Enterprise & Society

Corporate Branding, Nation Branding, and Nationalism

The association between a product and a territorial origin can be traced back to ancient Rome.²⁰ We can also find the first corporate strategies for promoting a product through its association with a territory, its landscape, and a lifestyle in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the state of California and especially with the city of Los Angeles.²¹ However, at the end of the twentieth century, corporate branding gained importance as a way to add value to products on consumer markets.²² In regional and national development, the unique value that the culture of a given territory assigns to its products is becoming increasingly important for a nation’s economic players.²³ The cultural dimension of products distinguishes them and allows one territory to gain a competitive advantage over others,²⁴ and thus to obstruct products coming from competing territories.²⁵

In the various processes of country image building, simplicity and clarity are now regarded as key factors.²⁶ In the developed world, [End Page 816] place branding became a national concern in the 1990s,²⁷ powered by corporations and private consultants.²⁸ This in turn led to the development of tools to measure worldwide perceptions of nation–states, which uses the dimensions of culture, governance, population, exports, tourism, investments, and immigration.²⁹

Otherwise, as various authors have observed, the car provides an ideal medium for banal nationalism, from the basic content and appearance of its license plates to any other number of design levels,³⁰ and it can be used to reflect consumer preference³¹ and indicate how consumers adhere to an economic form of nationalism and express their sympathy with a “friend nation” or reject identities they consider “hostile” to national identity.³²

Research conducted into marketing since the 1970s has shown that the awareness of place-of-origin also remains an important factor in the automotive industry.³³ For years, this industry has represented the heart of the industrial policy of nation–states, especially in Europe. In the British case, the decline and virtual disappearance of the automotive industry has been interpreted as a symbol of the decline of Britain as an industrial power and its transition to the post-Fordist economy based on services and financial sector.³⁴ These processes of industrial decline have been interpreted as a product of globalization and neoliberalism, and have become the focus of a discussion of industrial history.³⁵

However, the merger and integration of automotive companies—such as the case of the Volkswagen Group—is part of the internationalization of the economy that invalidates the old schemes of national economies. This is especially so in the automotive industry, in which globalization of the supply chains makes it impossible to claim a clear and distinctive national origin of the finished manufactured product.³⁶ This process can also be analyzed as part of the [End Page 817] regionalization of the world economy through the construction of regional units such as the European Union. However, although this integration process is reflected in a political and—to some extent—social confluence, there is to date no Europeanization of identity; that is, there is no common European identity.³⁷

Therefore, despite the integration of brands from different national backgrounds, the territorial element has not lost weight in marketing strategies. Instead, national stereotypes³⁸ are used to define brand personality. However, this requires the development of complex strategies to reconcile different brand identities and different brands (for example, Rover, Mini, and BMW) that may not always be entirely consistent in terms of content and market positioning strategies.³⁹

The Uses of History: From Corporate History to Corporate Branding

Corporate strategies that use banal nationalism to gain loyalty to the brand at home or, to a lesser extent, to improve foreign consumers’ perception of the brand do not adopt the arguments of the old economic nationalism or the discourse of ethnic nationalism. Instead, they prefer to use indirect evocations, such as national stereotypes, historical landscapes, or nostalgia to generate an emotional link to the brand.⁴⁰ The brands thereby intend to embody the values and cultural heritage of the nation,⁴¹ even if it means somewhat simplifying and distorting the cultural diversity of a country.

Corporate brands, despite being multinational, continue to use national flags and historical narratives regarding their connection with national characteristics to present the brand’s products.⁴² In this regard, certain reinterpretations of the history of a country and a nostalgic celebration of past times⁴³ can be used by manufacturers to confer a specific character or value on the brand and its products via [End Page 818] retro-branding⁴⁴—by appealing to the nostalgia of consumers, their personal memories, or the collective memory of a country.

This strategy has been implemented by the Italian automotive company FIAT—the original 1920s logo was resurrected for the new FIAT model in 1999.⁴⁵ Through this redesign, FIAT intended to present its products as a “return to Italian design” and especially “the golden years of the Turinese bodywork designers.”⁴⁶ The Mercedes brand has also developed a powerful strategy to recover the history of the brand, through the creation of a museum at its headquarters in Stuttgart in 2006.⁴⁷ However, in some cases, brands need to manage a troubled past related to their ties with a dictatorial regime—as is the case, among others, of Mercedes and SEAT—so these episodes do not affect the brand image permanently.⁴⁸

