While essentialized discourses around language and national identity are increasingly subject to challenge and critique, marketing discourse, like many other corporate and institutional discourses, persists in a strict alignment of language and identity (Blommaert Reference Blommaert and Vertovec2015). One way in which this happens is through the exploitation of country-of-origin appeals, as a means of differentiating a product, by drawing attention to an essentialized and unproblematized link between language and nation. Country-of-origin appeals rely for their success on a certain level of consumer ethnocentrism. Through such country-of-origin appeals, certain “scopic regimes” (Jay Reference Jay and Foster1988), ways of seeing and hearing foreign languages, can become enregistered (Agha Reference Agha2003) for the target audience and are thus available to be utilized as a semiotic resource for attaching a national identity to a brand.
In the current era of marketing communication, however, the discourse of country-of-origin branding is not just one-way and needs to be broadened to include the role of consumers. Co-construction is one of the key concepts and buzzwords on which contemporary marketing is built. In the current context, which is understood as dialogic, value is seen as a two-way, co-constructed process between the brand/company and the consumer (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder Reference Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder2011, 305). Brands and companies rely on consumers to do a lot of the work in creating, narrating, and adding value to products. However, while this new paradigm has clear advantages for companies in the form of working consumers gifting their labor, there are also potential problems, particularly in a context where bottom-up and do-it-yourself discourses have the potential to reach wide audiences via Web 2.0. Thus, while a brand may be positioned in a certain way through the exploitation of a language-territory link in an advertising text, this may be accepted and confirmed but also challenged by consumers. Contemporary marketing theory understands both of these processes as adding to and/or taking away from the value of the brand and being part of the dialogic nature of marketing.
This article reports on one such case in which the country-of-origin appeal created for the Stella Artois cider brand through a high-end marketing campaign is disputed by the consumers who are the target of this campaign. We begin by looking at the marketing discourse upon which the use of this essentialized country-language link is based, namely, the idea of country of origin as a tactic for branding. We then move on to discuss the role of language as a semiotic resource in country-of-origin branding, focusing in particular on the notion of linguistic fetish as a way of explaining how specific ways of seeing and hearing foreign languages become enregistered. Following this, we examine the case of the Stella Artois C’est Cidre campaign and its discussion on YouTube, paying attention to the discourses that emerge, before drawing some conclusions about what this particular case tells us in terms of the semiotics of nation branding.
Country-of-Origin Appeals in Marketing
Country of origin is one of the most researched aspects of international marketing and a well-established technique for differentiating products. It is considered one of the extrinsic or intangible features of a product—like brand or price—that can be easily manipulated and altered without changing the basic or physical attributes of the product (Pharr Reference Pharr2005, 37). Marketing research shows that the concept of country of origin is “complex and encompasses symbolic and emotional components as well as cognition” (Pharr Reference Pharr2005, 36). A country-of-origin appeal highlights “positive and normally stereotypical attributes of another country and imbues the product originating from that country with those image-enhancing qualities” (Moon and Jain Reference Moon and Jain2002, 93). Furthermore, the combination of “humorous stereotyping” with an “allusion to a particular expertise which is associated with the foreign country” (Moon and Jain Reference Moon and Jain2002, 93) has been shown to instill confidence in a product.
A significant variable when evaluating country-of-origin effects is “consumer ethnocentrism,” a term coined by Shimp and Sharma (Reference Shimp and Sharma1987). Consumer ethnocentrism correlates positively with “patriotism, politico-economic conservatism and dogmatism” but negatively with cultural openness (Moon and Jain Reference Moon and Jain2002, 94). It is understood as providing the consumer with “a sense of identity, feelings of belonging, and, most importantly, an understanding of what purchase behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable to the in group” (Shimp and Sharma Reference Shimp and Sharma1987, 280). Levels of consumer ethnocentrism have been shown to have a “strong and significant” effect on country of origin appeals, with country-specific “animosity” and stereotypes also playing important roles (Pharr Reference Pharr2005, 36). Consumer ethnocentrism is frequently seen as a barrier to country of origin–based advertising appeals in the marketing and advertising literature, particularly in terms of “beliefs by consumers regarding the appropriateness and morality of purchasing foreign-made products” (Moon and Jain Reference Moon and Jain2002, 94). However, as we shall see below, much of the marketing of foreign products and the use of foreign languages in marketing is in fact posited on an ethnocentric appeal, with many of the campaigns being designed in the target audience country and having nothing to do with the “country of origin,” the country in question being framed entirely from an ethnocentric viewpoint.
