I ran into Mikko in a bar here in Helsinki. We got into talking about the usual stuff: marketing, Finland, entrepreneurship etc. He then asked me about my thesis and its theories and why I use big American brands mostly as my examples. He said that American brands (or rather, American consumer tastes) might not translate or might be a hard “sell” for Finnish businesses.
It’s a fair point. The only small brand I’ve featured in this blog was Gym Jones and the only Finnish brand has been Nokia. But the thing is, I don’t think Finland has that many brands that could qualify as iconic brands, at least in the sense of portraying an identity myth. One reason is the size of our market and our relatively late industrialization, but another reason is that we’ve been notoriously lagging in the grand art of marketing. The only brands I could think of when chatting with Mikko were Marimekko, Iittala and maybe Ivana Helsinki, and with each of them I have a hard time conceptualizing an identity myth that could be clearly identifiable. Marimekko probably comes closest with its timeless and unwavering design (as Mikko said), but as said, that in itself doesn’t make for an identity myth yet.
An iconic brand?
However, when I got home I remembered a great example of cultural branding in Finland that my friend Viola had in her master’s thesis. It’s the case of Karjala (Karelia), a Finnish beer brand. As this (Finnish) Wikipedia page shows, Karjala’s sales were modest in the 1960s until the Soviet ambassador Andrei Kovaljov stated that its nationalistic imagery and name were insulting to the USSR. This created a nationalistic movement that boosted the beer’s sales immensely. Karjala got swooped up into the national dialogue and became a key and credible prop in culture, although not by its own doing (which might often be even for the better). People even had a saying in those days: “Let’s bring Karelia back, even though it’s one bottle at a time!”
Fast forward to 1994 and the beer brand decided to start sponsoring the Finnish national hockey team, and when the team won the hockey gold medal a year later the brand saw significant increases in its sales. Karjala had dipped into its heritage of nationalistic pride and gotten lucky, yet again, with circumstances that were out of its control. One could argue that any beer brand could have done the same, but I feel that the key issue here was Karjala’s nationalistic heritage, that had lived on since the 1960′s onwards. Another brand might’ve seen a small increase in sales, but Karjala saw massive gains thanks to their place in Finnish culture. It goes without saying though, that Karjala should look to reinvent its myth, I doubt that the nationalistic angle from the 90s is still resonant with culture, but that’s a whole other issue.
Karjala continues to leverage its place in Finnish culture
I also somewhat disagreed with Mikko that American culture and European culture (and Finnish culture for that matter) are so different that you can’t necessarily take from American cases examples and try to apply them here. It’s true that nearly all of Douglas Holt’s work is based in America, and I’m sure that it gives the theories a distinctive flair. But popular culture has been converging for a long time now, and the Internet has only accelerated this trend. We same a lot of the same memes, anecdotes and stories with our American counterparts. And as Joseph Campbell has shown with his work, idenitity myth as are universally identifiable. I’m sure Finland has its own versions to, for example, the American “man of action” myth, one example that immediately springs to mind is Koskela, the mythic character from Väinö Linna’s books.
From the article (in Finnish, sorry):
Yläsen mielestä Yhdysvallat varsinkin sellaisena, miksi Hollywood sen klassisella kaudella kuvasi, oli Suomen kaltainen, herroja kunnioittamaton raivaajakansa, joka oli oppinut tulemaan toimeen omin avuin.
“Sä et tyrkytä apua, koska kaikilla on samat edellytykset, kaikki pärjäävät itse.”
So it seems that Finnish and American culture might have more in common than previously thought.
It’s also very important to note that in many ways America could be seen as a testing ground for branding, because their consumer culture is so much more saturated in terms of choice and amount of advertising compared to us. I’d also argue that this leads to a higher “consumer literacy level”, as I had argued in my thesis. So in effect, America consumer culture is paving the way for European brands.
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