10
Branding and Culture
Introduction
As early as Roman times, sword blades and wine containers were marked to identify the producer, suggesting that branding has always had basic functions which we have easily lost sight of in the brand-saturated culture of global capitalism today. Again, in the medieval era, craft workers identified their products with trademarks, the forerunner of the distinctively packaged and widely distributed branded goods which came to characterize the industrial era. Thus the elementary purposes of the trademark, and hence, the brand, are to “uniquely identify” the maker of a given product, to differentiate that product from its competitors (and imitators), and to provide a warrant of quality and consistency to the purchaser (Aaker 1991, 7).
By the nineteenth century, rather than buying bulk, generic goods like oats, weighed out by the grocer, shoppers were learning to identify their preference amongst the packets on the shelf – would it be Quaker or Scott’s Porage Oats? And around the same time, householders were coming to appreciate the convenience of branded products, like Ivory, Pear’s, or Lifebuoy soap in packets, rather than having to make their own lye soap at home. In this way, manufacturers were using the distinctiveness of brands, along with their display and packaging, to establish a direct relationship with consumers, so that the traditional intermediary role of the retailer was bypassed by the brand itself serving to sell the product, a shift ultimately resulting in the “self-service” supermarket (Lury 2004, 19). Before long, even the retailers found that they had to adopt some of the characteristics of a brand if they were to prosper in a shifting and competitive market – Sears, Roebuck in the United States, Selfridge’s in Britain, David Jones in Australia, to name a few.
With the rise of the press, then radio and television coming to dominate social communication in the twentieth century, branding found its supreme vehicle in the advertising which impelled the commercial growth of these media. More than uniquely identifying a product or its manufacturer, advertising enabled brands to acquire cultural meanings, such as hierarchies of status (Nieman Marcus versus Wal-Mart); associations with certain kinds of people (“The Pepsi Generation”); and even something like their own personalities (stylish Lexus versus reliable Toyota). This capacity of goods to evoke and claim cultural meanings for themselves is called “brand equity,” or “brand image,” to which we shall return shortly. The point here is to show how the brand has become much more than the trademark from which it began, involving “the transfer of value through images” achieved especially, but not only, by advertising and other forms of marketing (Lash and Urry 1994, 138).
Branding is thus deeply implicated in the emergence of “consumerism” and the “consumer society.” This prominent moral and ideological aspect of capitalist society has been subject to sustained critique from both conservatives and Marxists, the former concerned with the materialism attributed to consumer society and its values, the latter with the functions such values are seen to serve in perpetuating capitalism. Among the latter, for example, Andrew Wernick (1991) offers a critique of “promotional culture” in which both individuals and institutions take on the character of brands, familiar to us respectively from the world of celebrities, and the way universities, for example, once aloof from the world of commerce, now position themselves with slogans and logos in an internationally competitive “marketplace.”
Naomi Klein (2001) demands “No Logo,” as her protest against “the new branded world,” and refers particularly to the rise of rapidly globalized “lifestyle” brands of the 1990s, like Nike. Her book on branding shows how brands conceal a worldwide struggle between capital and labor, and has become a founding text of the antiglobalization movement. She exposes the manner in which the actual manufacturing of sportswear and other such products has been outsourced, usually to low-wage, developing countries, leaving the company free to concentrate on marketing, which mainly means building up the brand. In this new paradigm, she says, “the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand” (2001, 21).
This insight takes Klein close to Celia Lury’s more abstract view that the brand is an “object,” that is, a thing, but not so much a single thing as a set of relations which mediate between producer and consumer, or supply and demand. More concretely, the brand is the management of the relations between what the traditional marketing textbooks call the “five Ps”: product, price, place, packaging, and promotion. Like Wernick, Lury also draws attention to the pervasiveness of branding, how it turns people into celebrities, and stretches across institutional spheres which have not seen the need to brand themselves in the past, like political parties and charities. She also notes the rise in the branding of places, even whole nations (2004, 5–16).
The pervasive branding of institutions, places, and spaces is a theme also found in the work of Liz Moor (2007), but whereas most writers on branding focus on advertising and promotion generally as the main means of establishing and building a brand, Moor draws attention to the role of design, both in the product itself and its packaging: think of the distinctive shape of the Coke bottle which has been maintained now over several decades. She points out that it is only since the mid-1990s that the concept of branding has come into everyday public discourse, a symptom of what she calls “a more reflexive capitalism” (2007, 5), that is, in the sense of it being more self-aware.
Perhaps the most recent and influential analysis of branding to emerge is from Adam Arvidsson, whose contribution is to show how consumers, rather than being the passive dupes of the marketers, actually participate in the making of a brand, albeit unequally. His insight is that brands capitalize upon “people’s ability to create trust, affect and shared meanings: their ability to create something in common. … it is the meaning-making activity of consumers that forms the basis of brand value” (2005, 236–7). Common meanings created collectively by people (whether a nation or a subculture) is one of the main things we mean when we talk about “culture,” so in other words, Arvidsson’s view is that although it is people who create cultural meanings, what brand marketers do is to pick up on these meanings and exploit them by associating them with particular products and services. This is a capitalism which is more reflexive in the sense that it recognizes the rise of an independent popular culture, but seeks to bring it under control to serve commercial interests.
