Nation branding and the social imaginary of participation: An exploratory study of the Swedish Number campaign

Media technology and nation branding

In the early 21st century, national identity appears to be undergoing a relocation from the realm of legal constitutions to that of marketing logic, via the vehicle of the nation brand (Kaneva, 2011a). The idea that nation brands can extend and empower citizen participation in the assertion of national identity is integral to their logic. Aronczyk (2008: 54) argues that in order for the brand to be enacted and ‘lived’, ‘the media of the message is effectively the citizens themselves’. Volcic and Andrejevic (2011) take the 2010 campaign ‘Making the case for Israel’ as an example of this particular logic. The aim of the campaign was to improve Israel’s international image by means of enlisting Israelis to enact the brand identity abroad, to become a medium for the Israeli brand image. Such strategies rely on the participatory affordances of media technologies in their campaign designs, which creates a platform of interactivity and user-generated content centred on tropes of the national. Media technologies facilitate the circulation of nation brand tropes and become part and parcel of the toolset through which people and organisations enact national identity. Lury (2004: 165), for instance, argues that the brand has become what Manovich (2001) calls a new media object, which he defines as modular (i.e. comprising samples or parts), automated, variable (i.e. malleable) and as able to transcode (i.e. translate something into another format). Lury (2004) writes that the brand ‘is not simply an object of the media, or simply a media processor, it is a media synthesiser and media manipulator’ (p. 158). The successful circulation of nation brands is thus contingent on their capacity to take on properties of media objects in a digitised, convergence culture (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015; Jenkins, 2006).

The aim of this article is to unpack key themes in the rearticulation of nation brand campaign assets by sub-state actors, by focusing on the role of media technologies in circulating nationalist tropes and more particularly on the concept of the nation brand as a platform for transmedia engagement. The research questions raised here concern the integration of media technologies and nation branding in the (re-)enactment of national identity (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015). This study follows the critical tradition of nation branding research, which is not concerned with ‘advancing a theory of nation branding that could inform its applied practice’, but rather focuses on questions of power, identity, nationhood and neo-liberalism (Kaneva, 2011a: 127; Aronczyk, 2013). At times, such studies assume that the outputs of nation branding campaigns – traditionally brochures, PowerPoints and strategy documents – ‘do’ something to national identity (cf. Pamment, 2013a). On the contrary, we argue that the role of media technologies as ambiguous agents in the mediation of nation brands – and in particular the ways in which ‘brand publics’ (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016) rearticulate and co-create tropes from these campaigns – requires further attention (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015).

The argument made here draws on a study conducted in 2016 of the campaign the Swedish Number. In this initiative, a smartphone app was used to enable international citizens to call ‘the Swedish telephone number’ and be connected to a random individual living in Sweden. Citizen participation was at the core of the initiative: regular people based in Sweden were given the opportunity to talk freely with regular people in other countries in order to answer any questions they might have about visiting the country. Sweden’s Prime Minister even answered one of the calls. Yet, despite the apparent official and nationalistic overtones of the campaign, it was in fact a private endeavour by a tourism association that simply mimicked and reproduced tropes from the official Swedish Brand. Nearly 200,000 individual conversations may be reduced to an average call length of little more than 2.5 minutes, which suggests that much of the participation did not go beyond the realm of platitudes and novelty. On the contrary, it appears to have been the public relations (PR) value of the exercise – the value of the publicity and buzz generated by the existence of the initiative to its organisers – that had the greatest impact. Therefore, this combination of citizen engagement and publicity may be considered to reveal some of the mechanisms by which nationalist tropes generated by nation brands circulate via media technologies.

This article proceeds through five main sections, which together analyse the circulation of nation brand values through media technologies and brand publics. The first section covers recent academic debates on the participatory aspects of nation brands. Following that, Brand Sweden is introduced in order to establish how its design and assets have informed the Swedish Number campaign. The third section analyses the interplay between the brand value of authenticity, and the use of media technologies to support authentic-seeming public participation. The article then considers the publicity aspects of the campaign and argues that publicity was in essence the main focus and success of this particular initiative. Finally, the analysis considers some of the domestic consequences of the ways in which the campaign circulates nationalist tropes, including a treatment of the role of ‘Sweden-haters’ in contrast to the aims of the initiative. A short conclusion then follows.

