Throughout the analysis, that is, I have considered opera institutions as actors capable of influencing the meanings and values attached to opera.

The chosen case studies represent two different aspects of institutionalized opera production in contemporary Nordic welfare societies. Folkoperan (meaning “folk opera”), founded in 1976 with the vision to “make opera relevant to everyone” and based in Stockholm, is a small opera company with just over six thousand followers on Instagram.¹⁹ Organized by the classic Italian stagione system, Folkoperan mounts only one production at a time, increasing the pressure on production-oriented marketing communications. Moreover, what makes Folkoperan a particularly fitting case study in this context is its vision of opera for all, articulated on the website as follows: “We are passionate about bringing opera to a wider audience irrespective of age, background or experience. At Folkoperan we create opera that everyone can relate to in their own way. Opera that becomes people’s opera and a platform for introspection and how you see the world.”²⁰ This resonates very well with contemporary cultural policies advocating democratic access to culture.

With roughly the same number of Instagram followers, the Savonlinna Opera Festival, on the other hand, represents seasonal opera production.²¹ While festivals devoted to art music and operas are remarkably common in Europe, their financial basis differs from the opera companies offering year-round performances in that they generally receive less direct public funding or none at all.²² Relying thus on other forms of revenue, such as box office income, sponsorship, and broadcasting fees, opera festivals experience another kind of pressure on fundraising and marketing to diverse stakeholders. Founded in 1912 and marketed as “Finland’s premiere cultural event,” the Savonlinna Opera Festival is an annual international opera festival in a medieval castle on Lake Saimaa (adjoining the provincial town of Savonlinna) in Eastern Finland. ²³ Tellingly, of the festival’s approximately eight million-euro budget, over eighty-five percent comes from box-office receipts and sponsorship.²⁴ As is common in the Nordic countries, the festival does receive some public funding, including a government grant corresponding to twenty-nine percent of all the public funding for arts and cultural festivals in Finland.²⁵

Branding Opera as High Culture

If presence on Instagram is motivated by what Folkoperan’s communications officer Frida Edoff calls “being where the people are,” marketing for both Folkoperan and Savonlinna is clearly multichanneled, spread across an array of marketing platforms—print media, websites, print products, and social media sites—according to purpose and target group.²⁶ Whereas print media is recognized as an important channel for the existing audience, the role of social media is, as Edoff explains, to “show opera as if we had an extra stage.”²⁷ Communications personnel in both organizations also stress the need to be present on several online platforms simultaneously, balancing resources to continuously feed every platform with engaging content.

Jannika Vahvaselkä, the information officer responsible for social media at Savonlinna, gives a detailed account of the strategic targets associated with specific social media channels. According to Vahvaselkä, Facebook is where the festival can reach its core audience and generate discussion. But if this kind of audience engagement can be seen as a form of deepening participation among the already-initiated, Instagram becomes the go-to channel for potential new audiences—“the place,” as Vahvaselkä puts it, “for presenting the opera festival in a more relaxed way and also a place for those who know nothing about the festival or are just slightly interested, maybe once visited, but are not opera lovers or heavy users as we say.”²⁸ Unlike its marketing communications on Facebook, then, Savonlinna’s presence on Instagram is directed toward broadening participation by attracting those who are likely to participate but do not currently do so.²⁹ While arts organizations employed participation-building strategies long before social media, the association in a contemporary media setting of platform choice with specific audience-engagement practices is worth noting. Parallelling a wider recent trend in marketing, in which the shift in focus from text- to image-centered advertising is linked to the view of the contemporary consumer as a disinterested and uninvolved “browser,” building participation in the arts today demands arousal of interest in the different target groups by different means on different platforms, while constantly taking a stand on the question of cultural hierarchies.³⁰