Finally, in an increasingly globalized, “postnational” marketplace, many marketing theorists have begun to question the continuing salience of country of origin as an advertising appeal. Products, like people, can now have “hybrid” identities and origins, as a result of the offshoring of production: “products with multi-country affiliation question the role and relevance of the construct of country-of-origin” (Phau and Prendergast Reference Phau and Prendergast2000, 160). A whole range of new categorizations has been developed to “reflect new complexities in global product operations” including country of parts, country of design, country of assembly, and country of manufacture (Pharr Reference Pharr2005, 34). The current era of globalization and blurred borders has the potential to both obscure and also exaggerate country-of-origin effects (Phau and Prendergast Reference Phau and Prendergast2000). Consequently, a more robust concept of “country of brand” is increasingly being preferred in order to allow for continuity in the country association even where there is a change in the manufacturing location of the brand. So long as a brand is consistently identified with a particular country, then “just being produced in another country cannot eliminate the effects” of a strong country association (Phau and Prendergast Reference Phau and Prendergast2000, 14). So, we can see how appeals can simultaneously exaggerate the origin of the brand while at the same time obscuring or masking the actual origin of the product.
As argued earlier, the construction of country-of-origin appeals needs to be broadened to incorporate the role of consumption, reflecting a philosophical change in the marketing concept of the consumer. This involves a shift from the perception of the consumer as the passive recipient of marketing messages to the reconceptualization of the consumer as not just an active participant in the marketing communication, but as an equal cocreator. Co-construction, as stated earlier, refers to the processes by which both consumers and producers collaborate, or otherwise participate, in creating value. Thus, we now talk of “working consumers, co-production, prosumption, consumer empowerment, consumer resistance, consumer agency, and consumer tribes” (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder Reference Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder2011, 304). Alongside this there has been a deconstruction of the very concept of value, and a subsequent repositioning of value as something “complex and multidimensional” (305), in opposition to its previous narrow meaning as something understood in functional or economic terms. Thus, consumers, by gifting their labor in both formal and informal brand communities and by the work they do in using products, create value not just for the brand or product but also for themselves and their peers in terms of individual identity work.
Linguistic Fetish and Country-of-Origin Advertising
One of the primary semiotic resources in indexing country of origin and building a positive association is language. The concept is not a new one. The notion of “terroir,” for example, is well established in relation to French agribusiness and the marketing of foods. In such a system, the localness and origin of the product are part of its essence, and the territorial anchoring of the brand is a semiotic resource that differentiates it from a product from another location (see, e.g., Barham Reference Barham2003). Companies and brands often make use of language in order to index place in an attempt to link a brand or product to that particular place and simultaneously exploit associated second- and third-order meanings in relation to these particular places. So, for example, French is used to create associations of beauty and fashion, and German to evoke efficient engineering (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2000, Reference Kelly-Holmes2005; Hornikx, Van Meurs, and Starren Reference Hornikx, van Meurs and Starren2007), while English may be used to evoke “Americana” (Martin Reference Martin2002, Reference Martin2006) or any range of modern associations for products (cf. Bhatia Reference Bhatia and Thumboo2001, Reference Bhatia2007; Piller Reference Piller2001, Reference Piller2003; Baumgardner Reference Baumgardner2006; Lee Reference Lee2006; Ustinova Reference Ustinova2006; Kasanga Reference Kasanga2010). Concepts such as “impersonal bilingualism” (Haarmann 1989), “language display” (Eastman and Stein Reference Eastman and Stein1993), and “linguistic fetish” (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2005, Reference Kelly-Holmes and Machin2014) have been used to describe this phenomenon. The language or accent used in the advertising is often a “foreign” one in the context of the target advertisees and so is not a representation of everyday, lived bi- and multilingualism in that cultural context, though it should be noted that these concepts have been used to explore bi- and multilingual advertising to bilinguals (e.g., Santello Reference Santello2015) and advertising in complex multilingual situations involving minority languages (Coupland Reference Coupland2012), English as a second language (Bhatia Reference Bhatia2007), and accent (O’Sullivan Reference O’Sullivan2013).