Branding and Value
Influential writers such as those just discussed are pointing toward the significance of branding as a cultural phenomenon, yet they also recognize that it is an economic instrument of capitalism – indeed, some go further in arguing that the economic asset of a brand is not just based on, but actually is the equivalent to, the cultural meaning which exists for it. The capacity to endow a certain good or service with cultural value, that is, to transform a product into a brand, and sustain it as such, is called brand equity in the business management literature. According to Aaker, for example (1991), brand equity is composed of:
- brand loyalty, or the ability to retain satisfied customers
- familiarity and recognition of a brand name and/or symbols
- perceived quality of products offered under the brand name
- associations, including positioning of a brand relative to competitors
- other proprietary brand assets, such as control of distribution outlets.
In other words, brand equity mainly consists in the relation of a brand with its actual or potential consumers, at the level of culture. As early as the 1950s, the advertising industry was referring to this quality of a brand – to evoke loyalty, familiarity, and positive associations – as “brand image,” which is the character or personality which branding bestows upon a product to make it a “public object” (Gardner and Levy 1955, 35).
In this perspective, we see that the brand is not so much a mere image in the form of a logo or symbol, but a form of intellectual property, and as such, “an important immaterial asset in contemporary capitalism” (Arvidsson 2005, 238). As early as the 1980s, the value of established brands was apparent in high-profile, large-scale takeovers, such as when the US cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris took over General Foods in 1985, and then Kraft in 1988, as it became clear that tobacco had little future (Sandler and Shani 1992, 28). The 1990s and 2000s have seen sometimes long-standing brands being acquired in a process of continued global corporate expansion and consolidation of brand portfolios, such as Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of Gillette in 2005.
What is being bought in such transactions is brand equity – that is, brand image is given a financial value so that it can change hands. Since there are high costs and often also long years involved in building up brand equity, corporations that want to take over an existing brand via acquisition or merger have to compensate the seller, not just for the investment embedded in the brand, but for the meaning it commands as a public object. The elusive, intangible quality of a brand image is thus given a concrete value, or specific, calculated quantity. Since the 1980s formal accounting methods of putting a figure on both the present and future value of brands have become standardized to facilitate such takeovers and mergers, which in effect are methodologies for transforming quality into quantity (Lury 2004). Certain marketing communications companies also measure brand performance. Notably, in recent years the UK-based marketing research company Millward Brown Optimor has captured the attention of the business world when it publishes annually, from its BrandZ survey, its calculations and ranking of brands on a world-regional and global basis, using their metric of dollar value to identify “the world’s most powerful brands” (Millward Brown Optimor 2008).
As with mergers and takeovers, when global companies like Coca-Cola enter licensing arrangements with local bottling and distribution companies, or McDonald’s sell franchises to the “Mom and Pop” operators of particular outlets, the principal part of what is being licensed or franchised is brand equity. Indeed, the extensive growth of brand licensing and retail franchising arrangements, seen for example in the same range of shops being found from one main street or shopping mall to another, is a potent, though understudied, form in which brands now pervade our environment as “capitalism in kit form” (Perry 1998, 51). As for licensing, some corporations reach the point where they find it is more profitable to sell the rights to their brand, rather than keep producing it themselves: for example, the Australian-based global brewing company Foster’s closed down its breweries in Europe and Asia, and sold the rights to brew the brand to its former distributors.
Thus, whether it is stock market evaluations, takeovers and mergers, or licensing and franchising contracts, capitalism requires that a calculable value can be put on a brand. This value allows the brand to be traded, or financially negotiated in some way, and because it has financial value, the brand owner needs to protect it. It is in this sense that a brand is a form of intellectual property. Once again, the trademark can be seen as the ancestor and paradigm of the legal protection with which brands are now surrounded, but patents, copyright, and design rights may also apply. All these rights prevent competitors from imitating or otherwise encroaching upon the brand’s equity, thus protecting the company’s investment in developing or acquiring the brand. Consumers are protected also, to the extent that the brand owner has an incentive to maintain the brand’s quality, and in the sense that they are assured of what it is that they are buying. However, in the era of corporate globalization, intellectual property law has become something of a weapon to eliminate local competitors, especially in new markets (Moor 2007).
For instance, the UK-based global confectionery company Cadbury pursued, and lost, a lawsuit against an Australian firm, which, like Cadbury, also used the color purple as part of its brand image. The issue was not so much whether Cadbury could “own” the color purple, but whether consumers would be “confused” by both companies using it. This ostensible protection of the consumer is a key concept in trademark law, but clearly can benefit more the market power of producers, even if not in this particular case (Lury 2004).