Such diversity of messages and platforms encourages organizations to focus on branding. Referring to a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or a combination that represents the benefits that a product provides, a brand can help to identify a certain product or an organization and differentiate it from competitors.³¹ In the current consumer environment, populated as it is by disinterested and uninvolved browsers, a brand can therefore function as a communication shortcut between the producer and the public, presenting something of potential value to customers. According to Edoff, Folkoperan has encountered difficulties reaching the public on Instagram when “digging too deep on the theme of one specific performance,” which has now made the organization reorient toward a more brand-centered strategy: “I would say that we need to focus [on strengthening the brand] in all our digital communication, to clarify what Folkoperan is and what we can offer, and to try to lower the threshold into the world of opera and offer opera to more people. That's a pretty lofty goal we have in some way in our DNA. That we should be, like, the gateway.”³² This quote further illustrates the aim of the organization to increase opera’s accessibility, or to diversify participation.³³ Savonlinna and Folkoperan thus identify different goals for their Instagram presence: whereas Savonlinna seeks mainly to attract nonparticipants who are inclined to participate, Folkoperan’s focus is on disinclined nonparticipants. This difference in focus is reflected in the respective brand images transmitted on Instagram and the ways in which the brands position themselves to the question of high culture.

The Savonlinna Opera Festival brand handbook provides “guidelines for the Festival’s behavior, appearance, and manner of speaking,” with the aim of “embracing the personality of the Opera Festival as a brand.”³⁴ The forty-page document includes a brand manifest; brand attributes; the mood to be conveyed or “tone of voice,” with examples of suitable as well as undesired phrases; a run-through of the roles of different communication channels; a visual identity kit (logos, typography, colors, advice for layout); a summary of the festival’s visual history; guidelines for the upcoming key visual elements; and photography rules. Essentially, the festival links its brand to the art of opera: “Every visit to the Opera Festival is our chance to show our love for opera—and to touch a human being beneath the surface.”³⁵ Further on, the festival is described as “ambitious,” referring to productions of high artistic quality; “fantastic,” meaning the total experience of summer-night opera in the castle; “social,” defined as inclusive, open, and with a twinkle in the eye; and “passionate,” as in hosting a passionate relationship to an art form full of passion.³⁶ These attributes reflect the traditional sphere of high culture, centering on artistic quality, professionalism, and something unique, transcendent and transformative surrounding the art. While the idea of the festival as “social” might seem to stand out in its gesture toward broad appeal, this, too, ends up reinforcing the idea of opera as high culture: “We know our value,” the brand handbook affirms, “and that's why we can afford to be kind to everyone.”³⁷ In other words, while acknowledging the political pressure to increase accessibility to opera, the festival only embraces it as a top-down form of access that never questions the supreme cultural value of the art form.³⁸

An examination of the festival’s Instagram profile (see fig. 1) suggests that the guidelines in the brand handbook are integrated into the social media image. The festival’s profile page stands out with the systematic use of professional black-and-white photographs alternating with pithy text-based posts, all graphic-rich and sleek. The majority of the image posts are so-called carousels, featuring several images, and in many cases, the images that follow the cover image are in full color. In a similar manner, many of the text-based posts are in fact reels (short videos) in full color, and the text cover that fits the style of the profile page seems to be designed separately. Indeed, Vahvaselkä stresses that she would “never ever” upload a quick phone shot on the festival’s social media: “Never. That must not happen… . We only use high-quality photos. Stories are a bit different [though], as well as reels. They are more relaxed in a way.”³⁹ The festival’s intense scrutiny of the quality of images suggests that the posts on their profile page are essential in managing the brand on the platform, representing the “benefits that make the organization distinctive” and serving as a sort of business card, quickly transmitting the most central brand message.⁴⁰ Moreover, photographs in black-and-white are associated with a timeless aesthetic and intellectual air, while black-and-white imagery in advertising has been critically interpreted as a deliberate stance against the traditionally glossy and glamorous.⁴¹ By choosing to apply strictly black-and-white imagery, the festival thus aligns itself and opera with Art and against commercialism.

