Leisure corporations, beer brand culture, and the crisis of masculinity: the Speight’s ‘Southern Man’ advertising campaign

Abstract

Leisure corporations and their brands are becoming increasingly signified to represent certain values and attitudes towards leisure and particular aspects of identity. One popular leisure product and practice is beer and its consumption, which also plays a role in constructing identity and, more specifically, masculinity. Within the context of contemporary promotional culture, beer advertising serves to reproduce the cultural links between masculinity, sport/leisure, and the consumption of beer, which form a theorised ‘holy trinity’. In this paper, we focus on Speight’s, one of New Zealand’s renowned breweries and beer brands, to explore the ways in which its promotional culture illuminates notions of a crisis of masculinity. Our multimethod, qualitative approach combines contextualisation with the critical textual analysis of two advertisements from the ‘Southern Man’ television campaign and interview data obtained from one key cultural intermediary, the campaign’s creator. From this, our analysis elucidates three key dimensions about the important role of the Speight’s ‘Southern Man’ advertising campaign as a site for understanding masculinities, in addition to how they are constructed and, ultimately, how they embody a crisis of masculinity. The first is the campaign’s exploitation of societal cleavages. The second is the campaign’s explicit use of nostalgia. And the third is the campaign’s omission of ‘other’ masculinities.