This article documents the debates surrounding the policing of the brand “Switzerland.” It demonstrates that debating nation brands—particularly within the framework of a state policy of economic expansion—seems to be about who gets to produce and consume the desires that nations are imagined to stand for as much as about who gets to capitalize on the imagined value that these nations seem to have in specific markets. I also argue that if brands effectively seem to be precious sources of added value that can be exchanged with other forms of capital, not everybody is considered to have equal access to this capital. Because of their capability to produce and naturalize hierarchies between commodities, nation brands—and the entire institutional apparatus within which they are anchored and regulated—have also to be understood as key technologies of a state infrastructure governing the distribution of capital under current capitalistic conditions.

The designation of Catalan culture as guest of honor at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair raised controversy over whether Catalan culture is expressed in one language or two. This was an opportunity for elites to promote Catalan industry internationally but also to compete over visions of Catalonia for domestic political purposes. An analysis of media texts from the controversy shows that national branding emerged as a key trope in the official defense of emphasizing Catalan over Castilian-medium literature. As a discourse sanctioned in the global political economy, branding was strategically revoiced by Catalan officials to parry Castilian critics’ free-marketeer accusations of illiberal essentialist protectionism. This analysis uses Silverstein’s concept of indexical order to argue that branding functioned not only as a sign of Catalonia’s distinctiveness in the global marketplace but also at a higher order as a brand in itself to index the Catalan administration’s cosmopolitan, contemporary, and rationalist character.

Country-of-origin appeals create national identities for brands, thereby exploiting positive country-specific expertise. As a result of such marketing discourses, which utilize essentialized territory-language linkages, such practices become enregistered for consumers, and these linguistic fetishes are available as semiotic resources for the national identity branding of products. Contemporary consumers can play a role in creating, maintaining, and possibly challenging the national identity branding of products. This article reports on a recent campaign by brewer Stella Artois that used French to emphasize the brand’s Belgian origins and on consumers’ disputing this usage in a discussion of the campaign on YouTube. The case illustrates the stability of the semiotic resources of national identity branding and who is and is not allowed to use them and for which purposes. This becomes apparent when transgressing these unwritten rules is sanctioned by the audience for the ad, who seek restoration of predictability and stability in relation to borders and branding.

This article analyzes the forms of metasemiotic regimentation that are inherent to any nation-branding project and examines their implications for the organization of publics and governance. Focusing on a state-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in the Republic of Macedonia, the article argues that nation-branding strategies are best understood as interventions within and across public spheres. As illustrated in the article, the nation-branding project that developed around Skopje 2014—a spectacular urban renovation plan that transformed Macedonia’s capital—included both a public relations effort that targeted several external publics and also a campaign to shape how Macedonia was represented internal to the Macedonian public sphere. This inward-facing aspect of nation branding in Macedonia manifested through metapragmatic discourses that ascribed meaning to public speech and conduct based on their imagined impact on the nation-branding project. In analyzing how government-produced media sought to interpellate Macedonians as responsible for “living the brand,” the article interrogates how logics of nation branding can organize new demands on how and to whom one performs national identity and argues that such coordinated efforts to regulate public communication constitute a wider program of economic and social governance that can be glossed as a “nation brand regime.”

This article analyzes how under conditions of crisis certain social actors shift the metasemiotic frames through which minority languages may be approached in order to suit place-branding purposes and to make them more widely accessible for business usage. In the cases we investigate in Shetland and Western Ireland, the new meanings associated with language are connected with how crises are framed and constructed in discourse. We thus examine two types of crises in which certain social actors view language as part of the solution to ward off specific trouble: economic recession (Ireland) and depopulation (Shetland). With the branding potential of these languages then positioned as part of the solutions to “crises,” new indexical alignments exemplify the neoliberal metasemiotic framework through which all elements of social and cultural life may be strategically made marketable—in this case on the intra- and international markets on which people themselves are vied for.

In 2007, Belfast City Council contracted with a London-based branding consultancy to develop a new brand identity for the city. The result was a new logo (a heart-shaped letter B), a bespoke typeface, and a set of brand guidelines designed to reflect “Belfast’s coming of age, the turning of a new page and the new shared enthusiasm which is palpable to all those who experience the city.” A key element of the rebranding was an official palette of sixteen colors to be deployed in association with the logo. Nonprimary hues with low saturation predominate in the new color scheme, which is overlaid upon a complex preexisting system of vivid sectarian color contrasts that mark, among other things, the partitioning of space in a “divided city.” Drawing on recent work in the semiotic anthropology of branding, the article shows that the rebranding of Belfast is part of a larger effort to frame recent histories of ethno-sectarian conflict in terms of “cultural” diversity.

The regional government of Alsace, France, first commissioned the development of a regional brand in 2010 with the hopes of enhancing the region’s presence in the European and international market. Yet drawing on contentious histories and communities in a region historically beset by perceived linguistic, national, and cultural difference, the brand became a platform through which to resolve and promote particular versions of historical conflict. This article traces the semiotic labor involved in one such production of ambivalent identity, which took the form of the so-called Alsatian oxymoron. Through the Alsatian oxymoron, meant to signify historical Alsatian duality, consumers, tourists, and even Alsatian citizens themselves were invited to reencounter Alsace as a place of attractive ambiguity, exotic difference, and irreducible complexity. This essay tracks this brand labor, seeking to reveal the semiotic strategies involved in such production. Particularly, I rely on Susan Gal’s (2012) formulation of axes of differentiation to elucidate the ways in which the Alsatian oxymoron both draws on and reconfigures historical processes of differentiation in Alsace.