Edoff at Folkoperan is equally aware of the importance of a neat and curated Instagram profile:

I think that the quality of the [social media presence of the] stages in Sweden is quite high… . In Stockholm, and so on, there are neat Instagram [profile] pages—you can’t argue with that. The challenge may well be to move away from that neatness at some point. It’s difficult, I think, because you also want it to be visually attractive and stylish. But at the same time, in order for us to be able to position ourselves, we need to be something different from the Royal Opera and the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the City Theatre, these biggest competitors. So I would probably say that we stand out in some of our materials but perhaps not as a whole, but we're working on it.⁴²

This quote illustrates the different approach Folkoperan applies to branding on Instagram. Whereas Savonlinna’s branding is centered on the art of opera, positioned as high culture, Folkoperan places opera in the broader context of local performing arts scenes, aiming to build a brand that stands out and offers opera to more people. In doing so, however, the organization cannot fully deviate from high-culture representations—it still needs to be “visually attractive and stylish” to be regarded as a professional performing arts scene among the competitors.

Achieving a balance between standing out and not standing out too much presents a challenge. While Edoff notes that it is “a lot of fun to work with a brand that is allowed to stand out,” she is quick to add that Folkoperan cannot do whatever it wants “because people are not stupid either, they want smart things.”⁴³ In other words, Folkoperan identifies the norm of presenting opera on Instagram in a certain high-culture manner, and while it wants to challenge that norm, it needs to do so by embracing the norm in a witty way that appeals to the target group. Lurking in the background, too, is the company’s “lofty goal” of offering opera to more people, and its Instagram presence is a part of that strategy—a strategy that aims at challenging the idea of opera as exclusive high culture. Again, doing this in a way that appeals to the target audience requires delicate balance. As a result, the focus of the brand remains unclear, reflecting instead several parallel ideas of opera, reminiscent of the view of contemporary culture participants as omnivores making their own judgments of taste. Professional stage photographs and black-and-white promotional pictures of visiting artists follow the same style as the Savonlinna profile page, echoing the high-culture image cultivated there. But these are combined with backstage material as well as pictures of visiting performances and children’s performances (breaking the uniform aesthetic line) and short videos that challenge the idea of opera as serious and intellectual (see fig. 2).

Lowering the High through the Platform Vernacular

One way to approach the different types of material produced on Instagram is to look at Instagram’s platform vernacular, a term coined in communication studies to refer to a platform’s popular mode of communication—“its own unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics.”⁴⁴ Reaching beyond the platform’s affordances or forms of participation and representation, the platform vernacular accounts for forms of creativity specific to the platform, the material architecture, and the “collective cultural practices that operate on and through it.”⁴⁵ From this perspective, the norm of curated, sleek profile pages can be regarded as a part of Instagram’s vernacular and as a form of “advertorial dissemination.”⁴⁶ Departing from this norm of what Russmann and Svensson call the “official context,” however, is the instantaneous, mundane snapshot or selfie context, typical of social media.⁴⁷ As the discussion above shows, Folkoperan deliberately subverts the image of opera as high culture by challenging the curated, sleek style: snapshots and selfies are key to that challenge.

Typically, both Savonlinna Opera Festival and Folkoperan deploy snapshots/selfies in stories, which disappear after twenty-four hours if they are not made permanently visible as highlights. Even when permanent, stories do not appear in the grid on the profile pages curated according to their quality standards described above. It is in the context of the stories that Savonlinna adopts the more relaxed tone of the snapshot: “it’s like more free there,” Vahvaselkä explains.⁴⁸ Part of what is accommodated in the stories is what Vahvaselkä regards as the important work of showing the backstage world of the festival to the visitors. She points out that visualizing the massive work required to mount opera productions in a medieval castle without adequate infrastructure can help the customers understand the high ticket prices. Instagram story videos also have a role as a channel for internal communications among festival staff, many of whom are not familiar with the work done by other units. This practice has also been well received: “It really interested the followers and got a lot of praise [from them] and also from within our organization.”⁴⁹