Indeed, just as an older generation of political economists identified advertising in general as a “barrier to entry,” so can this criticism be more precisely leveled at branding. To say branding is a barrier to entry means that prospective competitors are discouraged from entering a market because of the high costs which those new entrants would have to invest in branding so as to match the levels which the incumbents already have put into developing and/or acquiring existing brands. Branding is thus a bulwark of market power, and so favors oligopolistic market structures; that is, where there are just two or three corporations which share a market for a given kind of good or service, such as the global dominance of Procter & Gamble and Unilever in so many “fast moving consumer goods” (FMCG) brands.
Marxist Political Economy and Branding
“The treatment of the commodity in the first hundred or so pages of Capital is arguably one of the most difficult, contradictory, and ambiguous parts of Marx’s corpus” (Appadurai 1986, 7). The question with which Marx began his major work was how it was that goods, or “commodities,” which he defined as any object that satisfied wants, were able to conceal the real relations between capital and labor under which they were produced. For Marx, labor was the true source of value, but the mystique of the commodity made it seem that it was valuable in itself. To be under this illusion was what Marx famously called “commodity fetishism.” Intrinsic to his analysis of the commodity was the distinction between use value and exchange value, which actually derives from the classical political economy of Adam Smith. Use value was just that – what an object was useful for, its utility – but exchange value was what someone would give for it in exchange. For Marx, it was in exchange that the commodity became fetishized, that is, when its mystique overshadowed the labor that produced it, and particularly when it was being exchanged for money. In practical terms today, we are talking about the difference between what a certain “good” is good for, and the price we are prepared to pay for it.
In Marxist critical discourse, “commodification” has become a key concept, applied to situations where what was once free now comes with a price attached; where what was once publicly available has become privately held; and where what was once natural and authentic has been contaminated, diluted, dumbed down, or otherwise corrupted, and then usually packaged for mass, or perhaps niche-market, consumption. “Commodification,” in fact, has come to serve as a critical metonym used to denounce all cultural forms in which commerce is seen to encroach upon spheres of life where it ought not belong. As such, it is more of a rhetorical than an analytical and heuristic concept, though one authoritative contemporary political economist gives it this formal definition: “Commodification is the process of transforming use values into exchange values” (Mosco 1996, 141).
However, from the perspective of branding, it would be more true to say, “Branding is the process of transforming use values into exchange values,” in the sense that while one commodity will perform the same function as any other, branding differentiates commodities and provides exchange value for the consumer who seeks out one in preference to others. In that light, it is actually brands, not commodities, which are fetishized, though modern-day Marxists would agree that branding certainly contributes to the mystique that conceals the value of the labor which made the product; it is part of what they mean by commodification.
Yet for those not schooled in Marxist discourse, the concept of commodity itself can be confusing. While Marxists do commonly refer to branded products as commodities, such usage completely inverts the hierarchical relation between brands and commodities now understood in contemporary “bourgeois” economics. In the current business literature, for instance, commodities are seen as fungible and undifferentiated, merely the raw materials from which products, whether as goods or services, are made for exchange (Pine and Gilmore 1999, 6). Indeed, Marx himself specifically had in mind commodities like corn, iron, or silk, which, although there may be variations in quality, are generic: one load of corn is much like any other. By contrast, branding creates differentiation – even in Marx’s own time, to hark back to an example given in the introduction, soap (in the UK) became Pear’s. And as also noted above, differentiation can involve one or more of the “five Ps”: product, price, place, packaging, and promotion. Differences can be actual, such as in quality, origin, or design; or rather based more on the brand image – what distinguishes Coke from Pepsi, for example. Indeed, when brand owners talk about “commodification,” what they mean is their fear that their brand will lose its distinctive image, and the product become readily substitutable for any other of its kind, an MP3 player rather than an iPod.
More than for their use value, or mere competitive display in what Thorstein Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption,” there is an anthropological argument that all societies need goods “for making visible and stable the categories of culture” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979, 59). Similarly, Appadurai, following Georg Simmel, argues that “It is exchange that sets the parameters of utility and scarcity, rather than the other way around, and exchange that is the source of value” (1986, 4). For Appadurai, the meaningful criteria of exchange are governed by “regimes of value,” which enable exchange to take place not only within cultures, but between them (1986, 14–15). More broadly, Douglas and Isherwood take the view that “the very idea of consumption itself needs to be set back into the social process … Goods, work and consumption have been artificially abstracted out of the whole social scheme” (1979, 4).
This anthropological idea, that goods do not so much derive their meaning from culture, but on the contrary, provide culture with meaning, perhaps surprisingly finds some resonance with modern Marxists. Jean Baudrillard is notorious among them for his rejection of use value in his analysis of consumption, in favor of a semiotic hierarchy of symbolic exchange value, although he largely restricts the meaning of such value to its role in making and keeping class distinctions (1981). That is, for Baudrillard, the cultural significance of goods forms a kind of pecking order that reflects and reinforces the social system. More recently, there is the contribution of Arvidsson, who draws on the current strain of “autonomist” Marxism to argue that the “productivity of consumers,” that is, the cultural capital which they collectively produce and which marketers exploit in branding, is a kind of “immaterial labour” which forms the context of consumption, “within which goods can acquire use-value” (2005, 242). By “use-value” here, he means the social identity and cultural belonging bestowed by the consumption of goods; for Arvidsson, use value is the good’s cultural meaning, not its utility. Yet since Baudrillard’s exchange value seems to equate to Arvidsson’s use value, it is difficult to see how the classic distinction can have either utility or meaning in the contemporary analysis of branding and consumption.
