This chapter reveals the ‘imposition’ and ‘invasion’ (Bourdieu 2001) of nation branding within the Polish state’s field of national images management on the basis of
emic professional accounts and public policy documents. First, it demystifies branding
in Poland as it is prerequisite to understanding the emergence of nation branding. Second, by unfolding the field’s ‘structured structures’ and ‘structuring structures’, it discloses the settings of this study and accounts for relevant communicative practices preceding nation branding. It moves from an historical exegesis to report on its findings within a social space where the government interests have met with business interests: it maps out the positions of agents and explains their relationships to the field of power. In keeping with an ontological worldview (p. 80), this thesis uncovers buried structures that make up the field, presents mechanisms that ensure its structuration and reveals the resources used by agents engaged in nation branding.
In essence, the findings reveal that nation branding, as envisioned by nation branders, have not been fully institutionalised as a routinised practice (Reckwitz 2002) characterised by its own professional code of practice. While the Polish, private sector marketers and public relations actors explain their understanding of nation branding in ambiguous, often tactical terms, the Western nation branding consultants travelling across the Polish state structures and beyond, alongside their business employers, explicitly define their vision of the field and offer insights into assumed requirements for nation branding practice. The ideological discourse on nation branding has
emerged as an ‘idealised model’ that has been imposed on the Polish state by the newcomers to the state bureaucracy. The advocates of nation branding employed ‘succession strategies’ enacted by public affairs campaigning to secure their interests in nation branding consultancy and made an impact on the Polish state’s promotional policy making. Thus, nation branding has been performed through attempts to form
112
their vision of the field and by attempts to formalise nation branding as part of the public policy in which the Polish state articulates its transnational economic interests.
I start off with demystifying nation branding and offer insights into how this powerful promotional culture idea and practice is rooted within the cognitive
structures in Poland. Later, I report on the interrogated field by outlining the historical overview of relevant actors. This section follows a reflexive approach to the analytical process emphasised by scholars studying early modernist government communication (L’Etang 2004). This section also offers a flavour of terminology used by participants. During my fieldwork, I was regardful of the context in which the phrase ‘nation branding’ was used and meanings attributed to it. Altogether, the assumption that there exists an autonomous field of nation branding in Poland is highly contestable.
In fact, the early stage of the fieldwork reveals different ‘institutional labels’ (Everett 2002) within the field, signifying institutional practices: ‘public diplomacy’; ‘national marketing’; ‘investment marketing’; ‘destination marketing’; ‘cultural
diplomacy’ and amidst them ‘nation branding’. These are markers of change. These
practices are linked with promotional policies of the Polish state and, are defined by the state actors, as aiming at challenging the ‘images of Poland’. Why is it important? First, it captures the conditions within the field. Second, it supports the view that “influxes of new agents into the field can serve either as forces for transformation or conservation” (Benson and Neveu 2005, p. 5). Against this background, nation branding emerges as an additional policy and communicative practice in the nation- building process. The fieldwork data reveals that the first initiative explicitly signified as ‘nation branding’ took place in August 1999, but central to this study, ‘Nation
brand building programme’, was contracted on 15th December 2003. THE MYTH OF BRANDING IN POLAND
Although I had conducted preliminary interviews in London and Warsaw prior to my fieldwork, I was still asking myself, if at all, nation branding is different to its conceptual predecessors? How is it practised? And what purpose does it serve in the
113
context of political economy and promotional culture in Poland. I arrived in Warsaw on 25th July 2009, having fixed few interviews prior to the fieldtrip. Straight from Chopin Airport, I set out for the city centre. I decided to take up a role of a ‘native tourist’ during my fieldwork. Having put my ‘researcher as a tourist’ glasses on, I headed towards the city centre. Warsaw welcomed me with beautiful weather. The eclectics of Gothic, Art Nouveau and Soviet-style architecture intertwined with the omnipresence of promotional artefacts scattered across the city. Soon after landing, I was drawn to the public information campaign called ‘Choose branded’. In fact, it is an ongoing campaign run by the Polish Association of Branded Goods Manufacturers (2009) tailored to persuade Poles of the virtues of branded commodities. This growing clutter of messages reveals expansion of promotional culture that nowadays is integral to the iconographic landscape in Poland (Chmielewska 2005).
My fieldtrips to Warsaw became an opportunity for a reflection about Poland. Apart from the colonising promotional culture, occupying public spaces, the streets of Warsaw welcomed me with public spaces where the homeless, prostitutes,
unemployed, and the impoverished took advantage of the philanthropic support of the Roman Catholic Church. I began to wonder if these social classes of the Polish nation find representations in performative discourse on nation branding. I kept thinking about the culture in which I grew up. I could clearly recall that within my social networks across various fields in Poland, Western branded commodities, services, and corporate brands had been considered as a symbol of ‘long-lasting quality’; ‘high- tech’; often idealised as ‘luxurious’ or ‘conspicuous’ in the impoverished socialist economy15 by the authoritarian governed Polish nation. I could recall, how ‘branded’
ex definitione meant ‘better’.