Such use of social media—to render backstage visible to followers—echoes the idea of the private sphere becoming public on social media platforms.⁵⁰ This affordance of blurred lines between the private and the public, or, in the context of performing arts, onstage and backstage, offers the cultural institution the agency to create a new public space. In this space modes of expression and online participation typical of the platform vernacular but inappropriate for the official high-culture context are embraced. The Savonlinna profile features two highlights that present the backstage world by following certain members of staff as they carry out their duties during the festival. Filmed in lower quality and, mostly, in full color, the videos are quite distinct from the official photography guidelines provided in the brand handbook, resembling, instead, the use of snapshots and selfies. In a similar manner, one highlight features the festival choir rehearsing outside of the summer season, showing not the polished, theatrical, and impressive details of opera on stage, but, instead, ordinary people singing in an ordinary auditorium. What’s more, these videos encourage followers to participate, through question boxes, quizzes, and likes. The participatory affordance is furthermore indulged in a highlight dedicated to reposts of followers’ content praising the performances and their visit to the festival. In this manner, the opera festival embraces Instagram’s platform vernacular while enabling audience participation in a way not possible outside of this new virtual space.

Although this virtual backstage space enables participation and features modes of expression more casual than the official tone branding opera as high culture, the high-culture status of opera is not questioned. On the contrary, what the backstage videos actually show is how the festival assures the high quality of the performances, from the dressmaker’s detailed work and the music manager’s accuracy during a performance to members of the choir practicing. Followers are permitted to express their affinity for the content, but no space is created for a democratic discussion or expression of taste. An analogy can be drawn to the difference outlined by Zizi Papacharissi between public space, enhancing discussion, and public sphere, enhancing democracy: discussion between the audience and the institution is facilitated, yet this has no bearing on the cultural hierarchies because the judgment of taste is not democratized.⁵¹ In other words, the institution links high quality to opera and lets the audience see how such quality is assured, but although the audience is offered opportunities for input, the virtual backstage space lacks a democratic discussion about quality. The participatory, democratizing potential of the social media affordance—the blurring of the public and the private—is welcomed but then neatly incorporated into the old, institutionalized hierarchy, upholding the distance between the audience and the institution and maintaining the high culture hallmark.

Adapting to Instagram’s vernacular by showing both the official and the snapshot/selfie context is something that Edoff views as natural for Folkoperan: “Because Instagram is image-based and we have a business that is very attractive visually… , we like to work with strong image material. It's about both being able to invite the recipient backstage, but also showing what we do on stage and in the best of worlds, we want to create content… where we use Instagram almost as an extra stage.”⁵² Here, the communication officer makes an interesting distinction between backstage, onstage and extra stage, observing that all three are relevant to the organization’s Instagram content. Instagram’s most obvious property of strong visuality is thus harnessed in three different ways, and three different virtual spaces are created: backstage for snapshot/selfie content, onstage for official content with professional photography, and extra stage for content created for Instagram and designed explicitly to suit the platform’s vernacular. This division stems from the way social media marketing at Folkoperan is planned. Whereas the official content is designed in cooperation with a marketing agency, and the plan for social-media visibility and PR (with trailers and activations) in advance of a new production is tightly scheduled, snapshot/selfie content is utilized primarily for quick, unplanned reactions: “If something fun happens onstage or in the outside world, we should be able, really, to go down and film a bit or pick up a news item or something like that.”⁵³ Like Savonlinna, Folkoperan saves stories in highlights, but whereas Savonlinna uses the platform’s different channels to distinguish between official and snapshot/selfie content, Folkoperan, following the idea of “standing out” and going against the norm of the curated profile page, applies both types of content to both channels. Thus, a highlight can be dedicated to the opera currently performed, featuring a promotional trailer created by a professional marketing agency, official stage photos, backstage material, screenshots of press reviews, and reposts from the audience—all in one entity. In this way a new media object is born, one with a more nuanced representation of an opera performance and as such more accessible. In short, an opportunity is provided to make the audience feel engaged and involved in the institution in a more equitable way.