However, setting aside this considerable conceptual problem in Arvidsson’s approach, there is his insight, already quoted more fully in the introduction, that brands capitalize upon “people’s ability to create trust, affect and shared meanings” (2005, 236–7). Once again, this can be matched to the anthropological argument which implicitly fits this sharing to brand-names, the view that “Goods are endowed with value by the agreement of fellow consumers. … Enjoyment of physical consumption is only a part of the service yielded by goods; the other part is the enjoyment of sharing names. … by far the greater part of utility is yielded … in sharing names that have been learned and graded. This is culture” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979, 75–6).
From Political Economy to Cultural Economy
Since the conceptual language of traditional Marxist political economy lacks analytical edge when confronted with the phenomenon of branding, and seems especially unsuited to explaining how the economic functions of a given brand depend upon its cultural significance, we need to find a conceptual framework that can comprehend both the economic and cultural dimensions of branding. Although we abstract concepts from the reality we observe around us so that we can understand it, sometimes we then forget that these concepts are abstractions of our own making, and they become reified or hypostasized. That is, we come to think of the concepts as being real, not the actual world from which they have been abstracted.
We are especially prone to mislead ourselves with this fallacious way of thinking when the concepts form a mutually dependent pair, or structured opposition. For example, although consumption is not conceivable without production, and vice versa, or in Marxist theory, the superstructure without a substructure or base, and vice versa, there is an inclination to argue for the significance of one at the expense of the other. Furthermore, the way in which theoretical understanding is organized into disciplines and fields encourages this tendency. To take the most pertinent case, Marxist political economy puts its primacy on the substructure of production, leaving the superstructure of consumption to fields such as cultural studies. This has meant that in studies of marketing, advertising, and branding, political economy is prone to concentrate upon the institutional relations between the consumer goods and services companies, their marketing agencies, and the media; while the content of their marketing and advertising campaigns is left to cultural studies. So on these grounds too there needs to be a more integrated theoretical understanding of the economic and the cultural dimensions of branding.
One of the most useful and influential formulations to attempt this in recent decades has come from Mike Featherstone, who has argued in favor of the concept of “consumer culture” to characterize contemporary capitalist societies, not as a form of moral condemnation, but analytically:
this involves a dual focus: firstly on the cultural dimension of the economy, the symbolization and use of material goods as “communicators” not just utilities; and secondly, on the economy of cultural goods, the market principles of supply, demand, capital accumulation, competition and monopolization, which operate within the sphere of lifestyles, cultural goods and commodities. (Featherstone 1987, 57)
This two-way understanding of the relationship between economic processes and cultural meanings opens up fertile ground for the study of branding. In the 1990s, another fruitful contribution came from Scott Lash and John Urry, who argued that the economy and culture were becoming ever more integrated: “the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and … culture is more and more economically inflected” (1994, 64). They particularly see an “aestheticization” of economic production, meaning that goods have come to be designed to attract certain kinds of consumers and to fit with their lifestyles; indeed, the concept of lifestyle is very much a buzzword of the 1990s. Prior to the “cultural turn” in that decade, it was sufficient to have a life, but the discourse of marketing promoted the idea that we each needed a lifestyle, a way of defining ourselves in terms of a certain constellation of brands.
However, the notion that there was something new and epoch-making in this alleged “culturalization” of the economy has been criticized by a group of theorists forming the emergent “cultural economy” school. Instead, they argue that culture and economy are not hitherto mutually distinct, stable, and coherent macrostructures in society, but rather, they both have always been embedded in observable, analyzable institutions and practices which can not be disentangled into the cultural and the economic – that is, they constitute each other. Their refusal to accept a theoretical distinction between culture and economy leads the cultural economy school into a predominantly empirical approach which seeks to observe and understand how the economy is “performed” culturally. It follows that if the cultural and the economic can only be observed in actual empirical situations, neither culture nor the economy can overshadow the other. Liz McFall explains this standpoint in relation to advertising (though not branding as such): “The cultural is not something that intervenes in economic processes; rather it is constitutive of them. … the approach advocated here is to focus on the performance of advertising as a constituent material practice. … In as far as they exist at all, ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ exist in concrete instances of material practice” (2004, 86, emphasis in original).