Nationalism, Place-of-Origin Effect, and Consumers’ Purchase Decisions

One of the researched aspects of the relationship among place, economy, and national identity is the negative or positive association between a country’s image and the products that are seen to come from this country, known as the country-of-origin effect⁴⁹ or place-of-origin effect, given that regions or cities are increasingly significant players in branding. Since the mid-1960s, research has been conducted on the importance of place of origin to consumers and the assessment consumers make of a product’s qualities in relation to its place of manufacture. It has been repeatedly shown that information about place of origin helps explain consumer preference, even though the place-of-origin effect varies according to product type and is more pronounced in high-technology products such as cars or electronic devices.⁵⁰

Researchers have also observed an underlying nationalist bias toward domestic products in peoples’ habits of perceiving and evaluating the market offer;⁵¹ it is generally accepted that consumers in [End Page 819] developed countries are positively biased toward local products and negatively biased toward products manufactured abroad. In developing countries, however, the opposite is true, inasmuch as the products from developed countries are perceived to be quality products and their possession a mark of successful adhesion to a Western lifestyle.⁵² However, more importance has been placed on culture of brand origin (COBO), not only on the country of origin (COO), which reveals the importance of symbolic and cultural elements associated with the country brand and how this affects the brand building strategy and consumer reception.⁵³ Moreover, some of the importance of the internal cultural and national diversity of each country has been emphasized to understand the impact of marketing and the varying degrees of acceptance regarding identification and brands.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, the field of subnational marketing and subnational segmentation of consumption is a field that is still poorly studied, despite the constraints that cultural and collective identities (and hence also sub-national identities) can have on the effectiveness of marketing and consumer reception of advertising.

Otherwise, the globalization of the automotive industry has led certain authors to speak of car as a hybrid (binational) product because its design and brand associate it with one country (usually a developed country), even when it has been manufactured in another (usually a developing country, where human resources are cheaper).⁵⁵ This is important for consumers, for whom national design and manufacture are often quality guarantees.⁵⁶ Consumers tend to react more favorably to foreign designs when these are nationally manufactured,⁵⁷ which allows manufacturers to avoid negative customer bias towards foreign products:⁵⁸ By locating their production in Europe and the United States, therefore, the Japanese automakers Toyota and Honda and, [End Page 820] more recently, the South Korean Hyundai and Kia,⁵⁹ have avoided creating this kind of customer prejudice.⁶⁰

Regional Corporate Branding and Subnational Nationalism

Since the 1980s, greater importance has also been given to regional or local branding, especially when these brands are associated with renowned creative clusters.⁶¹ Assigning value to the uniqueness of place of origin and product will become increasingly fundamental in branding processes,⁶² especially in the luxury goods sector, in which place and product can be qualitatively associated in a more effective “story.”⁶³

In some cases, this regional branding creates links with strong sub-national identities, but it is not perceived as an adversarial element in the identity of the nation–state, as is the case in Germany and Italy. Thus, in the automotive industry, BMW’s very name (Bayerische Motoren Werke) uses the fact that its headquarters are in the capital city of the Free State of Bavaria to add value to the product, as does its chequered roundel, the flag of the state—and its customers are thereby encouraged to associate the company with a regional industrial cluster that makes the brand unique, while also engaging in a kind of regional banal nationalism. Similarly, FIAT advertises its Torinese origins to associate the company with the North Italian design cluster’s seal of approved quality and innovative design.⁶⁴ By associating place of origin and product and by fashioning an idealized symbolic identity and heritage,⁶⁵ the European corporations are creating an image of uniqueness to protect themselves from the [End Page 821] increasingly fierce competition of the emergent economies (especially South Korea and China) in price and technical features; in other words, such companies are activating the emotional factor that determines a customer’s purchase of a car⁶⁶ by encouraging customers to associate good design with place of origin.

The customer trend toward economic nationalism has led car manufacturers to produce more place-of-origin–directed branding campaigns. In most cases, international marketing campaigns consider only national cultural differences; regional or subnational identities are considered to a much lesser extent. The development of a study of the interplay between national and regional branding, and of interactions with subnational identities, is a field of study that still suffers from considerable conceptual confusion, and few empirical case studies exist.⁶⁷

However, in some cases, the influence of subnational identities has been taken into consideration, as in the case of Quebec and the nationalist sentiments within the region; the “made in France” label has been applied by car makers such as Toyota, which hopes that this will provide a better brand perception because of the Francophone sympathies of many Québécois customers,⁶⁸ Quite the opposite is the case if we consider SEAT, which rejects the development of subnational marketing in Catalonia, because it sees this as contrary to its brand identity.

