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Discursive Legitimation of Chinese Automobile Brands in the Russian Market: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Online Consumer Discourse
Given China’s rise as the world’s leading automotive producer and the radical
transformation of the Russian market, societal acceptance of new market entrants remains a dif-
ficult communicative task. Against the backdrop of growing sales and persistent consumer am-
bivalence, this study examines how Russian consumers discursively construct, challenge, and
renegotiate the legitimacy of Chinese automobile brands in online forums. Drawing on Such-
man’s multidimensional legitimacy framework and Van Leeuwen’s legitimation mechanisms, we
conduct a mixed-methods content analysis of 1,144 comments sampled from two leading Russian
automotive platforms (2014–2023). The approach combines manual polarity coding, which traces
the temporal shift from early skepticism to societal acceptance, with a thematic analysis that maps
consumer narratives across the pragmatic, moral, and cognitive dimensions of legitimacy. Within
each dimension, we specify the discursive strategies and linguistic means consumers use to secure
(de)legitimation. The findings reveal an asynchronous legitimation process: pragmatic legitimacy,
anchored in cost–benefit and reliability discourse, consolidates first; cognitive legitimacy is ac-
complished through normalization and historical analogies; moral legitimacy, by contrast, proves
the most resistant to change, sustained by value-laden metaphors and social identity debates. We
further show that legitimacy formation is not linear but a dialogic exchange between professional
automotive journalism and lay consumer discourse on digital platforms. By reworking market
categories through everyday communicative practices, ordinary consumers act as active legit-
imacy agents. Taken together, the results provide a processual, empirically grounded account
of brand legitimation in transitional markets with practical implications for market entrants and
policy-makers, and extend research on digital professional communication by documenting the
growing weight of electronic word-of-mouth in institutional market debates.