A further contribution from the cultural economy school is its introduction of “actor-network theory.” Derived from science and technology studies, actor-network theory gives explicit recognition to the role of objects in bringing about social change. Although often controversial, this “agency of nonhumans” notion is quite comprehensible if we consider how certain objects have facilitated the mass transition from being served by the grocer to serving oneself by selecting brands in the supermarket: the shopping cart or trolley most obviously, but also packaging, display shelving, and refrigerator installations. More abstractly, Lury (2004) asserts that the brand is an “object,” actively mediating between supply and demand as a kind of interface or platform which uses information to frame exchange across time and space.
Like Lury, McFall also explicitly draws upon actor-network theory, specifically the work of Michel Callon on markets, and identifies the role of information in the “reflexive attachment” with which consumers perceive and grade differences between products, a process in which the brand is central as a “complex socio-technical device” (McFall 2004, 83). Similarly, Callon is also cited by Arvidsson in his account of how markets are brought into being, and once again, information is seen to provide an interface. For Arvidsson, ultimately, branding is a set of relations “between things, people, images, texts and physical and informational environments” (2006, 126). He stresses that the brand is more than the goods or services which are offered under its sign; the brand transcends the product to become its “context of consumption” (Arvidsson 2005, 244).
In brief, with the cultural economy school, we arrive at a more complex and relational conception of branding which goes beyond the sterile dualism, however conceived, of economy/culture, culture/economy, and directs our attention to the actual interaction between brand owners and their prospective consumers in the marketplace. Furthermore, particular attention is given to the active role of information, which includes not just the marketing campaigns of the brand owners, but the knowledge, emotional associations, and perceptions of a brand which consumers bring to the market. The cultural economy approach thus offers a significant advance over traditional Marxist analysis in two related ways: it escapes both the trap of economic determinism, and also the “cultural authority model” derived from it; that is, the belief that the brand-owning corporations have omnipotent control over “how people think and feel through branded commercial products” (Holt 2002, 71).
Branding and National Cultures
Thus, rather than the “cultural dopes” of past theory, consumers are now seen to “use goods productively; they use them to construct social relations, shared emotions, personal identity or forms of community” (Arvidsson 2006, 18). Nevertheless, this does not amount to the all-out victory of the sovereign consumer. There is a hegemonic struggle going on in which marketers constantly seek to engage and mobilize the “meaning-making activity” of consumers with their branding (Arvidsson 2005, 237). A whole range of marketing practices, such as the current vogue for “experiential marketing” (Pine and Gilmore 1999), are deployed by corporations in order to build brand image and hence equity, but such “brand management” has its limits. It should not be thought that a certain kind of image can be arbitrarily imposed upon a brand by manipulative brand managers, for they must work with what is already in the culture. Arvidsson goes so far as to suggest that consumers collectively have “a high degree of autonomy” in this regard, or at least that consumer perceptions are “beyond the direct control of capital” (2005, 242). For example, the universally positive associations enjoyed by Rolls-Royce is not something which has been implanted by years of active marketing, but rests upon popular cultural notions of quality, design, and engineering.
The images and narratives of branding can be powerful vehicles of myth, in the ideological sense used by Roland Barthes in his classic analysis of the new Citroën, “consumed in image … by a whole population” (1973, 88). Douglas Holt argues that the most important of such myths, as in this case, “concern how citizens are linked to the nation-building project,” especially when these myths motivate and are performed in acts of everyday consumption of particular brands that encourage the consumer to identify with the “populist world” of the nation (Holt 2004, 57–8). In this sense, national identity can be taken to refer to things as well as persons. Drawing on actor-network theory, Tim Edensor asserts that “things are partly understood as belonging to nations,” and observes that “mass manufactured commodities are associated with particular nations, also often carrying mythic associations that connote particular qualities and forms of expertise” (Edensor 2002, 103–5). More than a kind of broad “reputational capital” (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2000, 59) which nations have for their goods – Italian style, Germanic quality – or national comparative advantage in a generic sense – the Scots make whisky, the French make wine – this insight can be applied to particular brands. To take Edensor’s own examples, the Swedes have their Volvo, while the British have, on the one hand, the Aston Martin, yet on the other, the Mini (2002, 118–37). These associations are symbolic, not actual – it is beside the point that Volvo is now owned by Ford, and Mini by BMW, and given that automotive production has become highly globalized, there is no knowing exactly where in the world any of these “national” brands are actually produced.
When we talk about national identity, we not only mean the identity of the nation in relation to other nations, but also the identity of those persons who see themselves as belonging to the nation, and for whom that is a dimension of their personal identity. In this second sense, and in line with the view that consumers make meaningful choices for themselves, it can be argued that they choose national belonging rather than have it imposed on them, an allegiance which they express in making purchases of certain brands which are represented to them as embedded in an everyday, popular national culture that they identify with as their own; “it is in consumerism that we most express our sense of social belonging. … Culture is the society we build with our brands” (Davidson 1992, 124).
