A Nation Forged in Iron
A map of the world highlighting the countries where the biggest-selling soft drink was a Coca-Cola product became a viral hit on social media in the UK in 2017 (Murphy 2017). At first glance, every single country across the entire world appeared a uniform red, underlining the global dominance of Coke. But there was one exception. The sole presence of a tiny, blue Scotland attested that one country at least had proved to be uniquely resilient to the juggernaut of consumer conformity that had assailed the rest of the world. The number one drink consumed there was identified as Barrâs Irn-Bru, a locally made, orange-coloured soft drink with a sweet, tangy, indefinable fruit taste somewhat reminiscent of bubble gum. The mapâsubsequently adopted by the manufacturers for their own social media feed as well as being commented on in the mainstream media across the UKâcontained numerous errors and doubtlessly overstated Cokeâs dominance in markets like Cuba or North Korea. Despite frequent articles that present Irn-Bru as the biggest selling soft drink in Scotland (see Murphy 2015), it also very possibly exaggerated Irn-Bruâs actual market share in the country. Nevertheless, the map encapsulated the cultural importance of Irn-Bru consumption in Scotland, illustrating how this unique beverage is enthusiastically mobilised to convey questions of contemporary Scotsâ national identity.
According to popular mythology which draws both from the brandâs official backstory and from popular legends around the invention of the beverage, Barrâs Irn-Bru reportedly originated in Scotland in 1901 as Iron Brew, having been invented to preserve the vitality of thirsty steelworkers in Glasgow. On the bottle label and in print ads, early brand ambassadors are identified as âhairy Highland athletesâ, forging an indelible connection between national origins, industrial strength, cultural traditions and vibrant masculinity. Most of these stories are false, but that does not diminish their power. Today, the beverage is taken to represent the embodiment of a distinctive national characterâan irreverent sense of good-humoured resilience in the face of adversityâand it remains uniquely popular in Scotland. Barrâs Irn-Bru has its own official tartan, Andy Murray is photographed toasting his victories with it, and a crate of the beverage was reportedly chosen by Sir Sean Connery to represent his homeland as an exhibit for the Museum of Scotland (Murphy 2015). Suggesting further that the beverage enjoys the status of an institutionally supported vector of gastronationalism in Scotland (DeSoucey 2010), First Minister Alex Salmond successfully lobbied the EU not to clamp down on the use of the two key colorants present in the beverage which are suspected of causing hyperactivity in children (âFirst Minister raises a glass as Europe backs down on Irn-Bru colour banâ 2011). Despite the best efforts of its Scottish manufacturers, AG Barr plc, the beverage is frequently politicised. Campaigners on both sides of the 2014 independence referendum claimed Irn-Bru as their own and the influx of new SNP MPs to the UK Parliament in 2015 was accompanied by various news reports about the increased demand for Irn-Bru at Westminster (Efstathiou 2016). When in 2018 Barrâs halved the sugar content in response to the âsugar taxâ announced by the UK Parliament, the recipe change not only sparked a boycott by diehard Scottish fans to reinstate a ânational treasureâ, the move was cited online by some as further proof of the need for Scottish independence to escape the influence of Westminster.
Barrâs Irn-Bru is today mobilised from above and below to incarnate a form of authentic, modern Scottishness and the extent to which this brand functions as a totem of a nationâs identity has few parallels in the world beyond Coke itself. Barrâs Irn-Bru has been locally produced now for well over a hundred years. But if it can be proven that there was nothing intrinsically Scottish about a beverage which originated from outside the country and which borrowed its visual identity and marketing discourses from extra-national sources, then a number of questions arise.
