Paper short abstract:

Advertising personalizes brands and runs campaigns particularly addressed to local consumers. This paper aims to demonstrate that Romanian brands create their identity mainly by strategically developing national heritage, and especially by associating it with the myth of origins.

Paper long abstract:

Aside from its marketing purpose, advertising also has a role in mass-communication; more specifically, it personalizes brands and runs campaigns particularly addressed to local consumers. The present paper aims to demonstrate that Romanian brands create their identity by strategically developing national heritage, and especially by associating it with the myth of origins. Brands deliver creative products whose campaigns usually explain the genesis of the product, often related to the production process.

In light of this background, I selected 10 Romanian local brands belonging to a range of product categories to analyze the development of their heritage: Napolact and Covalact (dairy), Scandia (pâté), Rom (chocolate), Murfatlar (wine), Timişoreana (beer), Boromir (bakery), Dacia (automobile), Dero (detergents) and Altex (electronics retailer). Subsequently, I focused on a corpus composed of at least 100 television advertisements belonging to the aforementioned brands that ran on public media after 2005. The theme of heritage was researched, through a stratified qualitative method, which will consider aspects such as: the context of corpus campaigns (the environment where the product was created, urban or rural), brand positioning, the campaign hero, strategy, and features of brand heritage.

We aim to answer the following questions to explain the role of local brands in preserving national heritage: What is the connection between product categories and cultural heritage? How important is the rural or urban environment in building brand identity? Our main hypothesis is that rediscovering genuine brands involves managing their identity according to the cultural heritage of consumers and market characteristics.