While it is difficult to generalize across all product types and all segments in any given national market, suffice it to say that while there are certain international brands which are bought as such and valued for their own sake, such as Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and other prestigious designer labels, other brands have their equity grounded in an established association with the nation. Tim Edensor goes so far as to suggest that the demonstrable demand for “certain exemplary national products” (2002, 113) may be motivated by a desire to stabilize identity in a turbulent world: “In the face of globalization commonly shared things anchor people to place. … The ability of things to connote shared histories is potent” (116). In the United States, the kind of person who flies the stars and stripes on their lawn will have a Chevrolet rather than a Toyota in the driveway; some Britons traveling abroad might feel more secure when flying British Airways; while Australian backpackers find their comfort in a jar of Vegemite. Thus, in addition to whatever utility branded goods may have, and however much they may mark our social distinction as individuals, they also can express our belonging to a nation.
Modern nation-states have their own interests to pursue in promoting images of national unity and belonging, and in cultivating support for their policies at home and abroad. They do so increasingly as a form of branding – Cool Britannia (McLaughlin 2002), India Shining (Bijoor 2004), and Australian Made/True Blue (Australian Made 2003) are recent examples. That is, the nation itself now presents itself as a brand, both internally and externally. Internally, in the interests of governance and as the custodian of the national culture with which it legitimizes its authority, the nation-state addresses its citizens as members of the “imagined community” of the nation, and hence as participants in its supposed “deep horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 1983, 6). However fraught and tenuous national cultures have become in the era of global flows, cultural belonging continues to be associated with place and nationhood (Morley 2000). Externally, many nations now cultivate a brand identity, each seeking to position itself vis-à-vis other nations in the global marketplace, competing for trade, tourism, and investment, or protecting the unique “nation of origin” status of their exports (Anholt 2000, Moor 2007).
Tourism is an instructive case. As O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy point out, the nation is “awkward” as a brand because “there is a general level of ignorance of countries other than one’s own” (2000, 57). While on one hand, this ignorance allows national tourism authorities and promoters a certain latitude in how they selectively shape the brand image of their nation, they are also constrained by the stereotypes which are already established in their target markets: the United States as the country we see in Hollywood films; Britain as a nation of historical and cultural heritage; Australia as a frontier land of desert, bush, and beaches. Yet from a branding point of view, the images that people have of other nations are more than just stereotypes of this or that country. Brands acquire their meaning from their position relative to their competitors, so rather than being condemned for the ignorance which they no doubt represent, stereotypes need to be understood in relation to each other, collectively forming a system in which each nation is assigned a position. This position can change, but any change may thus require a repositioning of the others, so in practice it is difficult to move position. The broader point is that national identities, like personal identities, are relational; their meaning derives from where they stand in comparison with others.
For example, an expensive international campaign launched in 2004 which sought to cast Australia in “a different light” with an aesthetic, reflective, and personalized approach, was soon terminated when tourist agencies overseas objected that they could not convince prospects to make the trip with such an unfamiliar, abstracted image of Australia- they all wanted the beaches – that was what Australia was about. A country can claim a new position for itself within the total system of national identities, yet like love or social status, position is something which cannot be demanded, only given by others.
To the extent that “the market rather than the state has become the key reference point for national identity” (Foster 1999, cited in Edensor 2002, 111), the “official nationalism” of the nation-state is now infused with what has been called the “commercial nationalism” of the market (James 1983, 79), which also addresses people in their capacity as members of the nation, not as citizens but as consumers, calling upon the same “trust, affect and shared meanings” involved in national belonging (Arvidsson 2005, 236). This ascendance of the values of the market over those of the nation-state also entails a shift from the formal, official markers of nationhood toward those that are more grounded in popular culture and its commercialization by the media. Indeed, more than “print capitalism,” it has been commercial television, in its dual role of nation-building and the forming of national markets for advertisers, which has led so many contemporary developed nations to become “imagined communities of consumption” (Foster 1991, 250). Thus, in addition to diffuse popular traditions and narratives of national belonging, and the “shared meanings” of nationhood expressed in televisual and media culture in general, branded goods, “as advertised on television” and elsewhere, also become mediators of membership of the nation.
As Robert Foster observes, “Nations, and national cultures are artifacts – continually imagined, invented, contested and transformed by the agency of individual persons, the state, and global flows of commodities” (1991, 252). We should also be aware that the global flows of persons in the form of migration, displacement, tourism, and other forms of “deterritorialization” mean that contemporary nation-states and markets alike are confronted as never before with culturally diverse and fluid populations. In these circumstances, myths of national belonging and their expression in communities of consumption also exclude at the same time as they include – the mainstream, dominant culture is affirmed, while minority cultures and subcultures are “othered.” In terms of marketing and branding, minorities within a given national market mostly lack the critical mass necessary to attract the attention of marketers, although members of the same minority living in different countries, as in the case of diasporas, can form transnational markets for certain branded goods and services, Western Union for example, literally transnational in the sense of cutting across national boundaries.
