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Conclusions
There are great fjords and hot springs in Scandinavia, and those will be great images for our beer, but we don’t want to give the impression that the beer is made out of hot springs that people are swimming in, so we’re still working on the idea. Hot beer, the affjordable beer. (Gordon 1993, 9)
As we see in this parody of beer advertising, nationality often plays an integral part in marketing culture. In the Canadian case, we have seen the extent to which Labatt and Molson fought over what they, as it turned out, rightly believed to be a powerful international symbol—ice. In keeping with similar trends in the tourism industry, Molson thus framed its leisure- or travel-based marketing event as an exclusive and authentic once-in-a-lifetime event surrounded by alcohol, loud music, extreme sports, and the extreme and mythic environment of the Canadian Arctic. Juxtaposed against the tradition of the megaconcert and appropriately dubbed Polarpalooza, the Arctic concert offered a seemingly unattainable goal, that of ‘‘trekking’’—albeit in a plane—to the North Pole, thus perpetuating the thrill of mastering space, nature, and weather.
Through the many sites of solicitation, contest entrants and winners also played an active role in the shift toward target marketing and advertising in increasingly segmented consumer markets. Consumers were enticed to offer personal information in exchange for a chance to win a unique prize, and successful contestants also assisted in the commercial advertisement of the product. And while Molson’s targeting of probable consumers sheds light on a company’s active incorporation of personal information and persons into a marketing apparatus, such beer drinkers and consumers do not appear to have been actively ‘‘disciplined’’ or otherwise subject to the panoptic effects discussed earlier in this book (except perhaps through an increase in junk mail or other solicitations). The Inuit community (and its profile) was, conversely, objectified to authenticate the purity of the ‘‘extreme’’ experience and commodity.As a relatively new and increasingly popular tactic, event marketing thus extends advertising appeals from the banal to the extreme, from the everyday to the once in a lifetime, from the core to the periphery (and back). The search for uncluttered commercial space and time also calls into question the politics of using or deploying profiles in promotional campaigns—in this case, the probable consumer within a promotional event (highlighting national tensions) and the Inuits (and their immediate environment), who do not fit the targeted profile but nonetheless assist in the process of reproducing the market for Molson.
