BRANDING AND BELONGING

Abstract

Branding is an economic and cultural process. Branding endows goods and services with value which corporations protect as their intellectual property, enabling brands to support share prices and be traded as assets in takeovers and mergers, at the same time as they serve to differentiate products competitively in the marketplace. Yet this ‘brand value’ depends on cultural perceptions of the meaning and worth of a brand. More than the unique image or positioning of a brand being maintained relative to others of its kind, such perceptions may involve the expressive and emotional attachment of consumers, and this may be very widely shared. This paper argues that, with certain brands, such shared attachment can occur on a national basis, so that they become symbols of national belonging. Whereas consumers attribute a putative foreign national origin to some global brands – for example, Harley-Davidson is unequivocally ‘American’ – they relate to other brands as expressive of their own national origin. This identification often persists even when national brands are taken over by global corporations, since the brand's association with the nation is a major dimension of its value, or the ‘brand equity’ which the new global owner has paid for, and intends to capitalise upon. The paper examines instances in which this has happened in Australia, such as the traditional brand Vegemite, long ago acquired by Kraft, and also cases where the Australian associations of a brand have been exploited in establishing its global identity, notably Foster's Lager.