15 I consciously use the term ‘socialist’ as the latter has never been an ideological form of governance
in Poland in its purity. A distorted version of socialism has been reduced by the Polish Communist Party to an authoritarian regime imposed in Poland by the Soviet government after World War II (with the UK and US governments’ consent) and subservient to its policies. To think of Poland as the communist state is a simplification and does not reflect writings of Marx and Engels.
114
The representations of commercial branding practice are hardly new to Poland: its myth, or what Bourdieu (1991, p. 167) terms as “collectively appropriated
product”, had existed in Poland prior to the emergence of nation branding. As far as promotional culture in Poland is concerned, the myth of branding has gained
momentum driven by socialism-capitalism dialectics: branding has gained its impetus thanks to shortages of goods and promotion culture in which Polish socialist
enterprises did not use professionalised corporate communication language.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a growing demand for basic products and products rationing were frequently aligned with ‘inefficiencies’ of the socialist system of production. Simultaneously, branding was attributed to Western corporate symbols. In these settings, the myth of branding had been reproduced as self-fulfilling prophecy of Western capitalism. Sidorenko (1998, p. 9) summarises the above points in the
following way:
...Polish reality from the late 1970s on compared unfavourably with images of life in the West. These images helped to create a fantasy of communism’s other through the unfortunate medium of the feel good American movies, imported alongside real denim jeans and Pepsi- Cola during the populism of the Gierek regime.
Those contrasting relationships, based on the communism-capitalism dialectics, underpinned by growing demand and inefficient supply logic are also relevant to this study. Indeed, my findings remain consistent with the above observation. The insights presented by the field actors explicitly demystify preconceptions concerning
representations of brands and branding as well as contextual meanings attributed to this practice. One of them, in an insightful way, unfolds the culturally loaded myth of branding in Poland, which was presented to me in the following exchange:
Interviewer: Why is it so important for contemporary Poland to have
115
Interviewee: You see, your question brings about a thesis, a certain assumption. Hm...there are people who claim that it is important for Poland to have a nation brand. They claim that having a nation brand means that a country is better perceived, it is better recognisable. In their view, this can leverage into, say, the economic performance. So if a country is better recognisable and perceived positively.... Because, you see, ‘a brand’ is a positive term, it is not pejorative, right? It has clear positive connotations. So if we say, in Polish, don’t know about English as this might be culturally different, but in Polish, if we say ‘this is a brand’, we automatically assume ‘quality’. We do not explicitly have to say ‘good quality’. We subconsciously assume that we talk about a ‘good quality’. Henceforth, going back to nation branding, if you assume that Poland needs to have a nation brand, some argue, that it would automatically increase Poland’s
international prestige. That is what some people think.
Interviewer: Is that what you also think?
Interviewee: I think that the building of national prestige is much more complicated than drawing from a set of brand features (Kinga,
personal interview, 2008).
Nowadays, the term ‘brand’ can be demystified as an attribute of ‘outstanding recognition’, ‘prominent position’ or ‘extraordinary qualities’. The perpetuation of branding has gained a dominant meaning whereby making a reference to ‘an object’ as a brand creates ‘a subject’ which is in an assumed privileged market or social position.
Another culturally grounded and contextual feature of the branding myth lies in a presupposition that commodities, services, and organisations in Poland had not been
116
thought of in ‘branding’ terms and that until recently in marketing practice, Polishness has been rarely signified. Another field actor reveals:
“Even today, the specificity of marketing in Poland is that the commercial enterprises are reluctant to draw on a country of origin effect as a marketing technique. Only now they are awakening to the potential of this tactic in their product and corporate branding
(Adam, personal interview, April, 2008).
Further, he recognises the dynamics of marketing practice and gives an example of their client - Kompania Piwowarska16
- that widely signifies Polishness in its corporate communications. Indeed, before 1989, commodities, services or organisations in the Sovietised Poland had their own representations, but managerial terminology was not widespread. The myth of branding, further reinforced within the promotional culture, has developed explicit representations of brands and implicit representations of
branding. While I was aware that participants of my study lived similar experiences of the political economy in Poland prior to 1989, their construction of meaning regarding branding could have been significantly different. With this in mind, I embarked on the fieldwork eager to understand how nation branding has been enacted in Poland. As shown later in this study, the culturally loaded pre-understandings of branding have played their role in the effort to legitimize nation branding by private sector actors. At this stage, however, the following pages sketch out types of policy and outline the settings accompanying institutionalisation and perpetuation of nation branding.