Abstract
The idea of the Nordic has witnessed significant attention in popular culture globally. However, little has been done to explore how Nordic brand actors perceive and enact Nordic values. We set out to explore this through a journey from southern Denmark to northern Norway, via Stockholm. The study was conducted as part of a collaborative project that focused on how myths work as a foundation for developing Nordic branding strategies. The results identified several symbolic resources which also revealed a number of cultural tensions, e.g. balancing modern Nordic aesthetics with Viking imagery and Norse mythology; egalitarian inclusiveness with fine dining/haute cuisine culture; traditional gendered fashion with post-gendered/LBTQ fashion; and ethnocentrism with multiculturalism. We discuss how brand actors try to construct compromises of these tensions, so that Nordic values as expressed in brands and products are amenable to the market, with branding strategies utilising a mode of sanitised Nordic mythology.
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Andersen, L.P., Kjeldgaard, D., Lindberg, F., Östberg, J. (2019). Nordic Branding: An Odyssey into the Nordic Myth Market. In: Askegaard, S., Östberg, J. (eds) Nordic Consumer Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04933-1_10
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