In the course of this study, different sources of empirical material were collected and analysed, including promotional campaign materials, blog texts, newspaper articles and YouTube videos of bloggers and celebrities calling the Swedish Number. Key figures in the campaign were mapped, and in-depth interviews were conducted with the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Swedish tourism association and a brand strategist at Sweden’s official travel and tourism organisation Visit Sweden. The aim in the empirical analysis of the campaign was to capture how nationalist tropes were mobilised to create publicity and citizen engagement.

The Swedish Number offers a unique contribution to nation branding debates because it fits within a pattern of nation branding behaviour while not being a nation brand. In other words, it prompts a rethink of some of the larger trends in nation branding, in terms of the broader rearticulation of strategies, symbols and tropes established within nation brands in other kinds of nongovernmental and commercial branding campaigns. While critically informed research in nation branding has mostly focused on the accession of parts of post-Soviet, Central and Eastern Europe to the European Union (Jansen, 2008; Kaneva, 2011a, 2011b; Kennedy and Lucas, 2005; Van Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Van Ham, 2002; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011b), Sweden provides a valuable example because it is neither a neoliberal military power (such as recent studies of nation branding in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel) nor a transitional market state (such as recent studies in post-Soviet Europe) but is rather a stable social democracy. This study confirms that Brand Sweden has indeed had an impact on how commercial interests view national identity resources and employ them in the service of economic objectives. The case study demonstrates some of the ways in which the intersection of media technologies and nation brands is influencing identity politics via the leveraging of public participation, vast publicity drives via media technologies and the mimicry and rearticulation of brand resources established at the national level.

Theoretical framework

Recent critical scholarship on nation brands has led to new conceptualisations of the way brands work and how they create value for organisations. Traditional models of brand management – on which the techno-economic and political approaches to nation branding are based (Kaneva, 2011a) – have recently been reconsidered in relation to the Post-Fordist mode of production and developments in media technology. Within the field of place branding, Volcic and Andrejevic (2011) suggest that citizen involvement in the co-creation of nation branding campaign content constitutes a form of immaterial labour. This converges with a neoliberal form of governmentality, which ‘invite[s] the populace to identify its own interests with active participation in building and promoting a national brand identity’ (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011: 602; cf. Arvidsson, 2006). In our chosen case study, public participation is a key resource in motivating the campaign’s purpose and value to its organisers.

These autonomous forms of immaterial labour are often characterised by the ability to produce a common – a community, a social relation, identity, shared experiences and meanings (Arvidsson, 2006). While the informational content of the commodity involves changes in workers’ labour processes and the increased use of computers and information technology, the cultural content of the commodity refers to social activities that involve cultural norms, standards and tastes, including the ability to produce social relationships and communities around brands. Most notable in this strand of research is the work of Arvidsson (2006), which questions how brands configure common communicative spaces in order to create value. Arvidsson argues that the techniques of brand management enable consumption to function as an immaterial labour, because they appropriate local use-values and incorporate them into a general value form, that is to say, capital. The brand thrives on everyday social practices and user-created content. As has been highlighted by Bolin and Ståhlberg (2015), there has been a tendency in nation branding research to emphasise the content of the brand at the expense of the media technologies through which it circulates; an important aspect of the Swedish Number campaign that we are keen to consider in greater detail.

Arvidsson and Caliandro (2016) recently developed similar reasoning in relation to social media, by proposing that brand publicity replaces brand identity as a core value in consumer cultures relying on social media technologies. They argue that the value of brands is connected to their capacity to mediate and give publicity to different aspects of identity. The brand functions as a medium for publicity created through buzz, opinions and comments, which shape a public imaginary. The brand message must, so to speak, be translated into a general circulation of messages and content that can be shared, liked and clicked. The significance of a message is based on its contribution to an already existing flow of opinions, comments and ideas and the extent to which it can be repeated, reproduced and forwarded. Following this line of reasoning, brands are understood as deriving value from brand publics, which refers to looser constellations that do not require interaction among members, or ‘organised media spaces kept together by a continuity of practices of mediation’ (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016: 4). The concept of the brand public is modelled on Andersons’ (1983) conceptualisation of the nation as an ‘imagined political community’ by people united by a shared image of their communion (p. 5), which may seem particularly salient to the logic of nation branding. It is important, however, to underscore that there is a difference between national identity and the identity of the nation brand. While national identity is socially constructed over time by many different historical events and actors, PR consultants and brand management experts craft the nation’s brand identity for commercial purposes (Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016). Thus, in this context, brand publics should be understood as encapsulating imaginaries of Sweden as a particular nation brand, rather than Swedish nationhood.

