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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 difficult communicative task. Against the backdrop of growing sales and persistent consumer ambivalence, this study examines how Russian consumers discursively construct, challenge, and renegotiate the legitimacy of Chinese automobile brands in online forums. Drawing on Suchman’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 accomplished 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 legitimacy 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.