Furthermore, while symbolic and communicative functions of language are of course always linked in any utterance (e.g., Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991), in the use of foreign languages in advertising, the symbolic functioning of the foreign language or accent is generally more important than its communicative function. Thus, the foreign or other language is frequently used for “decorative” (e.g., visual or aural) effect, while the dominant domestic language is used for imparting important information or instructions in relation to the brand or product.Footnote 1
Such practices can be understood as a type of fetish, described as “the capacity of creating [symbolic] value—a value greater than it contains” (Marx Reference Marx[1867] 1954, 392), and may involve “form without content” (393) or a prioritizing of form over meaning. “Linguistic fetish” emphasizes the symbolic value—for example, the visual or aural characteristics—of a piece of language over the communicative value. We can see the symbolic value of a piece of foreign language as the product of existing linguistic hierarchies and regimes, ways of seeing the language or “scopic regimes” around the other linguistic culture involved (see Kelly-Holmes [Reference Kelly-Holmes and Machin2014] for a full discussion).
Linguistic fetish involves a culturally determined lens, constructed by the producer’s perception of the consumers’ own linguistic culture or habitus, as “visuality is inducted into the service of creating a homogenous cultural perspective” (de Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan Reference de Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan2010, 177). The linguistic choices in the relevant advertising texts are mainly determined by how the foreign word looks or sounds and by the second- and third-order associations the foreign word may have among target addressees. Haarman (Reference Haarmann1989) used the phrase “impersonal bilingualism” to describe the appearance of foreign words in Japanese advertising, having concluded that their usage had nothing to do with “everyday” or “real” bi- and/or multilingualism in Japan—which was in his view at the time a highly monolingual country. He argued that they were rather driven by a desire to exploit symbolic second- and third-order associations of these languages, which were not widely understood or taught in Japan at the time of his study in the 1980s.
Linguistic fetish can also manifest itself in the use of the national/official language of the target audience, spoken (or written) in a foreign accent—for example, English being spoken in a French or German accent in an advertisement targeted at a UK audience (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2005). It can be argued that this way of speaking becomes enregistered (Agha Reference Agha2003; Johnstone Reference Johnstone2009, Reference Johnstone2011) for the audience. This means that this linguistic variety—hyperbolized, foreign-accented English with a few words of token French or German—becomes ideologically linked with a social or, in this case, cultural or national identity (Johnstone Reference Johnstone2011, 657). A necessary part of the enregisterment process is that people show each other how to make this linkage and what the correct linkage is. In the case of linguistic fetish and country-of-origin branding strategies, advertising and marketing discourses clearly have a key role to play in this showing and linking. It can be argued that this foreign language fetish is a variety and the key way of indexing foreignness mainly as a result of advertising and other media discourses, and it is available as a semiotic resource for advertisers to use in order to attach a brand to a particular foreign national identity.
Three components need to be in place for this type of advertising strategy: there must be a strong, established, or commonsensical link between the brand and its country of origin (which builds on previous country-of-origin campaigns); there must be an established, essential link between the language exploited and that particular country of origin; and both of these must be flagged and reinforced in the advertising campaign.
