University of Leeds

“In what way has the globalisation of advertising affected
national and local cultures and identities?”

by 

Florian Mayer

Advertising as a cultural institution 4

Advertising and the deconstruction of local identities 6

Advertising and the construction of national and local identities  7

Conclusion  12

Notes 14

Introduction

It has been argued that individual and national identities are becoming increasingly fragmented under conditions of globalisation, that with accelerated global flows of commodities, culture and people, we become increasingly disembedded and rootless (see for example Bauman, 1992; Giddens, 1991). It is argued here that amid this increasing fragmentation, or perhaps in reaction to it, certain narratives work to anchor national identities and local culture in what is perceived to be tradition. This article examines the relationship between globalisation and the construction of national and local identities in the advertisements of several Western and non-Western countries, like Canada and Germany and Malaysia, Thailand and Ladakh in the western Himalayas. The importance of advertising in many of today’s cultures has been highlighted by Williamson, who states that ‘advertisements are one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life today’ (1993: 188), as advertising ‘creates structures of meaning’ (ibid. 189). Dru, perhaps slightly overstating the case, stresses that ‘nothing reflects a country and an age better than its advertising’ (quoted in Heilemann, 1997: 181) which nonetheless contains some truth. McLuhan, for example, called advertisements ‚the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities’ (quoted in Berger, 2002: 25). Apart from conveying information about products and services, advertising has come to play an increasing role in changing or reinforcing social attitudes, defining social roles and cultural values (Dyer, 1995: 2). Sinclair (1989: 31) claims that advertising’s cultural role may be more significant and pervasive than its commercial role. Investigating the mechanisms at work in Apple’s ‘Think different’ campaign¹, Grainge (2000: 138) remarks that ‘brand advertising has also functioned culturally in the negotiation of nation’. In this paper advertising is being seen as a part of the culture industries, of which Bateson (1990) notes that it plays an important role in the creation of community. Culture – ‘the texture of everyday life’ (ibid. 147) – in this sense, depends ‘on the process of continuous and dense communication that sustains shared assumptions’ (ibid. 150). Goff (2000: 560), for example, highlights that ‘at the same time that the use of more traditional methods of identity formation are becoming obsolete, thus leading some national governments to rely on culture industries for nation-building, the commercial importance of these industries is on the rise’. It is, therefore worth considering ‘one of the primary sources of images, ideas and definitions that shape the loyalties of citizens’ (ibid. 537) that are the culture industries, by looking at the globalisation of advertising in particular in more depth. In many scholarly accounts it has been asserted that globalisation and the spread of multinational corporations and their products and services are leading to a homogenisation of cultural diversity and to an increasing uniformity of tastes, fashions and thoughts around the world². The globalisation of advertising, which we are going to look at in the following pages, however, produces different outcomes for national and local cultures and identities in many cases.