National Identity, Culture, and Economy: The Case of Spain and Catalonia

Spain’s highly diverse linguistic and cultural character was partially recognized in the Spanish Constitution of 1978.⁶⁹ The state’s official and main language is Spanish and the four languages Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Occitan share co-official status in six of the country’s seventeen first-order political and administrative divisions, or “autonomous communities.” This cultural and linguistic diversity comes from the beginnings of Spain’s history as a nation–state and, at the same time, is linked to the Basque and Catalan political nationalist movements, which appeared in the [End Page 822] nineteenth century and which led a nation-building process at a subnational level during the twentieth century.⁷⁰

The Kingdom of Spain was formed in the fifteenth century through the dynastic union of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (the latter consisting of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). However, the two parts continued to retain distinct political and legal structures until the eighteenth century. Until then, the Principality of Catalonia maintained its autonomy and legal identity; it was not until 1714 that the region lost it as a result of the Spanish War of Succession, a long dynastic war across all of Europe that pitted the former territories of the Crown of Aragon against the new Spanish dynasty, the Bourbons of France.⁷¹ The new king of Spain, Philip V, would go on to imitate his grandfather, Louis XIV of France, and his construction of an absolutist state. Catalan political institutions were abolished and Catalan was stripped of its status as an official language. Power was concentrated in Madrid and the institutions, laws and language of Castile were given primacy over all of Spain.⁷² However, in spite of this, Catalan identity—as other identities, such as the Basque or the Galician—has developed in Spain as a project of national modernization within the social, economic, and cultural spheres.⁷³

However, during Spain’s transition to democracy at the end of the 1970s, the Spanish left and the Basque, Galician, and Catalan nationalist minorities reached the political agreement that produced the Estado de las autonomías, the model of state that combined a unitary state structure with a system of decentralized power for Spanish social policy, qualified in the 1980s—although not entirely clearly—as a quasi-federal model.⁷⁴ The Estado model has generally served to facilitate the country’s modernization process and its convergence with Europe, which was achieved with Spain’s entry to the European Community in 1986 and to the Eurozone in 2002.

During much of the twentieth century, large companies have oriented their production toward the Spanish domestic market and therefore have tended to hide their Catalan geographical origins throughout Spain. The relationship between national identity and corporate identity is an understudied phenomenon in Spain. Consider the perfume industry, though, in which some companies have adopted Italian names to avoid being recognized as Catalan brands. However, some export-oriented companies such as the Puig Corporation have [End Page 823] developed successful strategies of associating their brand image with Barcelona and a Mediterranean identity.⁷⁵

Nowadays, at the economic level, the mounting tension between Spain and Catalonia has led Spanish consumers to boycott Catalan products, especially those that are symbolically identifiable with their Catalan territorial origin, such as the sparkling wine cava.⁷⁶ Unfortunately, this allegiance to the Marca España project has also impeded the development of the Marca Catalunya initiative and has caused many businesses to disassociate their products from the Marca Barcelona. The problem here, of course, is that various studies profile Barcelona as one of Spain’s most successfully international place brands and one of the country’s high-tech conference, trade, and arts fair capitals.⁷⁷ Thanks to the combined efforts of its local and regional government agencies (Barcelona’s city hall and the government of Catalonia) with Barcelona’s cultural and economic elite,⁷⁸ the city has seen a steady rate of growth in international tourism,⁷⁹ the formation of an internationally renowned graphic and industrial design cluster,⁸⁰ and, during the 1990s, its consolidation as an automotive design hub for groups such as Italdesign, whose Catalan branch was created in 1992; Renault Design Barcelona, which opened in 2000; and Volvo Group Design Spain, inaugurated in 2001.⁸¹ The installation in 1994 of Volkswagen Group Design Centre Europe in the Spanish coastal town of Sitges, near Barcelona, was also significant. As its managers declared, with this localization they declared themselves to be “soaked with the light and culture of the Mediterranean and of Barcelona.”⁸² To sum up, after twenty years of naming its cars after different Spanish towns and cities, there seems a lost opportunity that SEAT was not finally naming one of them Barcelona. But it did not—so what, we might ask, is the nature of SEAT’s association with Barcelona? What, exactly, is the bone of contention that separates the company from its place of origin? At least in part, the answer lies in [End Page 824] the long and often rocky road that the city and company have shared over the past few decades.

From SEAT’s Beginnings under Dictatorship Rule to the Time of European Convergence

Established in Madrid in 1950, SEAT was the means by which the Franco dictatorship planned to motorize postwar Spain with the manufacture in Barcelona of Italian FIAT cars under license from FIAT. The Spanish state held 51 percent of the new company’s shares through the state-owned industrial holding company the Instituto Nacional de Industria (National Institute of Industry, INI), six Spanish banks together held 42 percent of the shares and FIAT, as the technological partner, held the remaining 7 percent.