Constructing Stella Artois’s National Identity—the Campaign
Stella Artois is a well-known brand of lager across Europe. Although the brand’s origins are in the Belgian city of Leuven, it is owned by the leading international brewery company, Anheuser Busch InBev, the largest brewing corporation in the world with a 25 percent share of the global market and a portfolio that includes brands of beer such as Budweiser (American) and Beck’s (German). The global extent of the parent company and its ownership of competing brands with equally strong national identities are of course never referred to in advertising for Stella Artois. Country of origin is thus a tactic that can be used to mask the transnational or global ownership by holding companies and conglomerates of a brand, which might otherwise clash with the brand’s exploitation of local or national identity (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2005; Usunier Reference Usunier2006). While brewing continues in the historic site of origin, Flanders in Belgium, and the brand is constructed as Belgian or at least continental/European (see below), the beer is also brewed in the United Kingdom, other parts of Europe, Australia, and Brazil.
The company history narrative on the Stella Artois website exploits a discourse of country of origin in relation to the brand’s Belgian identity. The lexis of an essentialized identity discourse (roots, origins, tradition, founded, foundations, and history) dominates the text:
At Stella Artois, we are extremely proud of our Belgian roots. Our story can be seen on every bottle of Stella Artois. If you look closely, hints of our origins are proudly displayed.
By 1366 roots of our brewing tradition had been established in the city of Leuven, Belgium—which is also where the original Den Hoorn brewery was founded. Den Hoorn laid the foundation for the quality taste and standard Stella Artois is known for. The symbol of the Den Hoorn Brewery is proudly displayed in Stella Artois’ cartouche to this day.
Sebastian Artois was admitted to the Leuven Brewers’ Guild as a Brew Master in 1708, and only nine years later purchased the Den Hoorn brewery. In memoriam, you can find his last name on the brewery and every bottle of Stella Artois around the world.Footnote 2
While the brand asserts its Belgian identity, this is potentially problematic, as we shall see below, in terms of exploiting the French linguistic fetish. Belgium, of course, has three official language communities (Flemish/Dutch-speaking, Wallon/French-speaking, and German-speaking) and four language territories: Flanders (Flemish/Dutch), Wallonia (French/Wallon), the bilingual zone in the capital Brussels, and the small German-speaking territory along the border with Germany. The country’s language policy is based on the territoriality principle, whereby linguistic rights are afforded depending on location (so, Flemish in Flanders, and French in Wallonia), as opposed to on the principle of individuality. Thus, Stella Artois, being located in Flanders, should be a “Flemish-speaking” beer, and the advertising should exploit a Flemish language–Flanders territory link. However, in its advertising to UK consumers, it exploits a French linguistic fetish. A further complication here is that while Leuven (Louvain in French), the home of the brand, is now located in the designated Flemish-speaking area, like Brussels, it lies on the border between Flanders and Wallonia and was for a time part of the bilingual province of Brabant. The splitting of the city’s ancient university, a significant moment in the sociolinguistic history of the region, into the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Université catholique de Louvain in 1968 was along linguistic lines. The former was a wholly Dutch/Flemish-medium institution and remained in the city of Leuven, whereas the latter was established as a French-medium institution in a new location outside the town, definitively in French-speaking Wallonia. Thus, the language-territory link that might be available to exploit in the brand’s identity is not a straightforward one.
The marketing campaign for C’est Cidre was designed by the United Kingdom–based advertising agency Mother to coincide with the launch of a new product by Stella Artois, a cider, targeted directly at the UK market. The message of the campaign centered on linguistically differentiating the French word cidre from the English word cider. The French word highlights the distinctive characteristics of the brand over its British competitors. To support this linguistic differentiation, another key feature of the campaign was a “verbal hygiene” (Cameron Reference Cameron2005) tactic, whereby consumers were given instruction on how to pronounce the French term cidre correctly in order to differentiate it from the English word cider. They are told to place the emphasis on the second syllable of the word and to pronounce it as ‘-dra,’ thus domesticating the pronunciation (Venuti Reference Venuti1998). We can understand this type of instruction as part of the contemporary paradigm of the working consumer, who adds value to the brand by learning how to pronounce it correctly.
