Sustainable branding through AI-mediated repairability: reconfiguring CSR in digital ecosystems

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.51300/JSM-2026-170

Sustainable branding increasingly depends on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is operationalized through digital infrastructures, not merely communicated. The right-to-repair (R2R) movement makes this shift visible by framing repairability as both a consumer right and an environmental responsibility. This manuscript contends that repairability attains legitimacy as a credible CSR initiative when embedded in infrastructures that facilitate practical repair, rather than advanced merely as a communicative assertion. Artificial intelligence reconfigures this capability by mediating diagnostics and guided repair while introducing tensions around opacity and dependence on proprietary data infrastructures. Self-service repair programs, platform partnerships, and predictive maintenance illustrate how ecosystem design enacts responsibility in practice. Yet these same infrastructures redistribute accountability, introduce gatekeeping through software locks and parts pairing, and expose brands to public contestation. Drawing on a composite vignette as a theory-building device, this conceptual manuscript develops a layered framework, a commitment–openness typology, and testable propositions for credible repairability-based sustainable branding. The framework reveals that brand legitimacy strengthens when access, intelligence, governance, and community layers align with responsibility claims and erodes when auditable inconsistencies trigger accusation dynamics in digital publics. For managers, repairability claims must be substantiated by repair infrastructures capable of withstanding public verification.