The history of the constitution of SEAT shows the difficulties the Francoist regime and Spanish banks had creating a car company in the context of an autarchic strategy. In 1940, the attempt to form a private company called SIAT (Sociedad Ibérica de Automóbiles de Turismo) failed because of the limitations of investment capital and confrontations between factions of the Spanish Franco regime. It was not until ten years later, in 1950, that the state and the private banks managed to form a new company, which did not become operational until 1953. Therefore, the Spanish automotive corporations “lost” ten years in which other European countries had already recovered their automotive industries. Meanwhile, as a public company, SEAT was the denial of two other possible alternatives. One possibility had been to grant a license to General Motors to produce cars in Spain as the American company had offered to the Franco regime. The other possibility had been to foster the emerging pole of the automotive industry in Barcelona. This cluster emerged before the Spanish Civil War and developed in the 1940s thanks to the company EUCORT. However, the Franco regime refused to support the latter possibility, which would have granted more economic power to the Catalan bourgeoisie; the regime preferred to develop more power and a state-owned industry controlled from Madrid, but very dependent on Italian technology.⁸³

The result of authoritarian modernization rather than private sector initiative,⁸⁴ therefore, SEAT’s origins would color the company’s progress during the first four decades of its existence.⁸⁵ [End Page 825] Meanwhile, Barcelona became the location for the company’s manufacturing plant because it was the pole of Spain’s industrialization in the 1950s, and it offered a natural port that was well connected to Italy as well as having good terrestrial communications to Europe. Furthermore, it had a wealth of qualified human resources.⁸⁶ However, this was FIAT’s decision rather than the decision of the regime.⁸⁷ The regime, by contrast, would have preferred the plant to be located in the Madrid⁸⁸ area and continued, for the next thirty years, to consider SEAT as the strategic enterprise of the nation’s industry,⁸⁹ leading Spain toward modernization and offering its growing middle class a product that would bring them closer in economic terms, if not in terms of democratic rights, to the prosperous Europe of les Trente Glorieuses (the thirty years from 1945 to 1975) and would also legitimize the regime itself.⁹⁰ However, the period after the Spanish Civil War until 1959 was characterized by the development of an autarchic economic strategy. In other words, during the 1940s and 1950s the economy suffered recurrent economic crises and shortages.⁹¹ Large Spanish industrial enterprises, especially those aimed at the end consumer, as SEAT was, had development comparable to their counterparts in other European countries, due to insufficient capital for investments and weak domestic demand.⁹² Therefore, it was not until the 1960s that true mass production took off in the Spanish automobile industry.⁹³

The company modeled its name after that of FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), except for two details: First, the Italian Fabbrica [End Page 826] was replaced by the Spanish Sociedad to avoid the negative connotations that would be created by the acronym FEAT (in Spanish, fea means “ugly”); and second, instead of using the word “Barcelona” where FIAT had used “Torino,” the Franco regime maintained the final T of the Italian acronym but as an abbreviation for the Spanish word turismo (within the complete name Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo), thereby avoiding any reference to Barcelona. The Franco regime did not wish to promote the city, because the capital of Catalonia had been a center for anarchist and nationalist movements all through the 1930s; on the contrary, Franco officials felt that the city had to be punished and disciplined for these activities.⁹⁴

Until the 1970s, the regime controlled the SEAT plant in every way, prescribing salaries and prohibiting union activity of any kind; in spite of this, the company found itself in increasing debt,⁹⁵ which finally led FIAT to decline a buyout offer and sell off its company shares in 1975.⁹⁶ SEAT then experienced a few years of uneven success with models of its own design. At this time, the company began to market cars with the names of Spanish cities and abandoned the designation of numbers to its cars, as FIAT continued to do. However, the continuity of the brand was endangered by the industrial decline of Spain after the 1970s and because of the drastic restructuring and privatization of the industrial public sector, enacted by the first socialist government between 1982 and 1986.⁹⁷

At the end of the Franco regime and the beginning of democracy in Spain, strikes by SEAT workers in response to the restructuring were severely repressed with imprisonment and torture of detainees; one worker was even killed during this period.⁹⁸ However, at no time did SEAT criticize its own Francoist origin or the union repression;⁹⁹ its website now reports that SEAT has “an exemplary history.”¹⁰⁰ Moreover, the official SEAT website states that the growth of SEAT was interrupted because of a period of great change, which was “the death [End Page 827] of General Franco in 1975, causing a change in Spanish policy framework.” That is, the death of the dictator was presented by SEAT as a negative factor that disrupted its growth, and the end of dictatorship was presented with the aseptic phrase “change in Spanish policy framework” rather than a recovery of democratic institutions, political freedom, and social rights.

