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

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’ campaign ¹ , Grainge (2000: 138) remarks that ‘brand

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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 world ² . 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

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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 formation ⁵ , 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 theorists ⁶ (Featherstone, 1987; Storey, 1999). For some writers it is media consumption in particular that lies at the heart of this process ⁷ (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 discourses ⁸ .

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Advertising and the deconstruction of local identities

The effects of advertisements on the ‘unsophisticated’ consumer can be farreaching, as Norberg-Hodge in her study of Ladakh culture in Nepal, observed. She charts the impact that the proliferation of western television had on a society which was ‘previously locked into its frugal ecological way of life for centuries’ (Norberg-Hodge, 2001: 37). The exposure of the Ladakhis to western television and advertising, she states, has undermined their selfesteem and the traditional culture is slowly but gradually being ‘displaced by the consumer monoculture’ (ibid. 37). Indeed, modern advertising makes no secret of its aim to stimulate desire rather than to propose the means for satisfying needs (see, for example, Williamson, 1986). Through advertising, meanings are spuriously attached to commodities and turned into what Baudrillard (1988) called sign values, which are then presented as the bridges to fulfilment and happiness (McCracken, 1988). In the case of Ladakh, the promotion of foreign brands by ‘imparting a sense of shame about local products’ (Norberg-Hodge, 2001: 38), undermined local self-esteem and led to the denigration of local products and people ⁹ . Within a few years from the introduction of television in Ladakh around 1975, children started to see their own food as primitive and backward, refusing to eat what had been eaten for centuries and regarded with pride. In many other areas of consumption, western goods came to be regarded as modern, civilised and desirable while their traditional counterparts were dismissed as backward and uncivilised. In a couple of decades the local culture was broken up irreversibly (Norberg-Hodge, 1991) by what has been termed ‘the jihad of the global consumer culture’ (Norberg-Hodge, 2001: 36). While acknowledging the role of other agents in such cultural invasion, Norberg-Hodge’s research highlights the power of the media and western advertising and acts as a particularly striking reminder of the likely effects on local cultures of further globalisation of the mass media and transnational advertising through satellite and cable systems ¹⁰ (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994: 137-160).

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Advertising and the construction of national and local identities

It can be said that, the development of global television as a fundamentally commercial form has placed that core activity of consumer culture, visualbased advertising, at the forefront of its activities (Mattelart and Mattelart, 1992). Television is pivotal to the production and reproduction of a promotional culture focused on the use of visual imagery to create valueadded brands or commodity-signs. Indeed, Wernick argues that cultural phenomena which serve to communicate a promotional message of some type or another have become ‘virtually co-extensive with our produced symbolic world’ (1991: 184). However, in her work on global media and local culture, Ang (1996) suggests that people who live in a media-saturated culture have to be active in their response to the overdose of contemporary images in order to produce any kind of meaning from them. Reciprocally, it could be said, advertising must engage with the values, norms, goals and dreams of those to whom it is addressed. Advertising, therefore, takes an important role in the formation of local and national identities as making up a major part of media content and promoting the commodities and images, which ‘contribute to the construction of our identities through consumption’ (Barker, 2000: 62; for more on consumption and identity formation, please see Strelitz, 2002).

We shall now be turning to examples where advertising is having the reverse effect to what has happened in the Ladakh region. In what follows, advertising can be seen as an ‘important carrier of discourses of national identity’ (Hogan, 1999: 748) and local diversity.

The Canadian Molson brewery, for example, advertises its ‘Molson-Canadian’ brand - ‘a beer made by Canadians for Canadians’ - by emphasising its national heritage in its ‘I Am’ commercials which have ‘branded it indelibly as the national beverage’ (Grace, 1998: 23). A recent Molson-Canadian spot called ‘The Rant’ is ‘already the most famous ad in Canadian history’ and has been praised for its ‘celebration of Canadian identity’ (Grace, 2000: 35) and its rejection of American cultural imperialism ¹¹ (which is also why some critics

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have argued that ‘The Rant’ sells Canadian patriotism short by establishing it as anti-Americanism).

Similarly, investigating advertising discourse and the construction of consumer identity in Germany since unification, Kelly-Holmes finds that advertising here carries important symbolic value and meaning as for one ‘of all discourse types [it] best symbolizes the communicative cleavage between east and west, and their competing constructions of identity’ (2000: 92; for an account of the split between west and east German identities please see Rodden, 2001; Weidenfeld, 1993 or my own work on nationalism and xenophobia in Germany after reunification, Mayer, 2003). The examination of the advertising and promotional literature of a selection of east German drink manufacturers also shows that the messages used convey a sense of east German identity which is seen as strong and powerful and which in turn provokes pride in the people of the region which previously had been seen as the poor and underdeveloped part of the country by easterners and westerners alike. ‘Glückauf Bier’, an eastern product, for example, attempts to present the beer as typical east German ‘through the use of location, slogans and also dialect’ ¹² (Kelly-Holmes, 2000: 99). In the case of the national brand ‘Radeberger’, ‘the beer and the city of Dresden have become inextricably associated through the advertising text’ which, as in the previous example, places ‘importance [on] the east German Heimat’ (ibid. 102). An example, in that sense, from west Germany, is the big, regional brewery ‘Karlsberg’ (not to be confused with its Danish rival, Carlsberg) which uses the local dialect Saarländisch in its advertising themes ¹³ , thereby raising awareness and popularity of the idiom which has led to a revival of the language, especially among young people, which previously had in an increasing manner thought of it as outmoded and unfashionable (please see Appendix for advertisements). The use of Saarländisch in the advertisements of Karlsberg seems to be a response to the desire of consumers to express their own special ‘habitus’, to speak with Bordieu - the desire to express and display preferences for a cluster of distinctive tastes in consumption and lifestyles (Bordieu, 1984). Kelly-Holmes in her study concludes that ‘regional identities are stronger than ever and they form a key element in advertising strategies’

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