Friday, March 14, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
In 2012, the easternmost region of France chose to consolidate its various cultural, tourism and government brands into one regional Alsace brand. Following the example of other regions and countries around the world, the region chose a marketing agency to put forth a cohesive brand that would not only represent its economic and cultural attributes, but its very identity. Such a project involved focus groups and interviews with Alsatians; it involved open-ended questions about the colors, smells and feelings of the region; and it also involved a foray into the Alsatian past. Alsace, a region historically traded from France to Germany and back again through European and world wars, is the site of a great deal of local collective memory work through which members of the population constantly renegotiate the trauma and legacies of their multiple shifts in national identity. Local actors continually advocate the region’s distinctive nature that sets it apart from the rest of France. Emanating from different actors in society, the opportunity to profit from the regional distinctiveness of Alsace was indeed the motivation behind the project. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which old disputes of identity, traumas of memory, and conflicts of nationality are renegotiated in a campaign to determine “Alsatianness,” with the ultimate goal of the creation of a brand. Specifically, how does the project of brand creation address, assuage or resurrect controversy, in a process which, as Hirschman (1977) notes, is rooted in the unifying interests of benign commercial “interests”?