At the international level, in the early 1970s and 1980s SEAT faced the increasing globalization of the automotive market, with many difficulties and questions concerning its future viability as an independent brand.¹⁰¹ It is true that SEAT had exported some cars to Colombia and other countries in Latin America, especially after 1965, taking advantage of Spain’s historical and social ties with Latin American countries. This is consistent with the idea of the Hispanic Community (called Hispanidad)¹⁰² and the foreign policy of the Franco regime.¹⁰³

The export strategy of the late Franco regime had some success: Exports were multiplied by ten between 1969 and 1973, and in 1976 represented 20 percent of production. However, this strategy faced two difficulties. The first was the oil crisis of the 1970s, which led to a sharp fall in exports in 1974. The second was the fact that FIAT was opposed to SEAT exports, which were perceived as direct competition. The decision to export was taken against the FIAT management and explains the rising tensions that ended with the rupture in 1975. However, this strategy was not to bear fruit as expected, and in the early 1980s the weight of international exports to Latin America was marginal and did not contribute in a significant way to the viability of the company in a scenario of economic liberalization.¹⁰⁴ Therefore, in the context of European integration in the late 1970s and early 1980s, SEAT was torn among a tightening of the partnership with FIAT, its independent development as a brand, and the closure of the factory, which would have led to great social unrest and economic depression in the Barcelona metropolitan area.¹⁰⁵

Finally, in 1986, the same year that Spain entered the EU, Volkswagen became the company’s main shareholder and began the process by which SEAT would eventually become part of Volkswagen Group. [End Page 828] Finally, at the end of the 1990s, Volkswagen Group positioned SEAT in its young adult and sports market segment.

The Use of Place Names to Personalize Brand Names

The Selection of Names: uses of Geography and History in a Symbolic Representation of Spain

SEAT’s first models were named according to a numeric code that resembled FIAT’s, but the company subsequently abandoned this system, whose lack of personalization it considered negative. After the break with FIAT in 1981, SEAT began to develop a marketing strategy of its own and gradually instituted the use of Spanish place names to market new models and reflect the company’s independence from the Italian firm. The first SEAT model with the name of a Spanish city was the SEAT Ronda, launched in 1982 and retired in 1986, which was a redesign of the FIAT Ritmo. Since that time, SEAT has produced the Malaga (1985–1991), Marbella (1986–1995) and Cordoba (1995–2009), all Andalusian place names; the Inca (1995–2003), the name of a city in the Balearic Islands; and the Arosa (1997–2004), a city in Galicia. At the time of this writing it still manufactures the Ibiza (1984–present), one of the Balearic Islands; the Toledo (1991–present), a city of Castile–La Mancha; the Leon (from 1999; currently available), a city of Castile and León; and the Altea (2004–present), a city of Valencia. The models that are not named after Spanish towns are the A-segment (city car), Mii (rebadged from the Volkswagen up!), the Exeo (from the Latin exire), and the Alhambra, which takes its name not from a Spanish city, but from the Palace of the Alhambra in Granada, an official UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984.

There is no officially recorded rationale for SEAT’s decision to name its models after Spanish towns, so the banal nationalism behind the decision remains only partially defined and the strategy itself is still a somewhat sensitive issue. We can, however, see the gradual development of a marketing strategy from the naming of one model to the naming of the next. First, all the towns are tourist destinations; SEAT’s strategy has therefore reinforced the nation branding of Spain as a country characterized by its particular culture and traditions, and by its beaches and weather.¹⁰⁶ Marbella is associated with international tourism for the wealthy; Ibiza with international and national tourism for young adults, who prioritize such aspects of their holidaymaking as nightlife; Toledo, Cordoba, and the Alhambra with national and international heritage and cultural tourism; and Altea [End Page 829] mainly with family tourism focused on “sun and sands.” The choice of these names also attracted buyers at a national level by creating an association between the cars and holiday destinations (Altea for domestic holidaymakers or Marbella for international tourists) and pointed buyers toward models according to buyer purchasing power or social class. Thus, the B-segment (supermini) Ibiza was designed to attract a younger buyer who associated the model with a holiday destination for younger tourists, whereas the D-segment (large car) Alhambra is a medium-to-high-cost model designed to attract the customer who would choose a family holiday destination characterized by its national heritage. The only model that does not declare its interests in a customer type is the C-segment (compact car) sports model Leon; however, this name was chosen as much for the name of the animal it denotes (the lion) and the qualities of that animal (mastery, strength, beauty) as the name of the Spanish city.