The concept of brand publics converges with research into participatory cultures (cf. Jenkins et al., 2013; Jenkins, 2006). Studies within this research tradition have explored the ways in which public imaginaries are increasingly shaped by transmedia engagement. Transmedia engagement goes beyond the notion of a single content adapted from one media format to another, to interpret how knowledge ‘unfolds across multiple medial platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’ (Jenkins, 2006: 97–98). Transmedia engagement is particularly tailored to the phenomenon of fan collaboration and co-created content, which is useful for understanding how public imaginaries and nation brands are mutually shaped and reshaped. The contention that public participation in brands constitutes a form of free labour (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011) meets with the burgeoning trend of participatory cultures, in which ‘each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives’ (Jenkins, 2006: 3–4). In other words, participation-as-free-labour is simultaneously a cathartic means of processing the mediated world. It is the contention of this article that such an approach may be useful to theorise the role of media in nation branding and particularly how the assets created by nation brand platforms become circulated and rearticulated by brand publics through media technologies (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015; Pamment, 2015).

Brand Sweden

The emergence of this peculiarly late 20th-century and early 21st-century adaptation of nationalism’s tropes has been well storied. Drawing on a body of research into culture and economic development throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Aronczyk (2013: 34–61) observes a distinct trajectory towards calculating the competitive value of culture and of developing the means to measure, evaluate and manage a nation’s attractiveness to foreign investors. In the late 1990s, incubated by the image-conscious politics of the Blair Government in the United Kingdom, the term ‘nation branding’ encapsulated these efforts (Anholt, 1998; Pamment, 2016a). The Nordic countries played close attention to these developments, and the Swedish Institute, under Göran Persson’s left-of-centre government, first invited British consultants to help shape their outward image towards the end of its mandate (Pamment, 2016b; Valaskivi, 2016b). Much of the brand’s initial justification drew on Sweden’s rapid modernisation under the principles of social democracy:

In the 20^th century, Sweden underwent a rapid social transformation – from an agricultural society to an industrial society, from an industrial society to an information and knowledge society. This took place without revolutions, through steady movement. Development has meant a continually rising standard of living. (Swedish Institute, 2008: 15)

Sweden formally launched its nation brand in 2007, defining itself as a ‘progressive, open country … that balances development with people’s needs and environmental considerations’ (Swedish Institute, 2008: 6). The value-based brand keywords of progressive, open, authentic, caring and innovation have been established as the cornerstone of the outward face of Sweden, as coordinated by the Council for the Promotion of Sweden Abroad. ¹ Sweden’s journey from an impoverished nation of émigrés in the late 19th century to that of a technologically advanced, exporting nation capable of punching above its weight on the international stage has been supported by a strong international reputation for neutrality and social equality (Lundberg, 2005). Much of the focus of Sweden’s formal nation branding strategy, as in other countries, has, therefore, been on crystallising this kind of nationalistic storytelling and persuading its citizens not just to buy-in to the basic ideas (or ‘core values’) but to actively and deliberately choose to represent them:

Each Swede who travels abroad and each foreigner who visits our country is, to some extent, an ambassador for Sweden … To facilitate this task for our ‘ambassadors abroad’, the Swedish Institute places its resources at their disposal. (Swedish Institute 2006: 8)

This approach to the ‘common brand platform’ has been aimed at domestic audiences as much as it has been targeted at foreigners (Pamment, 2013b). The branding has attempted to summarise Swedish qualities and create consensus around them, so that citizens can live and enact them. In this sense, the concept behind the Swedish Number neatly fits within a decade-long concept of public participation in the nation brand. Corporations such as Ikea, Volvo and H&M have been quick to assimilate aspects of Brand Sweden into their own marketing. Ikea, for example, drapes its warehouses in the blue and yellow of Sweden’s flag, while its handbooks for new employees now utilise the core values developed by the Swedish Institute as a way of introducing staff to Swedish national values. Volvo’s 2014 advertising campaign Made by Sweden featured among others Zlatan Ibrahimović reading a verse of the Swedish national anthem. Provenance, identified by Simon Anholt (1998) as a mysterious factor that can add or detract from a commercial brand’s value, has clearly become a selling point for contemporary Swedish corporations during Brand Sweden’s heyday. ²