Branding and Global Culture
In the “metaculture” of the “global ecumene” today (Hannerz 1996), many, perhaps most, of the brand-names that we know in our national markets are in fact those of global corporations. Interestingly, Lury points out that most of the major global brands are 50–100 years old, that is, older than most of their consumers (Lury 2004, 101). From that perspective we see that, at least in the main consumer capitalist societies, people experience certain brands just as they do their national language: brand-names and associations are an integral aspect of the complex cultural world in which each of us must learn how to function. Major brands like Coca-Cola can truly say “Always Coca-Cola” after having been part of a given culture for generations, just as McDonald’s, with its happy meals and birthday parties, has secured a place in the childhood memories of those who do not remember a time when there was no McDonald’s.
Importantly, however, brands extend themselves over space as well as time. These older brands have not always been household names throughout the world, and even now, they are not literally “global.” Rather, such brands point proudly to a constructed, anecdotal heritage of entrepreneurism, which has taken them from modest, unlikely local origins to global scale, and even critical accounts recognize how companies like Coca-Cola have been able to extend their markets over time from, in that case, the city of Atlanta to the state of Georgia, then to the south as a region, and from that to the United States as a nation, and then to particular foreign markets, before claiming global status (McQueen 2001). On the other hand, while it may be true that many global brands have had this extended period of development, contemporary marketing structures have allowed many others to achieve global reach in a matter of decades (Frith and Mueller 2003, 1). What is striking in recent times has been the sudden rise of communication and information technology corporations, including mobile telephony companies. In the BrandZ survey of 2008, 28 of the world’s top 100 brands were in this category, and with a faster growth rate than any other. Just to take the top 10, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are still there, along with General Electric and Marlboro, but Google is in first place (again), and Microsoft, China Mobile, IBM, Apple, and Nokia fill out the list. Other brands much further down in the top 100, which also have achieved global presence within a fairly short time, have more to do with contemporary leisure activities and lifestyles, such as Ikea and Starbuck’s (Millward Brown Optimor 2008).
While the technology corporations can be said to be the most truly global, in the sense that information and communication technologies are both cause and effect of the global era, branding is a major means by which all global corporations maximize the advantages that accrue to them via globalization, particularly the opening up of huge new markets and licensing opportunities, and the rationalization of distribution systems (Arvidsson 2006, Holt 2002). In the case of the technology corporations, what the orthodox economists call “first mover advantage” seems to be significant, first in achieving market power in the home market, and then by pressing that advantage when entering foreign markets. In such cases, first mover advantage is about technical innovation, and the protection of that innovation against competition and imitation at home and abroad – for example, Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems and Google’s pre-eminence in commercializing Internet search. In such cases, branding is less important than other forms of intellectual property, namely technology patents, but corporations have found it difficult to wield these against competitors in particular foreign markets. Thus Microsoft battles rampant piracy of its software in China, to take the most significant case, while China’s Baidu completely overwhelms Google in the search market. There are many factors involved here, including regulatory ones, but some may be cultural, given that there are other major culturally distant markets where Google also lags behind national corporations, for instance, Japan, Korea, and Russia (Waters 2008).
The strategic use of branding and the handling of cultural differences is more clear-cut and established in the case of traditional corporations like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and the FMCG giants like Procter & Gamble and Unilever. As noted, many of these expanded beyond their North American or European domestic markets several decades ago, and have become most experienced in managing their brands in culturally alien markets. Even so, they made some of the same cultural gaffes with brand-names which later became common with the high tide of international corporate expansion in the 1960s. While many of the stories about these are inaccurate, one which does seem to be true is that when “Coca-Cola” was first transliterated into Chinese characters in the 1920s by its distributors (not the corporation itself, they insist), it meant “bite the wax tadpole” when sounded out. A more contemporary one which can be confirmed is that the Mitsubishi Pajero is called a Montero in Spanish-speaking countries, where a pajero is a “wanker” or a “jerk.” Even within the same linguistic world, problems can arise: XXXX (“Fourex”) is a brand of beer in Australia, but of condoms in the United States (Ricks 1999). Clearly, if not even the meaning of a brand-name can be carried intact across national borders, then its brand image has no chance of going along with it.
This and other kinds of experience with cultural and linguistic barriers undermined the enthusiasm for “standardization,” which had been built up during the 1980s in certain quarters among marketers and their agencies. Standardization was an attractive ideal to corporations, because it seemed to offer a consistent global image for a brand, as well as economies of scale in having just “one sight, one sound, one sell” around the world (Mattelart 1991, 55). However, while this might have worked for the Marlboro cowboy, there were some spectacular failures – not necessarily to do with branding and culture as such, but also complications due to national regulations and problems with distribution systems in the target markets. Product type emerged as a factor as well – airlines could standardize their campaigns, but coffee manufacturers like Nestlé knew better than to even try.
By the 1990s, the buzzword became “glocalization,” or global localization, meaning an adaptive strategy in which the marketer seeks a practical balance between the organizational and economic advantages of standardization, and the necessities of responding to cultural and other differences between markets (Herbig 1998), a notion which takes account of the consumer’s cultural realities. The degree to which marketers are prepared to glocalize varies enormously, once again, depending on the product, but also upon the target market and its distribution. While there are cases of tailoring brand advertising for different cities in the same national market, more often if the same campaign will serve for “country clusters” and even a whole world region, then marketers will not glocalize any more specifically than they consider necessary: this is “strategic regionalism” (Sinclair and Wilken 2009).
