When social media act as parenting advice: Indonesian mothers’ understandings of formula milk branded content on Instagram

Despite Indonesia’s tightening regulations on breast-milk substitute (BMS) promotion, enforcement gaps persist as branded content on Instagram blurs the line between parenting education and commercial advertising. This study examines how BMS branded content is produced by brand managers and interpreted by mothers within this regulatory ambiguity. Using a critical interpretive grounded theory design, data were collected through two focus group discussions with twelve mothers and semi-structured interviews with three brand managers, analyzed via in-vivo and thematic coding guided by Ashley and Tuten’s typology. Mothers consistently decoded branded content as credible parenting guidance across three frames: functional (nutritional information), emotional (bonding and caregiving norms), and experiential (actionable routines). Brand managers, however, described the same content as compliance-driven and algorithmically optimized. Engineered for resonance rather than genuine education. This divergence reveals a structural gap between industry encoding and audience decoding, through which commercially engineered content gains legitimacy as parenting support while subtly circumventing formal advertising restrictions. The findings call for clearer regulatory classification of branded content, stronger digital enforcement of the WHO Code, and enhanced maternal digital health literacy to protect breastfeeding norms in algorithm-driven media environments.