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Figure 1.

Cities and places whose names have been used for SEAT models.

As shown in the map of Spain in Figure 1, the region that SEAT has used most to name its models is Andalusia (a total of four if we count the Ronda, Malaga, Marbella, and Cordoba, and five if we include the Alhambra). Next comes the Balearic Islands (the Ibiza for the island and town called Eivissa in Catalan, and the Inca) and then Castile and León (the Leon), Castile–La Mancha (the Toledo), Galicia (the Arosa, for the town called Arousa in Galician), and Valencia (the Altea). The company thereby identified itself quite clearly with the Castilian wellspring of Spanish nationalism and recalled the Reconquista of [End Page 830] Spanish territories from Muslim rule (the period of Spanish history spanning the period from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries), which since that time in history has become an essential (and also a fairly complex) feature of Spanish identity.¹⁰⁷

Furthermore, when the place name could have been chosen in the region’s own language (Eivissa, the Catalan word for Ibiza; Arousa, the Galician word for Arosa and also currently that town’s official name), SEAT chose instead to use the Spanish form, thus indicating its mono-cultural and monolinguistic position and Spanish nationalist bias.¹⁰⁸

Some names of cities also invoke places where some of the founding myths of nationalist and conservative historiography have been developed. The conquest of Granada—and its citadel, the Alhambra—by the Catholic kings in 1492 has been considered one of the founding events of Spain and has been used as a symbol of the “Reconquista”—the invasion of Muslim territories within the Iberian Peninsula. Therefore, the Franco regime used this moment and place in the claims regarding the antiquity of the Spanish nation (sic) and the unity of the nation–state, which was really a highly presentist perspective.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, the name of Toledo is associated with the rise of the Kingdom of Castile; the city was the capital of Castile and seat of the royal court between 1480 and 1561.¹¹⁰ Later, during the Franco era, it was turned into a symbol of the courage of fascist troops who, in 1936, after the uprising led by Franco, resisted a siege in the city’s fortress, the Alcazar, against the legitimate army loyal to the democratic institutions of the Second Spanish Republic.¹¹¹ Thus, the names of the car models Alhambra and Toledo are semantically shaped and influenced by their uses of as a myths of nationalist and conservative Spanish historiography.

SEAT, Nationalism and the Construction of the Image of Place of Origin

Since the 1990s, European manufacturers have been gradually losing ground in the highly competitive automotive industry, even in their domestic markets.¹¹⁹ As one of these, SEAT has launched an intense advertising campaign to brake the downward spiral of its domestic market share (SEAT exerted a virtual monopoly in the automotive market in Spain in the 1960s, but, on the contrary, in 2011 had only a 9 percent sales share¹²⁰). One serious stumbling block, though, is that unlike Volkswagen and other automakers, SEAT cannot foster customer loyalty with retro-branding.¹²¹ Instead, it has to cover up its past, not simply because of its origins under a fascist regime (after all, Volkswagen’s similar origins have not stopped its customers from buying VW cars), but because the company cannot offer cars inspired in past SEAT models, whose patents until the 1970s generally belonged to FIAT. In other words, SEAT cannot turn to its advantage the emotional bond that tied various generations of Spaniards to the SEAT 600, the first mass-produced car in Spain, simply because that car was an exact copy of the FIAT 500. FIAT, on the other hand, has successfully retro-branded its FIAT 500 in Spain, obtaining a market share of over 20 precent in that car’s range.¹²² Deprived of this marketing resource, [End Page 833] SEAT has needed to use territorial branding and to fall back even more on banal nationalism¹²³ to create that emotional tie.