Advertising as a cultural institution

Advertisements seek to persuade through their symbolic articulation of a society’s ideals and desires. Schudson (1984) has suggested that advertisements are ‘capitalist realist art’, in that they embody the values at the heart of capitalist societies, chief among them, consumption itself. This essay, however, is structured around the notion that adverts are more than a communication tool to sell products. Although there is certainly some truth in Williamson´s (1978) hypothesis of advertising being another way of perpetuating capitalist ideology, this point of view shall be largely omitted from this study. Instead, the assumption here is that advertisements can be regarded as one of the most important cultural factors moulding and reflecting our life. Advertising tells us what products signify and mean, and it does that by marrying aspects of the product to aspects of culture (Frith, 1997). Although we cannot dismiss the fact that advertising purports the ‘ideology of consumerism’³ (Sklair, 1991) or as Meijer claims ‘advertising leads to consumerism and consumerism marks an identity and lifestyle which are emptied of civic virtues’⁴ (Meijer, 1998: 238), the perspective taken here is to view ‘adverts as carriers of cultural values that define our everyday life’ (Frith, 1997: 3). This paper, furthermore, attempts to show that by constructing ‘reality as it should be – life and lives worth emulating’ (Schudson, 1984: 220) advertisements provide models for identity formation⁵, at the level of both the individual and the nation. The centrality of consumption to identity formation has been argued by a number of social theorists⁶ (Featherstone, 1987; Storey, 1999). For some writers it is media consumption in particular that lies at the heart of this process⁷ (see, for example, Bly, 1996; Kellner, 1995; Kroker and Cook, 1988; Willis, 1990). At the same time, it must be acknowledged that audiences do not uncritically accept mass-mediated images and build their identities around them. Those theorists which root their research in ethnographic studies of media consumption often arrive at conclusions regarding the media’s power over audiences which is quite at odds with those claims made by media and cultural imperialists which deny audience agency and the possibility of audience resistance, elide viewer differences, based in class, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and so on, and underestimate the mediating influences of other powerful social institutions (see Ang, 1989, 1996; Brown, 1989; Deming, 1989; Moores, 1993; Press, 1989a, 1989b; Skovmand and Schroder, 1992; Strelitz, 2000). In conceptualising national identity, this paper draws on Anderson’s (1991) argument that nations are more than simply geographical and political entities; they are ‘imagined communities’ in which the vast majority of members will never know each other. Anderson identifies the spread of print-capitalism as crucial to the formation of nationalism and national identity. Today, it could be said, that advertising, no matter if promoting global or local products plays an important part in the construction of local and national identities. From all the media, advertising in particular, is a ‘form of imagining’ (ibid. 24), creating ‘unified fields of exchange and communication’ (ibid. 44) in its discourses⁸. 

[...]

1 The campaign could be said to reconstitute American national identity by using black-andwhite pictures of over 40 individuals, including Ghandi, Ted Turner, Buzz Aldrin, Thomas Edison, Jim Henson, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Richard Branson and Martha Graham. The campaign addressed a global audience, however, ideologically it ‘was rooted in the values of America’, as Grange (2000: 149) states. He calls the campaign an example of ‘nationally nuanced transnationalism’ as the international figuration of heritage of the campaign was ‘organized around an implicit idea of American national genius’ (ibid., his emphasis). The campaign, was in Buell’s terms, part of a process of reconstituting ‘U.S. culture within the disorganizing forces of current globalization’ (1998: 577).

2 In terms of theorizing globalised identities, at both the individual and national-cultural level, globalization theorists can roughly be divided into three camps: those who argue that globalisation leads to increasing homogeneity, those who argue that it leads to increasing diversity or heterogeneity and those who suggest that it ultimately results in the hybridisation of world cultures and political and economic systems. Prominent in the first of the three perspectives are Marxian world systems theorists who argue that intensified global exchanges are inherently biased in favour of powerful industrial capitalist countries, the socalled ‘core’ countries, who politically, economically and ideologically dominate the ‘periphery’ (see, e.g., Sklair, 1991; Tomlinson, 1991 on ‘cultural imperialism’; Ritzer, 1993, 2001; Hamelink, 1983; Schiller, 1985; Herman and McChesney, 1997; Korten, 1995 and Ritzer and Liska, 1997). Theorists in the heterogeneity and hybridisation camps reject this notion, some arguing that globalising processes can provoke a cultural backlash which leads to the resurgence (or perhaps even the invention) of local traditions and identifications. This resurgent localism may take the form of religious fundamentalism, increased nationalism and nostalgia for native traditions, or even intensified economic and cultural protectionism (see, e.g., Appadurai, 1996; Basch et al., 1994; Gutmann, 1994; Hannerz, 1992; King, 1991; Waters, 1995; Wilson and Dissanayake, 1996). Considering the examples given in this essay, it can be concluded that, depending on the particular cultural, political and economic setting, globalisation may lead to one or any combination of these three outcomes.

