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

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^[i], 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 world^[ii]. 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’^[iii] (Sklair, 1991) or as Meijer claims ‘advertising leads to consumerism and consumerism marks an identity and lifestyle which are emptied of civic virtues’^[iv] (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^[v], 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^[vi] (Featherstone, 1987; Storey, 1999). For some writers it is media consumption in particular that lies at the heart of this process^[vii] (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^[viii].

Advertising and the deconstruction of local identities

The effects of advertisements on the ‘unsophisticated’ consumer can be far-reaching, 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 self-esteem 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^[ix]. 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^[x] (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994: 137-160).

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, visual-based 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 value-added 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^[xi] (which is also why some critics 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’^[xii] (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^[xiii], 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’ in east Germany which ‘reflects the (at least partial) failure of attempts by western advertisers to construct an ‘identikit’ east German consumer’ (2000: 106, quotation marks hers).

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^[i] The campaign could be said to reconstitute American national identity by using black-and-white 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).

^[ii] 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 so-called ‘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.

^[iii] 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.).

^[iv] 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).

^[v] 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 multi-faceted 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).

^[vi] 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.

^[vii] 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)

^[viii] 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’.

^[ix] Kumar (2000) researching the implications of cultural globalisation for Indian Dalits, similarly writes that:

One of the most palpable effects of globalization has been the spread of satellite TV to the remotest of villages. The cultural bombardment and the advertising blitzkrieg which the mass media have unleashed has created a spiral of aspirations and expectations which this society is incapable of satisfying. There is no civilized method through which a whole generation of youth denied of education and jobs can even come closer to the standard of living paraded on the mass media.

^[x] The huge investments in recent times in advertising, marketing, and promotion support the trend toward monopoly concentration, conglomerate mergers and take-overs, and an economy dominated by giant corporations. In the expensive advertising and promoting marketplace, only the major players can compete. This leads to economic concentration and quasi-monopoly control of the economy by giant corporations who can afford the advertising and promotion efforts. Therefore, many theorists have argued, that the convergence of ownership seems to imply an intensification across media terrain of the ideology of consumption (Watson, 1998: 221; Curran, 1991; Blumler, 1993, Kellner and Harms, 2003).

^[xi] Beginning quietly and concluding in an almost hysterical peroration before a giant flag, Joe, the protagonist of the commercial, proclaims, ‘I am not a lumberjack or a fur trader. I don't live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled. And I don't know Jimmy, Sally or Susie from Canada, although I'm certain they're really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American, and I pronounce it 'about,' not 'aboot.' I can proudly sew my country's flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing; diversity, not assimilation, and that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat. A chesterfield is a couch, and it's pronounced 'zed,' not 'zee'--'zed!' Canada is the second largest land mass, the first nation of hockey and the best part of North America. My name is Joe and I am Canadian!’ (in Grace, 2000: 35).

^[xii] For instance, the slogans ‘Wo mit Glückauf gegrüßt wird, wird auch Glückauf getrunken (Where people greet each other with ‘Glückauf’, they also drink Glückauf) and ‘Bei uns wird nicht nur mit Glückauf gegrüßt, bei uns wird auch Glückauf getrunken’ (Here we not only greet people with ‘Glückauf’, we also drink Glückauf) rely on localised knowledge of the miner’s greeting, ‘Glückauf’. The use of unser (our) here and bei uns (among us, in our home) relates not just to the brewery of course, but also to the target audience, at one and the same time acknowledging that this is also their identity and inviting them to re(construct) themselves in this way (Kelly-Holmes, 2000: 99-100).

^[xiii] For example, one slogan ‘Frisch gezappt’, is a play on words, as on the one hand it refers to the English word ‘zapping’ (as in changing TV or radio channels) and on the other to the local dialect, which stands for ‘gezapft’, the German word for a draught beer. Another slogan just says ‘All’ which in the High German language (standard language) is a word for the ‘universe’ but in the local idiom means ‘empty’. The picture chosen for the advertisement is an empty beer carriage flying weightlessly in space. Thereby the ad plays on both the dialect and the High German meaning of the word ‘All’. The ad ‘Finnisch gut’ means ‘I like that’ in the local dialect but means ‘Finish good’ in High German that is why the image depicts a man and a woman in a (Finish) sauna (please see Appendix for motives). Here, also the slogans’ meaning and comprehension by the audience and thereby functioning rely heavily on a knowledge of the local language and customs and might appear as typical German beer advertisements to the outsider without the relevant cultural knowledge.