Returning to SEAT’s history, the marketing strategy of assigning the names of Spanish cities and towns to its models was put into practice at the end of the 1970s once FIAT was no longer SEAT’s technological partner, but it actually acquired momentum at a later date, when SEAT was bought by Volkswagen Group and ceased to be a Spanish company, properly speaking. The strategy, then, was intended to provide the antidote to the Spanish public’s feelings that there had been a rupture between them and their national company; this was an important element in the media campaigns targeting the domestic market that advertised SEAT’s cars amidst a welter of Spanish nationalist stereotypes, from the bullring to the Arabian horse and flamenco dancing.¹²⁴ Another element that is often used in SEAT advertising, such as the background color or the color of the car in the advertisement, is red. This color evokes the Spanish national character stereotype and some definition of “Spanishness.” Red is the color of the national soccer team—known precisely as la roja—and associated with the temperamental and passionate character of Spaniards.¹²⁵ Unfortunately, the effect of this banal nationalism¹²⁶ and SEAT’s insistence on using such images in its nation branding was that the image of Spain that started to be exported was the image of an underdeveloped country.¹²⁷ [End Page 834]

At the present time, both in the Spanish- and English-language versions of its commercial catalogues, brochures, and web presentations, SEAT has chosen a fairly inclusive company line where national identity is concerned. “We are Spanish and German,” it declares. “We are passionate perfectionists. We are emotional technologists. Everything we know is everything you feel. We give design a purpose. We bring technology to life. We call it Enjoyneering. We are SEAT.”¹²⁸ Spanish emotion and German technology come together in such a way that the Spanish consumer can feel represented; in addition, the “spirit of the Spanish nation” evoked in the product’s vitality allow the domestic customer to accept and enjoy the German technology that raises SEAT head and shoulders above other “fragile” brands. On the one hand, SEAT acknowledges the superior quality of German technology, as validated by both the literature and its increase in sales,¹²⁹ and associates this technology with the Spanish brand to increase that brand’s competitive advantage through effective differentiation strategies. On the other hand, it reinforces Spain’s image abroad as a country that is friendly and attractive (a holiday destination, above all) but not particularly modern or sensible,¹³⁰ and, therefore, increases SEAT’s own dependence on Volkswagen Group. Catalan and Spanish consumers therefore see SEAT as being very closely tied to a banal Spanish nationalist position but also acknowledge the company’s inability to generate a technological project of its own that distinguishes it from the German project and does not bow to the Germans’ superiority, in accordance with German nation branding, a strategy that the experts interviewed for this paper considered to have been imposed by the German company (albeit with little Spanish resistance from SEAT’s top executives). If it did create any discomfort among SEAT’s technical managers in the Martorell plant or in the Catalan industrial design sector, this subordination to a simplifying stereotype did not lead to protest at any clear or organized level.

This dual image of SEAT’s models as “Spanish and German cars” is reproduced in the company’s advertising campaigns, webpages, and brochures of its two closest European neighbors, France and Portugal. However, this is not the case in its German-language copy. There, the emphasis is on how the technical modernity reflected in the symmetry of the chrome logotype combines with the warmth of the color red, which reveals the spirit and passion of Spain;¹³¹ the same text then goes on to describe how this balance between the rational [End Page 835] and emotional is reinforced by the company’s catchline, which is that “Enjoyneering” is synonymous with technological precision and engineering excellence combined with emotional Mediterranean design.¹³² Interestingly, the German version chooses not to present SEAT as a German brand, probably because the description itself (“the spirit and passion…”) would not fit the average German customer’s expectations of advertising copy for the description of a German-made car, and instead puts the emphasis on the innovative aspect of SEAT’s “Mediterranean” design (which, in contrast, does not appear in the Spanish-language copy on SEAT’s Spanish home page, possibly because its presence there might be interpreted as an indirect reference to its actual geographic location in Spain—that is, Barcelona and Catalonia).

It seems that the Volkswagen Group and SEAT are increasingly aware of the power of the brand Barcelona and its image as a cultural and creative city. In an official publication of the Volkswagen Group, the SEAT chapter is dedicated to Barcelona. The presentation states that “SEAT and Barcelona were made for each other” and that “the city is every bit as modern and style-conscious as the brand.”¹³³ In relation to the character of the brand, the publication states that “Barcelona is synonymous with diversity and temperament—just like SEAT,” thus mixing Barcelona with the stereotype of the Spanish character.

However, at no time is SEAT characterized as a Catalan brand or is any reference made to the different culture or language in Catalonia. Again, banal nationalism is mobilized through the appeal to the temperamental character of the brand (in line with Spanish national branding) and, significantly, the chapter is illustrated with a picture of a red car (the “national color”) and closes with the patriotic proclamation: “The Spanish roots of the brand today are more evident than ever.” Therefore, the incipient claim of having its origins in Barcelona collides with the fact that diversity, which the chapter mentions in reference to the city, is also differences of cultural and regional identities, which SEAT strives to hide under a homogeneous Spanish identity.

