“It’s this diversity that makes Australia such a unique country”: nationalism in a multinational marketing campaign

ABSTRACT

Multinational corporations use nationalism as a marketing tool to promote products. Vice versa, marketing facilitates positive images of the nation. The advertising of multinational corporations therefore covertly contributes to people's understanding of identity. It is against this background that this research investigates how the relationship between nation-states and multinational corporations is established in advertising discourse. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis as a theoretical framework, this study examines a marketing campaign of the multinational supermarket chain Woolworths in Australia. The main research question is “How does advertising discourse establish a link between nation-states and multinational corporations?” To address this central question, this study investigates how (1) the world is represented in advertising discourse, (2) various imagined communities are represented in advertising discourse, and (3) Australia is represented as different from all other nations in the campaign. Findings suggest that banal forms of cosmopolitanism go hand in hand with banal forms of nationalism in the campaign. Under the guise of educating customers, these ideologies serve to promote consumption and brand the company as Australian.

KEYWORDS:

• Banal nationalism
• banal cosmopolitanism
• imagined communities
• advertising discourse
• multimodal critical discourse analysis
• multinational corporations

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my supervisor Professor Ingrid Piller, who guided me in the development of this research and who gave me invaluable feedback throughout the writing process. I am also deeply grateful to my second supervisor Associate Professor Erik Lundmark for stimulating discussions about the content of this paper. My colleagues from Language on the Move, as well as the attendees of my presentation of this research at the 2nd HKU PhD Conference in Sociolinguistics on Multimodal and Mediated Discourse Analysis in 2017, gave me great suggestions for revisions which I deeply appreciate. Lastly, I thank my reviewers for their suggestions on the theoretical underpinnings and methodology of this piece, as they helped me to considerably improve the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author received financial support for the research and authorship of this article through an International Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (iMQRES), allocation number 2015175.

Notes on contributors

Rahel Cramer

Rahel Cramer holds a PhD in Linguistics and an MA in Multilingual Educational Linguistics. Her research focuses on language choice and discursive constructions of national identity in the business domain. Her research interests include language and identity, intercultural communication and discourse analysis. During her postgraduate studies, she has held positions as a research assistant, as a student assistant and as a tutor at universities in Germany and in Australia. She currently works at the Office of Higher Degree Research Training and Partnerships at Macquarie University in Sydney.