These messages of linguistic differentiation were supported and enhanced by other marketing activities which exploited the same semiotic resources. For example, in a social media marketing campaign, Le Président of Stella Artois invited young Londoners to an evening playing the French game of boules (not the English bowls) evening, where they could sample cidre (not cider) as a means of constructing the brand’s identity:
Stella Boules is back again, you know the score, boules not bowls and cidre not cider—never, never cider. Taking place between 12 noon and 9 p.m. this Saturday, get down for some serious Boules action and enjoy a free chalice of Stella Artois Cidre, not cider—never, never cider.Footnote 3
The campaign also featured television ads. One shows Le Président, marching hurriedly to the television studio with his attentive entourage to make une annonce importante ‘an urgent statement’, in relation to the difference between cider and cidre, apparently in response to rumors that Stella Artois was launching a new cider rather than a new cidre. Le Président and all the participants are dressed in 1960s costumes, and the studio is a retro set. Le Président uses stylized and hyperbolic French-accented English throughout the ad, with only a small number of French words, together with a fluent, poetic style (see Kelly-Holmes [Reference Kelly-Holmes, Coupland and Mortenson2016] for a full account and discussion of this ad). In the second ad of the campaign, Le Président is seen on his lavish country estate, driving in an open-top sports car to visit his orchards, where beautiful female assistants pick the ripest apples for him to inspect. In the evening, he is shown meeting locals for a drink of cidre in a barn, although the scene inside is closer to a sophisticated nightclub in a European city. He insists throughout, in a humorous way, that this is the simple Belgian life on which cidre is based.
As Cook (Reference Cook2001, 74) points out, advertising “carries a heavy proportion of its meaning paralinguistically.” The small number of French words used in the campaign billboards and posters and in the television advertising would be easily understandable to the viewer in the United Kingdom either from secondary schooling in French—the predominant first foreign language taught in that country at second level—or, as mentioned above, from the use and “enregisterment” (Agha Reference Agha2003) of French through mediatized performances, involving a mixture of a hyperbolized French-accented English with token French words, which is well established and enregistered as a stable variety for media audiences in the United Kingdom and other countries (see Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2000, Reference Kelly-Holmes2005; Hornikx Reference Hornikx, van Meurs and Starren2007; García Vascaíno Reference García Vizcaíno2011). The French speaking is as much about emphasizing the non-Britishness of the brand as marking its Frenchness. Stella’s advertising has itself contributed to the enregisterment of the French linguistic fetish—for example, in a campaign based on the 1986 French film Jean de Florette, which uses genres such as silent comedy and surrealism, and the advertisement “Last Orders,” directed by Jonathan Glazer, which is shot entirely in French.
Territoriality and Ethnocentrism—Debating C’est Cidre
Television advertisements such as the advertising of the C’est Cidre campaign represent monologic, one-to-many communication. While audiences have always engaged in “Did you see … ?” conversations (see Richardson and Meinhof [Reference Richardson and Meinhof1999] for a discussion), which are part of the discursive culture of any sociolinguistic context, and although there has been the possibility to engage in feedback with the relevant television station or brand/company either by contacting them about the advertisement or complaining to a third party such as an advertising watchdog, the advertiser and broadcaster have traditionally retained control of the advertising text and also feedback around it. In the current era, however, new media enable remediation (Bolter and Grusin Reference Bolter and Grusin2000) of monologic, one-to-many texts via social media and video-sharing sites such as YouTube, which is specifically designed for this type of remediation and, in fact, relies on it. On the one hand, this represents a loss of control on the part of the brand/company, since the advertisement is simply “out there” in hyperspace and can be posted anywhere, forwarded to anyone, modified in various ways, commented on, critiqued, parodied, ridiculed, and so on.