Conclusions

The place-of-origin factor in the makeup of a product is becoming an increasingly important concern for corporate branding when companies [End Page 836] attempt to maintain their market share or enter new markets.¹³⁴ Greater attention is being shown to consumer perception of a company and its brands and to the consumers’ assessment of a national brand and the way in which they identify themselves with fellow consumers sharing their national identity.¹³⁵ The archetypal industrial product, the car, has become the object of banal nationalism¹³⁶ practised by corporations who use national identity brands to differentiate their products and guarantee their use by certain consumer groups as a means to assess the product.¹³⁷

SEAT is therefore fairly representative of the corporate trend that, in an increasingly competitive market, attempts to use place of origin to differentiate its offerings.¹³⁸ In the automotive industry, SEAT is the only company to have adopted a geographic naming strategy for its models—and to have made such pointed use of its domestic and international tourism (by choosing the names of towns that are clearly recognizable as holiday destinations). Its use of nation-branding images to brand its products is very clear, especially since the time at which it became part of Volkswagen Group.

We can see these processes of integration in a multinational based in Germany as a part of the Europeanization processes. Indeed, we understand that this work shows that the process of European economic integration, at present, does not imply a unification of the national identities. Certainly, Volkswagen Group has developed more complex and hybrid identities of SEAT, combining Spanish and German identity elements. However, this hybridization does not imply the generation of a new coherent identity; on the contrary, it represents a combination of two distinct and stereotyped national identities. Therefore, this strategy fails to create a European brand identity apart from national identities.

We can thus understand this strategy of SEAT as a combination of Spanish nationalism with Germany’s car-making prestige. For this reason, SEAT has also systematically concealed its Catalan origins with banal nationalism to attract its Spanish nationalist consumers and to provide the European market with the image of Spain that, for better or worse, is currently most widespread; it has done this even though it meant acknowledging the German automaker’s seal of [End Page 837] quality in terms of technology and reducing Spain’s own contribution to the Spanish–German equation to the level of a stereotypical image (such as Spain’s “passion” and “lust for life”). On the other hand, by taking sides in this conflict of identities to avoid frightening away one set of customers, SEAT has effectively sacrificed an opportunity to exploit the high profile of the Catalan brand Marca Barcelona and its plural, Mediterranean identity.

This article has shown the scope and limits of the process of Europeanization in the automotive industry.¹³⁹ Even though SEAT has integrated into a European multinational company, Volkswagen Group, this has not led to the creation of a European brand image, but has maintained and enhanced a national image for each brand within the group. Although SEAT started this process of integration in the ends of eighties, Volkswagen Group assigned the Spanish company a brand image inside its own branding policies and positioned SEAT as the cheap alternative to the expensive quality car, the young person’s choice, the fun or “passionate” Spanish alternative to the serious VW, the luxurious Audi or the “smart” and commonsense Skoda. The Spanish company’s cars become associated with leisure activity, with tourism in Altea or Marbella, with partying in Ibiza, with the Andalusian passion of Córdoba or the Alhambra, and with Castilian character of León. A name like Barcelona simply does not fit in this context; this is why SEAT will never market that particular model. At a national level, a SEAT Barcelona could trigger a customer boycott by those whose political position favors Spanish nationalism; at an international level, such a model would simply go against the grain of the identity that has been created of the brand, like a sub-range of the German automaker that might compete with other product lines in the group.

To sum up, SEAT’s strategy shows the continuing importance of the symbolic elements of a brand, especially the development of a narrative regarding the history and identity of the brand linked to territorial identity. This process is especially visible in the Spanish case owing to the existence of a political conflict relating to identity diversity within Spain that is very present today. However, the importance of national identity and regional elements is maintained in spite of an increasingly globalized economy. In this context, companies are not required to adopt an identity (the identity of place of fabrication) but can develop hybrid identities or can strategically construct and use a territorial identity, as in the SEAT case. Volkswagen Group’s overall strategy has clearly chosen to make the SEAT brand a compatible hybrid brand (Spanish and German) and to associate its image with the Spanish brand, with its Spanish nationalist tendencies. [End Page 838]

Through this decision, SEAT has lost the opportunity to associate itself with its geographical origins. The cost of this decision has substantially increased in more recent times, because with this choice SEAT could not benefit the growing prestige of the Marca Barcelona. For example, as suggested by a journalist of the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia,¹⁴⁰ SEAT could place a showroom in the downtown in Passeig de Gràcia—as Renault does in the Champs Elysées, near the buildings of Gaudi and luxury boutiques, to attract millions of national and international visitors and associate its image with the artistic heritage of the city. Therefore, there is no current doubt that the association of the SEAT brand with the Marca Barcelona, a successful urban brand, would mutually benefit both and would change forever the complex relationship that has existed between the company and its city of origin.