This type of accessibility is further developed in the content specifically created for the social media audience. The initiative to produce material for the third space, the extra stage, developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Folkoperan, along with all the other cultural institutions in Sweden, was forced to cancel all performances. Folkoperan received extra subsidies to generate material for digital audiences, and the first videos, called Salon Folkoperan (orig. Salong Folkoperan), were created around well-known arias from the current productions. A soloist performed the aria with piano accompaniment, and the artistic director of the house hosted a discussion with experts in different fields on the topic of the opera. However, although produced for social media, the format did not fit the platform vernacular of Instagram, as shown in the following recollection by Edoff:

[It became] more like a format that suits an already quite initiated target group; it requires… the recipient to watch for so long. So instead we cut out excerpts… and put them on Instagram and on reels … where we have been able to spread it in a different way. And hopefully to a new target group. And where it becomes more like content without any kind of … corporate signage or whatever, so that it doesn't feel like advertising but more like an experience.⁵⁴

Here, Edoff makes two observations about content deemed suitable for Instagram’s platform vernacular: first, it needs to be shorter—not an entire aria, for example, and second, a certain feeling of authenticity, as opposed to advertorial content. Edoff expands on this feeling of authenticity when she explains that in the future the organization wishes to work more “with content that feels personal but is not advertising.”⁵⁵ Interestingly, a line is thus drawn between the commercial and the personal. Echoing the idea that commercial culture is inferior to art, what this distinction reveals is that creating a feeling of authenticity around an opera brand in a social media setting entails resisting the commercial tendencies of the platform vernacular and instead emphasizing the special status of art. Paradoxically, then, when Folkoperan adapts its branding practices on Instagram to the platform vernacular, it ends up emphasizing opera as anti-commercial high art—although it is precisely the high-art hallmark it aims to question.

Following the Salon Folkoperan project, however, the organization would create content that adapted to the standards of platform vernacular and anti-commercial authenticity in a different way. This consisted of reels featuring soloists singing short greetings that the opera house encouraged the audience to send in. All filmed in the same manner in front of a red curtain and including surtitles, the videos, only a few seconds long, are tagged with the same hashtags and collected on the opera’s website as a video gallery.⁵⁶ The greetings are sung in Swedish and include classic phrases such as “I love you” and “Merry Christmas,” but also mundane thoughts, like “it’s your turn to put the kids in bed” or “don’t forget to file your tax return.” The singers, wearing stage costumes reflecting various historical eras, use classical singing technique without accompaniment. In these reels, then, Folkoperan attempts to adapt to Instagram’s platform vernacular by creating content that is “spreadable.” As illustrated in the comments by Edoff, reels are understood as a type of content that is easily shared and made visible to new audiences—without being too advertorial. Indeed, by contrasting the fine costumes with the mundane greetings, Folkoperan subverts the idea of opera as high art, and the extra scene emerges as a new virtual space where cultural hierarchies can be renegotiated in relation to Instagram’s platform vernacular.

Managing the Brand, Managing the Value

Social media, however, presents risks for brand management. An opera house can manage its brand image only to a certain extent because it is in the very nature of social media that meaning is created on a communal level.⁵⁷ The more organizations engage audiences in discussion and create digital spaces for participatory practices, the more the power balance between the organization and the audience shifts. With this in mind, Sarah Quinton has proposed a new paradigm, adapted to digital media, in which brand managers and other parties involved with the brand come together and establish a form of community.⁵⁸ Some of the branding practices discussed above—the focus on experiences and emphasis on brand authenticity—display characteristics identified in Quinton’s idea of brand community. Quinton proposes that brand management should take the role of facilitator and “become the ‘glue’ for groups of consumers and their digitalized environment.”⁵⁹ A similar idea of brand manager as facilitator is reflected in Folkoperan’s view of the role of the institution on social media: “The most fun, we think, is when there is a discussion between those who comment; that there is a thread of comments between them. A discussion or… comments about an experience or something.”⁶⁰ Clearly, Edoff sees the creation of a brand community as a sort of ideal, in which the organization provides the space for discussion and shared experiences.

