Charismatic Entrainment: How Brand Leaders and Consumers Co-Create Charismatic Authority in the Marketplace

Abstract How do CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, celebrity bloggers, and other brand leaders acquire charismatic authority in the marketplace? Grounded in a multi-perspective, in-depth case study of the charismatic CEO of an Austrian shoe manufacturer, this article introduces a sociocultural mechanism called charismatic entrainment. Charismatic entrainment involves brand leaders staging charismatic authority by promoting polarized worldviews and taking personal risks to demonstrate their ability to lead social change. It further involves consumer-followers publicly validating and consumer-critics challenging brand leaders’ claims to charismatic authority, encouraging further entrainment via their support, but also their criticism. Brand leaders, consumer-followers, and consumer-critics draw on social media, marketplace sentiments, and brand manifestations as entrainment resources to more effectively endow brand leaders with charismatic authority in the marketplace. The article contributes a market-based, multi-stakeholder—versus an organizational, leader-centric—theory of charisma co-creation to the literature on charismatic authority. It also adds to theories of iconic branding, risk consumption, and societal morality plays, sensitizing readers to the constructive but also destructive potential of market-based charisma co-creation.