Consumerism can relay discourses of national identity when consumers are invested in the purchase of ânationally produced goods and servicesâ (Gerth 2011), but goods do not become national by simply being âproducedâ ex nihilo in a given location. They are the result of complex global value chains which involve procurement, logistics, promotion, marketing, distribution and so on. Within this framework, how do branded goods become inflected with national meaning to the extent that this obscures their transnational origins ? When brands are seen as having some claim to national legitimacy what are the institutional and cultural forces which allow them to become further entrenched and culturally dominant (MaleĹĄeviÄ 2013: 130)? What are the ramifications of the origins myths and backstories which brands use to secure legitimacy in the apparently mundane, depoliticised domain of contemporary consumption? Through which performative acts do national consumers display agency to reclaim brand identities as part of their own individual and collective identities? Can the brands involved in consumer displays of national thought continue to promote bounded identities in a globalised capitalist framework exemplified by increasingly heterogeneous populations and homogeneous high streets?
Everyday Consumption and National Identity
For a while, it was suggested that globalisation heralded the growing irrelevance of the nation as a focus for society, culture and politics. However, the consensus today is that nations do continue to matter today (Billig 1995; Foster 1999; Calhoun 2007; Aronczyk 2009; Mihelj 2011). The flows of goods, people and culture we experience daily in the developed world may have weakened the idea of the nation as a discrete, homogeneous entity, but a sense of national belonging remains a strong component of individual and collective identity. Alongside globalisation and the persistence of national thought, another defining feature of western consumer society has been the rise of what has been loosely termed promotional culture (Wernick 1991; Davis 2013). This refers to the dominant cultural presence of the marketing communications, branding and advertising which have come to play such an important role not only in business, but also in culture, society and politics. The aim of this book is to explore the connections between these forces.
Within a theoretical framework reliant on the concepts of âbanalâ and âeverydayâ nationalism (Billig 1995; Edensor 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008), this book thus seeks to address a phenomenon that has been loosely termed commercial nationalism. Volcic and Andrejevic use this term to refer to two related strategies, the first being the process by which state actors use commercial tools to promote the nation (2016: 2). The resulting studies on ânation-brandingâ such as those carried out by Kaneva have fruitfully highlighted the implications of this articulation of national interests in commercial terms (2016). However, our focus here is on the use of nationalist themes by commercial actors, the second of Volcic and Andrejevicâs definitions for the term.
As Foster reminds us, it can be extremely useful to âlook beyond the agencies of the state for sites where the nation as imaginative construct or narrative is made and made realâ (Foster 2002: 6). This is particularly relevant in cases when there is a relative weakness of state power as it allows us to study how the nation is materialised in the absence of the âmachinery of governmentalityâ (Foster 2002: 5). In the context of the multinational UK and a Scotland historically defined as a stateless-nation, this focus on the commercial construction of the nation (c.f. the state) will help avoid the unwarranted state-centred conflation of the two terms which Anthony Smith identifies as a common failing in studies of everyday nationalism (2008: 566â567).
Smith meanwhile cautions that focusing on everyday manifestations of nationalism favours an ahistorical reading of the nation (2008: 566). Many of the studies on nation-branding indeed concentrate on the contemporary era, with a particular focus on how nations have adopted commercial modes of communication following the fall of communism (Kania-Lundholm 2016). However, Kania-Lundholm rightly warns against viewing commercial nationalism as a new phenomenon (2014), and one of our concerns has been to address questions of temporality and historicity, by charting how national identity has interacted with modern marketing techniques from their earliest appearance in the late nineteenth century. It is true that this approach does not allow us to venture outside of the temporality of modernism. But the study conducted here attempts to show the importance of discourses of continuity and the past in linking consumerism to nation-building, with the interplay of local, national and global forces forming the backdrop of consumerism well before the advent of todayâs globalised consumer society.
The area of commercial nationalism concerned with how nationalist themes are taken up by advertisers, producers and consumers has been termed more specifically âconsumer nationalismâ by CastellĂł and Mihelj (2018). The latter conclude that given its often overlooked political and cultural signification, nationalist consumptionâand the social and economic factors which shape itâmerit further study (2018). The societal and cultural impacts of such low-culture, vernacular, commercial forces have often been unjustly overlooked. The wider social role of advertising in particul...