Creating this kind of discussion calls for an active audience on Instagram, but Edoff points out that the organization, with its relatively small presence on Instagram, lacks the resources for a continuous discussion and follow-up of comments.⁶¹ In a similar manner, Vahvaselkä explains that Instagram is “rigid” compared to Facebook, where engaging the followers in discussions is easy: “Well, it's certainly kind of more rigid. We notice the same thing that influencers seem to wrestle with a lot, that the content is probably interesting to the recipient but that getting a reaction, i.e. a comment or a like, is really under a rock… . I realized that when I posted again after a while, it [the content] didn't reach as many as it used to, and now it takes a while to engage the audience again.”⁶² Here, Vahvaselkä identifies a discrepancy between interesting content and weak audience reactions, and goes on to explain that online engagement requires regular activity. In the context of enabling participation and interactivity, Instagram’s platform vernacular is hence viewed as more restrictive, because the algorithms are understood to favor content creators who are able to “feed these channels with good content all the time.”⁶³

Still, observation of the reactions and comments the organizations receive on their public posts in the profile suggests that neither of the organizations puts much effort into responding to the audience’s reactions—this despite the fact that responses could be seen as rewarding from the audience’s perspective and therefore stimulate audience participation. Both communication officers admit that interactivity is an area for improvement, but they also explain that they lack the resources for follow-up, as described here by Frida Edoff: “It [reacting to the response] could probably be better. So absolutely we get comments sometimes, especially when people appreciate what we do on stage, they like to write it. But we could certainly do better there. And as I said, we also need to have staff who can start a conversation in some way and be quite quick to respond to comments and so on.”⁶⁴ Notably, interactivity is understood here as the practice of encouraging and responding to audience participation. An interesting analogy can be made here with a study on fashion bloggers. McQuarrie, Miller, and Phillips argue that, as bloggers become famous to the point at which they can be compared to an established figure in the fashion industry, they stop interacting with their followers.⁶⁵ This suggests that the practice of not responding to comments—or rather, not prioritizing the response—reflects the institutional status of the opera companies within the industry, a situation that creates and sustains a distance between the producer and the consumer.

What both communications officers seem to disregard, moreover, is the motive for the audience to engage. In fact, Quinton, too, fails to take into account the cultural reasons for contributing on social media, instead focusing solely on continual socialization that “can enhance the emotional ties to the brand.”⁶⁶ As a critical response, Adam Arvidsson and Alessandro Caliandro have proposed the term brand public instead of brand community, arguing that social media supports a publicity-oriented consumer culture where visibility, rather than belonging to a community, is a core value.⁶⁷ They describe brand publics as formations based on continuous mediation with little or no interaction—that is, as crowds of passive audiences rather than active communities—and the structure of a brand public as dependent on individual or collective affect instead of discussion.⁶⁸ This perspective on audience participation on Instagram might explain the discrepancy between interesting content and weak interaction as outlined by Vahvaselkä. Attention to affect and visibility, however, risks overlooking the question of the meanings that the audience attaches to the opera brands and opera as an art form. Indeed, Arvidsson and Caliandro, attentive to no reason for people to participate other than publicity, neglect the sphere of cultural meanings and hierarchies independent of the idea of “publicity.” If publicity is what the audience seeks to gain from interacting with opera brands, then those opera brands need to mean something already to the audience on the individual as well as the collective levels.

