Abstract
Drawing on cultural branding research, we examine how brands can craft national identity. We do so with reference to how brands enabled New Zealand’s displaced Pākehā (white) majority to carve out a sense of we-ness against the backdrop of globalization and resurgent indigenous identity claims. Using multiple sources of ethnographic data, we develop a process model of how brands create national identity through we-ness. We find that marketplace actors deployed brands to create and renew perceptions of we-ness through four-stages: reification, lumping, splitting, and horizon expansion. From this, we make three primary contributions to the consumer research literature: we develop a four-part process model of how brands become national identity resources, explore the characteristics of the brands that enable the emergence of and evolution of we-ness, and explore how our processes can address a sense of dispossession among displaced-majorities in similarly defined contexts
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | Journal of Consumer Research |
Volume | 48 |
Issue number | 4 |
Pages (from-to) | 586–609 |
Number of pages | 24 |
ISSN | 0093-5301 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Published online: 12. December 2020Keywords
- Brands
- We-ness
- National identity
- New Zealand
- Cultural branding