On the other hand, marketers recognise the impossibility of holding on to or controlling the meaning of ads and products in the current era and rely on, or at least expect some input from, consumers. In fact, contemporary marketing is premised on the co-creation of value between the producer and the active, rather than passive, consumer. Consumers are seen to co-create value in a whole range of ways (value being understood here as not “only the functional and economic value of goods and services, but also the consumer’s interpretation of consumption objects, including products, brands, and services” [Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroder Reference Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder2011, 305]), for example, by using products for identity work, forming networks around products, giving feedback on products and suggestions for new products (Sicilia and Palazón Reference Sicilia and Palazón2008; Brodie et al. Reference Brodie, Ilic, Juric and Hollebeek2013). Some of this co-creation involves sharing ads, discussing ads, modifying them, and so on. Advertisers can also interfere with, attempt to steer, and directly engage in these processes, aiming for a relationship with consumers via social media—sometimes setting up brand communities for just this purpose (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder Reference Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder2011). New spaces are opened up for debate and discussion, and the producer loses some of its control to the consumer.
The current campaign is a good example of this, in that Stella Artois has its own YouTube channel, where it posts its advertising and PR videos and allows some comment on these. But individuals can also post the ad to their own channels, and it is to one of these that we turn now.
The campaign ad featuring the president making une annonce importante received 46,479 views before it was removed in May 2014. The video had received 85 comments, 124 likes, and 13 dislikes. There were 64 contributors, and almost all (56) contributed only once. Using Herring’s (Reference Herring, Barab, Kling and Gray2004) criteria for evaluating online communities, the levels of interaction are low, and we can see this as a fleeting type of community. We can also see how one individual can have a significant influence in new media, attracting a large number of likes and influencing the debate. Table 1 shows the most popular comments in terms of likes by other contributors and also gives details of who contributed the comment and what their location was according to their profile:
Most Popular Comments in Terms of Likes
Table 2 gives a broad thematic analysis of the discourses present in the comments, keeping in mind that discourses are interlinked and that most posts contain a variety of discourses.
Main Discourses Featuring in Discussion of C’est Cidre on YouTube and Main Discursive Strategies Used
The predominant discourse in the comments is concerned with contesting Stella Artois’s use of French to highlight its origin. In addition, consumer ethnocentric/national-chauvinist discourses, and counterauthentic claims are all generated in response to the use of French to authenticate a Belgian product and differentiate it from the equivalent English product. Another interesting discourse is one of correction and policing (Blommaert et al. Reference Blommaert, Kelly-Holmes, Lane, Leppänen, Moriarty, Pietikäinen and Piirainen-Marsh2009), whereby the cultural and linguistic knowledge of previous posters is questioned and corrected by their peers. Some posters also engage in a purely technical discussion of the aesthetic merits or otherwise of the advertisement.
A very large number of contributors take their cue from the campaign and engage in linguistic display and play with “French”:
zis adveeertt gitttss oonn myyy teeeettz—ooo hh oooo hh ooooohhhh—ahh ahhh ahhh ahhh—i ve found theee remmmote—goooooodbyyyhhee !!!!—stuuuuppeeeeedd!!!!!
So would that make him a wankre, tossre maybe?
In a co-construction model of marketing, this extended use of the semiotic resource of the French linguistic fetish by posters can add value to the brand, create future conditions for usage, and contribute to further enregisterment.
Table 3 shows those posters who contributed more than one comment to the discussion. As we can see the top two contributors are from Belgium, with all others from the United Kingdom. The campaign was, as mentioned above, designed by a UK agency for a UK audience, but in the borderless media space of YouTube, the ad can of course be viewed by individuals from outside of this target audience.
Posters Who Contribute More than Once by Number of Posts, Location, and Discourse(s)
As stated above, the main theme of the YouTube discussion about the ad is the disputing of the use of the French language by Stella Artois in promoting its product. This discourse comprises several aspects. First, the essentialized language-territory link exploited by Stella Artois between French-speaking and Belgian identity is disputed because of the brand’s origin in the Flemish-speaking territory, as in the following example:
Extract 1. Stella is from Flanders where people speak Dutch not French. Ceci n’est pas un representation correcte.
Extract 2. In Flemish it is CIDER!!!
Who are these idiots? Stella Artois is Flemish
It is from Leuven NOT Louvain
As the comments above show, Stella Artois is criticized for using French mainly because the brand has its origins in Leuven, in the Flemish-speaking region. These posts also demand a restoration of the territoriality principle (Stella Artois is Flemish and so should speak Flemish) and that the brand respect this principle.