The penetration of global brands, both in the national markets themselves and the media that carry their advertising, has generated a considerable critical academic literature and even debate in world forums over the last several decades. While the “cultural imperialism” critique of the late 1960s has morphed into fears of cultural homogenization in the global era, other theorists have drawn attention to the multiple “local” adaptations which global cultural forms undergo, thus counterposing homogenization to heterogenization (Sinclair 2007). Interestingly, the academic debate between theorists of homogenization and heterogenization runs parallel to that just noted in marketing, between the advocates of standardization and those who favor adaptive “multidomestic” strategies. And just as the latter debate has found a consensus in the middle ground of glocalization, the theorists are coming to recognize a process of “hybridization” in which consumer markets and media audiences consciously negotiate between the global and the local (McMillin 2007), once again conceding much more agency to consumers than was ever allowed for in the “cultural authority” model of traditional Marxism (Holt 2002).
However, it is the marketers who are engaged upon this complex and contradictory middle ground in practical terms. For example, Watson’s (1997) study of McDonald’s in Asia is instructive in showing not only how the corporation has glocalized the menu items in accordance with the tastes of the various nations of the region, but also how the outlets have to manage the tension which exists between their need to discipline customers to the ways of eating fast food, Western style, and the customers’ desire to spend time in the stores for a whole range of social purposes. This question of “consumer discipline” is a major issue, even when the corporations are seeking actively to bridge cultural differences. Indeed, there is a sense in which brand management takes on a kind of teaching function, which is most certainly ideologically loaded, a form of induction into modern consumer capitalism. Even in the West, McDonald’s has redefined “restaurant” to mean a place where you serve your own table, eat with your hands, and clean up after yourself. This kind of discipline is about the acquisition of the cultural competencies associated with consumption, which could mean how to use a supermarket, or just learning how to interpret unfamiliar visual language in television commercials (Wang 2003, 252).
When what were then called the “multinational” corporations entered the “underdeveloped nations” of the “Third World” in the 1960s, those markets typically were divided between a small wealthy elite who could easily afford branded goods, and the great mass of people who could not. In a process dubbed as “the internationalization of the internal market,” the multinationals set up subsidiaries to manufacture their brands for both the “primary” (elite) and “secondary” (mass) markets. For the latter, cheap branded products in small packages were made and widely distributed, and backed with advertising, for example, Maggi soup cubes made by Nestlé in African and Latin American countries were considered a marketing success of this kind (Sinclair 1987). As one contemporary advocate enthused, “In what is called its pioneering phase, advertising’s function is not to rob sales from competitors, or gull the unsophisticated, but to teach new consumption behaviour. Western European/North American-style advertising has demonstrated itself as an enormously effective teacher of new ways of living” (Stridsberg 1974, 77). In more recent decades, there has developed a discourse about the expanding “middle class” in countries such as China and India. However, the bulk of the populations of such countries live outside the main urban areas which have been incorporated into global modernity, so that while the residents of Shanghai or Mumbai might grow up in brand-aware environments, their rural and provincial counterparts do not. Nor do they have the same purchasing power. Consequently, they tend to exhibit a stubbornly premodern inclination to buy goods on the basis of their price and reliability, rather than the kind of brand image cultivated by advertising. That is, they do not necessarily see products in terms of brands, and because their purchasing power is limited, they have very little experience of brands. One strategic corporate response to this form of consumer resistance is the “downward brand extension”; that is, offering more cheaply formulated versions of their premium brands (Doctoroff 2005). This strategy enables the advertiser to give prospective consumers an affordable product with which they may experience the brand, and perhaps thus to extend consumer discipline over them as they learn to respond to the aura of the brand name.
However, it is worth mentioning that although global FMCG conglomerates like Procter & Gamble and Unilever appear listed among the biggest advertisers in China and India in Advertising Age’s Global Marketers Report for 2008, there continues to be also a strong presence of Chinese and Indian brands, notably for traditional herbal and ayurvedic medicines, reflecting their respective cultures. Furthermore, although dominance of such lists by FMCG marketers tends to be typical of less developed national markets, there are significant advertisers in more sophisticated categories. As noted above, one of China’s biggest advertisers, China Mobile, made it into the BrandZ top 10 for 2008, while one of the biggest marketers in India, Tata Group, acquired the prestigious Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford that same year. On such indications, global brands are no longer the exclusive properties of the usual suspects, the major corporations based in North America and Europe.
Note
This chapter is an output from a program of research under ARC Discovery - Project, DP0556419, “Globalisation and the Media in Australia,” funded 2005–9. The author gratefully acknowledges the ARC’s financial support, and research assistance provided to the program by Dr Rowan Wilken.
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Suggestions for Further Reading
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