3 For Williamson (1978), for example, advertising is ideological in its obscuring of economic inequality at the level of production by images of free and equal consumption. Furthermore, Andren et. al.′s Rhetoric and Ideology in Advertising has examined the content and structure of advertisements for their distorted communications and ideological impact. Haug (1986: 121-122) criticizes the ‘illusion industry’, or ‘distraction industry’, for being tools of domination which exploit people′s needs and manipulate them into accepting consumer capitalism. And Kellner and Harms (2003) state that, ‘advertising has multi-faceted social functions, ranging from short range efforts to induce individuals to buy specific products to more long range functions that attempt to sell consumer capitalism as a way of life. He goes even further and claims that, ‘A close examination of the relationship between increasingly concentrated and powerful corporate advertisers and increasingly fragmented and isolated consumers/citizens reveals that advertising′s practices and trends contradict democratic ideals and goals (ibid.).

4 Dahlgren, for instance, argues that the discourses of advertising in the public sphere encourage consumption and promote ‘a consumerist subject position, which certainly manifests itself in a general way in social subjectivity. [...] The commodification of everyday practices and social relations’, he asserts, ‘is beyond dispute’ (Dahlgren, 1995:22).

5 There are contrasting different approaches to identity which offer an alternative to an essentialist understanding of identity as well as to the contradictory celebration of the Other. Whereas the latter view means a sanguine or pessimistic reification of group differences, the former has become increasingly outdated, as many scholars have argued (e.g. Welz, 2000; Woodward, 1997; Luhmann, 1990,1997; Melucci, 1989; Gilroy, 1993; Gillespie, 1995; Pieterse, 1995; Parker, 1995). It can therefore be argued that in an era of globalisation the real experience of alterity that is the experience of different identities (rather than identity in the singular) renders essentialist interpretations of identity obsolete. Rather, identity is multifaceted and relational and difference is established by symbolic marking in relation to others. Instead of starting with given aspects of identity, Luhmann, for instance, poses the question of how identity is produced. Instead of asking, what sort of thing identity is, Luhmann argues, we should rather ask ‘how identity is manufactured and what is made fundamental to the observation of identity (1990: 2). This anti-essentialist position does not mean that we cannot speak of identity, rather it points us to the ‘political nature of identity production and to the possibility of multiple and shifting identities’ (Barker, 1997: 194) which can be seen as ‘social constructions subject to continuous redefinition’ (Morris, N. 2002: 280; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Said, 1995: 332; Schlesinger, 1991: 168). 

6 According to Miller (1997), for example, whereas a century ago the identity of individuals was rooted in production – as workers or owners – today it is consumption which confers identity because this is the one domain over which they feel they still have some power.

7 Thompson (1995) writes that with the development of modern societies, the self has increasingly become a ‘reflexive project’ in that individuals have increasingly to fall back on their own resources in order to construct coherent identities for themselves. Central to this process of self-formation – the construction of ‘a narrative of self-identity’ (1995: 210) – are, he asserts, mediated symbolic materials. Yet another example of this privileging of the media in the process of identity formation is provided by Kellner who, while acknowledging the potential for resistance, argues that in contemporary industrial society a ‘media culture’ has emerged which helps ‘produce the fabric of everyday life [. . .] shaping political views and social behaviour, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities’ (1995: 1). He continues: Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or a failure, powerful or powerless. Media culture also provides the materials out of which many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality, of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Media culture helps shape the prevalent view of the world and deepest values: it defines what is considered good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories and images provide the symbols, myths, and resources which help constitute a common culture for the majority of individuals in many parts of the world today. Media culture provides the materials to create identities whereby individuals insert themselves into contemporary techno-capitalist societies and which is producing a new form of global culture. (Kellner, 1995: 1)

8 Hall (1992: 293) has described one aspect of such discourses as the ‘narrative of nation’, in other words, ‘a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for or represent the shared experiences [. . .] which give meaning to the nation’.