While the disputing of the national identity constructed is generally carried out by the Belgian contributors to the forum, one of the UK contributors accuses Stella Artois of having an identity crisis in the post below:
Extract 3. it’s not bloody cidre, it’s cider. stella artois is not bloody french its flemish. stella artois stop with your identity crisis
The discourse also reveals the extent to which the French language fetish is enregistered for UK audiences. As the contributor in extract 5 points out, Flemish/Dutch is not enregistered for this audience, which is why, presumably, it is not part of Stella Artois’s campaign in the United Kingdom, while in extract 6 the contributor acknowledges the success of a marketing campaign that can “market a beverage based on an alternative pronunciation”:
Extract 4. the only reason why Stella Artois does NOT put cider on their bottles is because it is cider in Flemish and it would never sell.
Extract 5. I don’t know what’s worse—the fact that they can market a beverage based on an alternative pronunciation, or the fact that it’s working. I really want a cidre now.
The notion that the French linguistic fetish can also work for a generic continental origin (in the way that say Dutch or Flemish cannot) is highlighted by a number of contributors:
Extract 6. To all those who say cidre is a French drink your wrong, its european, meaning anything made in europe is technically cidre, stella just used it as a market niche to get people to wonder whats so special to call it cidre not cider and try it.
The other main discourse running through the comments is one that can best be described as ethnocentric or national chauvinist. This discourse involves making counterclaims about the superiority of the English cider product in comparison to cidre. For example,
Extract 7. Funny ad, but I’ll stick to British Cider , not cidre
Extract 8. I liked this but not as much as my very English Aspall Cider. Sorry France you lose this one! Hah!!!!
However, along with counter-claims about the superiority of English / British cider, some comments are also overtly racist:
Extract 9. french being ass holes as usual … jk jk… sort of
Interestingly, despite Stella’s emphasis on a Belgian identity, animosity in the discourse about the campaign here is toward France, not Belgium. In fact, a number of contributors even correct anti-French posts and rush to reinforce borders between the French-speaking region of Belgium and France, as in the following comment which was posted by a contributor using a French tricolor as their icon:
Extract 10. Don’t put FRENCH from FRANCE and FRENCH from BELGIUM in the same net OK ? I hate this ! people don’t realise the difference between them RRRhhh!
Discussion
As we can see from the example of C’est Cidre, basing a brand identity and marketing campaign on an essentialized language-territory link in order to exploit a country-of-origin appeal carries both opportunities and risks for a product, particularly when we look at the role of consumers in co-constructing value for the product and meaning for the ad and the brand. Co-construction, as outlined above, involves consumers and producers working together, often asymmetrically, to create value for the product, rather than the former passively consuming products that have already been infused with value by the latter. Co-creation of value is not always a straightforward process. The ad’s remediation to YouTube and its discussion there offer us one such glimpse and allow us to observe how this particular space enables language ideologies to emerge in peer-to-peer interactions with other contributors as well as with the brand.
Interestingly, territoriality is in general respected by marketers, where consumers are sufficiently attractive in economic terms (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2013). In line with this principle, on Stella Artois’s localized Belgian site, strict territoriality is enforced with parallel monolingual options offered in French and Dutch/Flemish. Consumers choose their language/territory when entering the site and are then guided to a monolingual version in their chosen language, their choice being saved for their next visit. Thus, Stella Artois, in common with many contemporary brands is able to use both flexible (in the way in which it exploits French in its advertising) and fixed concepts (respecting Belgian territoriality principles when communicating with consumers) of language and multilingualism in its marketing approach (see Kelly-Holmes [Reference Kelly-Holmes2013] for a discussion of these issues and Kelly-Holmes [Reference Kelly-Holmes and Coupland2010] for a discussion of both of these issues in relation to McDonald’s global campaign).