It is precisely this meaning that the opera houses seek to manage through their brands. As a form of immaterial capital, a brand can be understood as “a particular predetermined frame of action… between what consumers do and what their actions mean to them.”⁶⁹ Against the backdrop of high culture, such a frame of action can be compared to Simon Frith’s conception of a discursive frame of appreciation that the audience applies to cultural products. In his study on value judgments in popular music, Frith proposes that music is appreciated via discourses either of art, folk, or pop, and that the social groups applying these discursive grids may vary over time.⁷⁰ Applying Frith’s argument to opera suggests that the audience, when encountering opera, may choose between different appreciation grids. For opera institutions that promote their productions to wider audiences, it consequently becomes essential to understand and shape those choices.

Although primarily a visual rather than a textual platform, Instagram enables the content creator to frame or explain the visual content with referential hashtags or text captions. The captions, which may or may not accompany the posts, vary in length, and the maximum length of 2,200 characters equals a short blog post.⁷¹ Interestingly, neither the Savonlinna Opera Festival nor Folkoperan posts much content on Instagram without text captions. Quite the contrary: while the referential nature of the digital age dictates that posts be tagged with hashtags that organize large amounts of content around a singular topic in one place, both organizations regularly add much more text than just the hashtags to their posts. In the text captions, the organizations give background information about the operatic works and the artists, not unlike traditional paper programs from the print media era. In certain cases, the institutions pay attention to ongoing events or current topics, such as Pride Week, whereas other captions cite positive reviews from the press. This is partly explained by Edoff, who notes that the majority of its audience reads newspapers:

And it has gone more and more from also being visible in print, because our target group is really there in Svenskan and DN.⁷² They still read paper newspapers—we see that in our audience surveys. Going from that to being more and more digitalized and having another opportunity to target specific groups and, at best, if the content is good, reach many people in a short time—this is a different type of potential, but there is also a very large amount of noise in these channels.⁷³

Illustrated here is the balancing act required for communication between different target groups on Instagram. Because the existing audience reads print newspapers, the opera company highlights visibility in highly regarded print media actors with the aim of evoking positive emotions in that target group, while at the same time reaching out to new audiences. This leads to the old value norms being transferred to new audiences. In other words, the opera house teaches new audiences to appreciate opera in the same way that existing audiences do, valuing, on one hand, detailed descriptions that focus on the art itself and the professionalism of the performers, and the expert reviews published in the print press on the other. In this way the view of opera as high culture, with the exclusive modes of appreciation and social norms inherent in it, is passed on to new target groups. In Frith’s terms, the brand practices aim at teaching new audiences (who may encounter opera for the first time) to apply an art discourse to opera.

While Folkoperan uses more of the program-book style in its texts, even omitting the hashtags in many cases, Savonlinna applies a more narrative style, with lengthy captions describing the opera festival experience. Indeed, the communication officer sees narrativity as a central affordance of the platform: “So [Instagram] is not a place where you promote something, nothing like ‘buy buy buy buy,’ but instead there must be stories and it is a place where you create that awareness and added value for those visitors.”⁷⁴ In addition to promoting an underlying notion of art against commerce, Vahvaselkä equates a narrative style with added value for the visitors, implying that it is this imaginative world of stories and pictures that motivates the audiences to engage with the brand. The narrative, however, is all about the institution setting the tone for the content and educating the reader on how the opera festival should be regarded. Besides, the narratives reach beyond the art of opera and the opera professionals—all framed in the art discourse manner—to the audiences visiting the festival (as illustrated in a lengthy caption in a Valentine’s Day post, fig. 3). Such captions extend the art discourse grid from the art of opera to the manners deemed suitable for attending opera, very much in the same way as in the nineteenth century. Expectations are created around the audience’s taste in food and wine, and a correct way of experiencing opera is outlined. Both strategies contribute to the idea of opera-attending as an exclusive pastime for those already initiated, creating a distinction between operagoers and non-attenders. As a result, the visibility that commentators can gain on Instagram is that they can be included in the valuable sphere of art discourse, which associates them with the hallmarks of high culture.

