A Case of Beer: Branding Brews and Sense of Place

Will sing for beer.

Now here's a sense of place study I can really get behind!

Published in the Journal of Marketing Management (paywalled) just this month, Leveraging the side of the brand using a sense of place: Case studies in craft breweries, authors Hede and Watne investigate craft brew branding strategies that attempt to connect consumers to place through the bridge of beer.

Academic articles like this are often only available to paying costumers or to students whose institutions pay for such access. It's a huge money-making market that doesn't actually pay the authors and keeps most scientific research out of the hands of everyday people. But that's a different debate.

A short description of the beer branding study, the abstract, is provided by the journal:  

In order for consumers to connect emotionally with brands, brands must be transformed from inanimate entities into the realm of acquiring human characteristics. Following a review of more than 1000 breweries from online sources and beer companion books, we explore how a sense of place, derived from myths, folklores, and heroes, enables marketers and consumers to co-create narratives that humanise brands. We add to the theory on brand humanisation as we conclude that a sense of place offers a novel, and different, approach to humanisation strategies based on anthropomorphisation, personification, and user imagery, but can also operate in tandem with them. Further research is recommended to understand how and why consumers respond to branding strategies that use a sense of place to humanise brands.

TTBOOK goes Back to the Land, Again.

Over the weekend I heard a great segment from To The Best Of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK). To say there's been a great segment on TTBOOK is redundant, of course, but this one caught my ear because of its focus on connection to land as a mechanism for personal change.

Here, TTBOOK goes Back to the Land.

From growing up as a child of the Back to the Land movement of the 1960s, connected directly to Helen and Scott Nearing (the somewhat stern grandparents of that particular movement), to the growing recognition of the immensity of food waste in America, this four-segment broadcast covers a lot of ground. Literally.

Imagine living in a 12' x 12' shack in back-country North Carolina or taking on with grand naivete a transcendent, blister-inducing journey along the Pacific Crest Trail. The folks at TTBOOK go from subsistence living to an immense journey of pure determination.

New York City resident William Powers found himself with the chance to live in a cabin for a few months (and then wrote a book about it) while Cheryl Strayed is featured in the final segment, talking about her book Wild and the story behind the story which has now become the story after the story behind the story. Don't think about it. Just listen.

Voices of Green Fire: Connecting City and Country

The Aldo Leopold Foundation's YouTube channel is a great resource for information on Leopold and his incredible legacy.

This new video, Voices of Green Fire: Connecting City and Country, builds off of the inspiring dialogue heard in the Green Fire documentary. Take a ten minute break and enjoy!

The push-pull of Environmental Communication

Tema Milstein wrote the chapter on environmental communication theories in The Encyclopedia of Communication Theory (Littlejohn & Foss, eds., 2009).

In is, she writes that scholars studying environmental communication do so because they are "particularly concerned with the ways people communicate about the natural world." Such communication, Milstein writes, "has far-reaching effects at a time of largely human-caused environmental crises."

In a similar chapter for a more recent compendium, 2012's Greening The Academy, Milstein writes about "greening" communication. In it she writes that environmental communication is based on two primary assumptions: (1) the ways in which we communicate powerfully influence our understanding of nature and (2) these understandings inform how we relate with and within the natural world.

Communication allows us to both express and understand our experiences, our being-in-the-world. Within this ever-changing sphere of influence and understanding are implicit (though often not consciously recognized) patterns of power, symbolism, materiality, memory, and persuasion, among other existential elements.

We filter all of this through our conscious mind yet the true filter, one we often give short shrift because it is so very subtle, is the pre-conscious or sub-conscious mind. The metaphor I like to use here evokes the winds powering the waves on the surface (consciousness) while the silent moon and mysterious stars push and pull the deep, heavy (subconscious) currents below.

Mobility, Placelessness, and Continuation

Reading through Tim Cresswell's book "Place: A Short Introduction" (2004, Blackwell), I am finding more support for the idea that place is a fundamental filter through which most people process the world around them.

Early in the book, Cresswell states that an important theme of the book is that "place is not just a thing in the world but... a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world."  Continuing, he says the book "is as much about place as a way of knowing as it is about place as a thing in the world. It is as much about epistemology as it is about ontology."

In discussing concerns with "placelessness" that emerged largely through Tuan and Relph in the early work of humanistic geography in the 1970s, Cresswell writes:

Clearly, if place is the very bedrock of our humanity, as some have claimed, then it cannot have vanished because it is a necessary part of the human condition. (p.49)

This is put forth after a short meditation on Thrift (1994) on place and mobility, to which Cresswell suggests:

Thrift sees mobility as a mark of all of life in an increasingly speeded up world. The study of the modern world is a study of velocities and vectors. Rather than comparing mobility to place, mobilities are placed in relation to each other. Place in this world seems increasingly redundant. (p. 48)

All this springs out of a chapter tracing back work on place up through post-modernity where, it often seems, that we have lost a sense of place... that all strip-malls and shopping centers look the same, chain restaurants have replaced unique regional diners, and the hyper-linked connections of a modern mobile world continue to wipe a virtual eraser across a wide swath of the blackboard of culture.

In some respects this is no doubt true. But there is also an enhanced regionalism that seems to be budding. Farmer's markets and local music and arts scenes come to mind for me.

At the end of this chapter, Cresswell introduces Lippard, writing in 1997:

Even in the age of a 'restless, multitraditional people' she argues, and 'even as the power of place is diminished and often lost, it continues -- as an absence -- to define culture and identity. It also continues -- as a presence -- to change the way we live.' 

# # #

Thrift, N. (1994). Inhuman Geographies: Landscapes of Speed, Light and Power in Cloke, P. Ed. Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies. Paul Chapman, London, 191-250.

Lippard, L. (1997). The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicultural Society. The New York Press, New York.

David Dye in Memphis

Another great installment of World Cafe's "Sense of Place" series. This time: Memphis, a city of rich cultural and musical traditions. Stax Records, BBQ, Beale Street, Sun Records, the Mississippi River. Whoa.

And Graceland! 




I enjoyed Dye's "sense of place" Dublin tour in early 2011, accompanied by musician Glenn Hansard. This 'tour' of Memphis is just as fun.

I'm feeling thankful for new media and our ability to "visit" so many wonderful places in the world. There's still no substitute for actually traveling, for getting oneself out of the daily humdrum, but it isn't always possible. So, here, you can get a dose of The King, some real-deal juke joints, some sights (if not scents) of lip-smacking BBQ... the list goes on!

Don't let me stop you.

Root's Roots

Robert Root's recent entry, Having a Sense of Place, posted on The Loft Literary Center's blog works over some nice thoughts on place as related to creative nonfiction writing. 

Relating his experiences as a writer in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Colorado -- and spending time in and actively engaging with those locales he's called home has influenced his developing "sense of place."