As Heller (Reference Heller2008, 512) points out, while the use of language as a means of creating distinction (in this case for a product) may “blur the relationship between political symbols and exchange goods,” contributors to the discussion are keen to reestablish a clear distinction and a need for the relationship between exchange goods and political symbols to be in alignment. One possibly unforeseen risk from the brand’s point of view is in the production and reproduction of national chauvinist and racist discourses that occur in response to the ad and that, because of the nature of the site and the nature of social media, become part of the text of the ad through its remediation. However, given that the campaign was designed by a UK agency for a UK audience, it can also be argued that the ethnocentric discourse of some of the contributors to the site actually enhances rather than takes away from the country-of-origin branding used by Stella Artois, by heightening its foreignness.
It would appear that the extent of the French linguistic fetish means that its indexicalization is relatively stable both for the UK audience and to a certain extent globally and that it has been “inscribed” (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) in the sociolinguistic culture through the use of French accents (voiced/styled and authentic), and in particular mediatized fake French and French linguistic fetish (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2000, Reference Kelly-Holmes2005). Thus, it is a key semiotic resource available to brands in order to construct a French-speaking identity in the UK market. In the contemporary globalized economy, language is deemed to play a crucial role, not only as a “mode of management” but also as a source of distinction (Heller and Duchêne Reference Heller, Duchêne, Duchêne and Heller2012), and one of its main roles is to create authenticity for brands, companies, personalities, regions, and so on, by marking place indexicalities, as discussed above. However, this use of language can only be successful “as long as it indexes something recognisable as a place or social category” (Heller and Duchêne Reference Heller, Duchêne, Duchêne and Heller2012, 11), and this is what the contributors on YouTube are claiming that Stella Artois does not have the ability to do with the French language. It was argued above that three components need to be in place for country-of-origin appeals using linguistic fetish to be successful. The country-of-origin link to the brand is established, as is the link between the brand and the French language, but the link between all three of these is disputed by consumers, as we saw in the posts discussed above and in the discourses that emerge.
Conclusion
Coming back to the focus of this special issue, the case of C’est Cidre asks questions about nation branding from another perspective. The current study is not one of how a particular nation is branded for its own citizens or for external audiences, but instead how a product is given a national identity in marketing discourse and the semiotic resources—primarily linguistic—that are used for that purpose. Thus, we are dealing here with the construction of the other and ways of seeing the other that are ethnocentrically determined and that of course are ultimately about constructing the self. So while this looks like a text that is about Frenchness and foreignness, it is of course very much more a text about Britishness and national identity. Marketing discourses are one less obvious place where we can see how the nation constructs itself by the way in which the other is constructed and domesticated for it. While we have many studies of these practices, in terms of the use of country of origin, terroir, and linguistic fetish in advertising, as outlined above, the addition of data from YouTube discussions of advertising adds another piece to the picture. It also provides another forum—a new public in Gal and Woolard’s (Reference Gal and Woolard2001) terms—in which issues of nation, language, and territory can be debated and where we have access to the effects of these widely circulating discourses. As Heller points out in relation to the commodification of languages in the current era: “the new economy’s valuing of increasingly commodified cultural artefacts and symbolic resources blurs the relationship between political symbols and exchange goods” (Heller Reference Heller2008, 512). Thus, while the branding plays with and blurs these relationships, the contributors to the YouTube discussion clearly show that it is still very real. The C’est Cidre campaign and its discussion on YouTube thus highlight how, “under new economic conditions of globalisation, existing language forms and configurations (e.g., bilingualism) are put to new uses, gain new values, and become objects of intense scrutiny as well as vehicles and sites of ideological struggle, contestation, legitimation, and authentication of ethnic, national, and other subject positions” (Jaworski and Thurlow Reference Jaworski and Thurlow2010, 258).
The play with French and the ways of hearing and seeing French also give us an insight into the extent to which these varieties, which are largely created and disseminated by media, are publically enregistered. What we also see in the case of C’est Cidre is how stable the semiotic resources of nation branding are and, more crucially, who is and is not allowed to use them and for which purposes. This is particularly apparent in the way in which transgressing these unwritten rules is sanctioned by the audience, who generally opt for a restoration of predictability and stability in relation to borders and branding.