Exclusive Access?

The analysis above shows that both Folkoperan in Sweden and the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland address the question of cultural hierarchies when branding their institutions on Instagram. The degree of reliance on the traditional high culture hallmark reflects both the different views the organizations have on the strategic aim of social media marketing and the consequent target groups and the overall visions of the organizations. Tempering the impact of these cultural hierarchies on their branding practices, the organizations adapt to Instagram’s platform vernacular by creating digital spaces for embracing the affordances and modes of communication that are typical for social media but that collide with the idea of opera as high culture. In addition to the distinction between virtual onstage and backstage, I have identified a practice aiming at creating a new virtual space, the extra stage, that allows the opera institution to renegotiate the cultural hierarchies without risking its credibility as a professional opera institution gained in the virtual onstage space. The more the participatory affordances of the platform vernacular are embraced, however, the more the power balance between the institution and the audience shifts. As a result, the institutions educate new audiences to attach high art value to opera, and, ultimately, to be endowed with the hallmarks of high culture themselves as a reward for participation.

A complex web of practices, cultural meanings, and techno-social architectures and affordances is described here, shaping the way opera is understood in contemporary society. Despite the critique directed toward the idea of high culture as a social marker, cultural hierarchies continue to shape the way arts organizations distinguish themselves as brands. Moreover, as social media jeopardizes the traditional power balances between institutions and audiences, the cultural meaning attached to a brand becomes an asset for the brand manager who fights for visibility and brand engagement online.

Art institutions, however, cannot embrace entirely the idea of high art because the exclusivity entailed by such a distinction opposes the ideology and policy of art and culture being made accessible to more people. The level of access and audience participation varies, that is, between different virtual spaces created around the art form on the platform. Attempting to control the process of democratization taking place as audiences engage in online participatory processes, the brand managers frame opera as high art and maintain the distance between the institution and the audience. As a result, the institution ends up extending the idea of cultural hierarchies to its audience, hence creating a distinction between operagoers and non-attenders. Paradoxically, access to the latter group is welcomed, whereas the group of “real opera-lovers” emerges as an ever-so-exclusive assembly.

Rooted in the empirical material from Nordic opera companies, the marketing processes described above are characterized by the wider picture of the creative and cultural industries in Nordic welfare societies. While receiving public funding—albeit in an ever more competitive context—the organizations analyzed here as case studies encounter less pressure to attract sponsors and philanthropists through their social media branding than opera companies in regions where public funding is scarce or non-existent. The argument presented here—that cultural hierarchies play an important role in branding and audience engagement—has a bearing on art institutions beyond the Nordic sphere, as is shown by the breadth of the literature on establishing and negotiating highbrow standards in historic as well as contemporary settings. As arts institutions, social media, and societies continue to develop, more studies on the relationships among the three are needed. An example of future tendencies is the arrival of Instagram Threads, a text-based sister platform of Instagram, where new practices balancing audio-visual media and textual framing of art and culture emerge.

For brand managers juggling arts marketing on different channels, the question of cultural hierarchies is never easy. The balance between high-but-not-too-exclusive and accessible-but-not-too-popular reflects different interests within the sphere of cultural production and the society around it. As a “waiting room” in which exclusivity and accessibility meet, Instagram functions as a practical tool for opera companies to establish their position within society while holding on to the cultural value of art.

Inka-Maria Nyman is doctoral researcher in musicology and university teacher in arts management at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. Before her PhD studies, she worked as PR and marketing manager for Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and as PR and sales manager for Turku Music Festival. In her PhD thesis, Nyman focuses on the cultural meaning of opera in contemporary society, exploring themes such as accessibility and public image.

Footnotes