Finding the real Sweden

Between April and June 2016, the Swedish Tourist Association (STF, 2016) launched the Swedish Number campaign. During this period, international callers could dial the telephone number +46,771,793,336 and be connected to one of 32,146 brand ambassadors who had volunteered to field questions about Sweden via a smartphone app. The initial objectives of 3000 brand ambassadors fielding 30,000 calls were met within 3 days. During the 79 days, the campaign was active, and over 190,000 calls were made totalling one full year of conversations. The STF described the process as ‘personal meetings through something as traditional and analogue as the humble telephone, where each telephone call could offer a unique picture of Sweden’. The open, honest – but also nationalistic – participation of regular Swedes was integral to the project. The General Secretary and CEO of the STF claimed that the campaign aimed to

Show the real Sweden – a unique country worth visiting with the right of public access, sustainable tourism, and a rich cultural heritage. With The Swedish Number, our goal is to create more pride and knowledge about Sweden, both nationally and internationally. (The Swedish Number, 2016)

In line with the authentic and open components of Brand Sweden, the STF wanted to use technology to offer ‘a different view [of Sweden] – more genuine and authentic – than tourists usually get to see’ (SVD, 2016). In this regard, the STF was well placed. Created in 1885 as a non-profit association of hoteliers and hostel-owners particularly in remote regions of Sweden, an STF representative observed a series of positive interactions between Brand Sweden and the STF’s own brand:

our brand disappears in the shadow of the Swedish nation brand, but I consider that to be a minor issue since Sweden is so close to us and represents values such as accessibility, friendliness, honesty, democracy that we also want to be associated with. (STF, personal interview)

He also noted that a focus on brand values has become a major trend in destination branding over the past few years:

One of the primary reasons today for visiting a country is because you are curious about the national culture and its authenticity and not so much the good food, lingonberries and beautiful beaches. It is interesting how the classical destination branding strategies have been absorbed by nation branding in the sense that it is the values of the national culture that makes a country worth visiting. For example, Stockholm is marketed through parental leave for fathers. The discussion about tourism often misses that what drives tourism is values and culture. Human community and attributes, value systems, and freedom of speech make Sweden a country worth visiting. (STF, personal interview)

Since the creation and launch of Brand Sweden in 2007, technological solutions to public participation have been an ongoing theme of Swedish efforts to assert a national brand identity. Many high-profile Swedish nation branding initiatives have emphasised a techno-participatory dimension under the themes of progressiveness, authenticity and openness: a series of 2007/2008 events joined ravers in Stockholm with VIP guests at the Swedish Embassy to the United States represented as avatars on giant screens (Pamment, 2013b: 117), while a virtual embassy to Second Life known as the Second House of Sweden was created in 2007 (Bengtsson, 2011; Pamment, 2011). More recently, the Curators of Sweden project launched in 2011 maintains a Swedish Twitter account run by a different member of the public on a weekly basis (Christensen, 2013). Self-characterised as ‘the world’s most democratic Twitter account’, the Curators project uses the official-sounding @Sweden Twitter handle to lend an authentic voice to national promotion. Media technologies, authenticity and citizen participation go hand in hand.

The Swedish Number campaign follows in this trend of using so-called liberation technologies to promote Sweden’s international profile. Citing Diamond (2010: 70), Christensen (2013) defines liberation technologies as ‘any form of information and communication technology that can expand political, social, and economic freedom’ (pp. 34–35). He particularly refers to digital communications involving smartphone apps and social media, due to their participatory affordances. As the STF claimed during the launch period, ‘Instead of an advertising campaign telling you what you should experience, we allow the Swedish people to themselves explain what’s good about Sweden’ (SVD, 2016). The Swedish Number (2016) was from its inception framed as a technological solution to public participation; the number gives ‘all citizens a fair chance to express themselves’ in line with Sweden’s historical commitment to freedom of speech:

250 years ago, in 1766, Sweden became the first country in the world to introduce a constitutional law to abolish censorship. To honour this anniversary, Sweden is now the first country in the world to introduce its own phone number. Call today and get connected to a random Swede, anywhere in Sweden and talk about anything you want.

Striking in this campaign blurb is the mimicry of official nation branding themes and techniques. During 2016, the Swedish Foreign Ministry and other government departments ran an international advocacy campaign to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Freedom of the Press Act. Besides promoting the Swedish model, the campaign was used by diplomats as a pretext to raise issues of censorship in countries with limited press freedom. The Swedish Number campaign in essence mimicked a governmental initiative at the sub-state level, drawing on similar strategies to official nation branding including the choice of topic, brand assets, participatory approach to technology and the methods of generating international publicity.

In mimicry, historical situations – real or imagined – are reiterated and transformed. Thus, mimicry changes that which it imitates; in this case, the life-or-death matter of freedom of speech was transformed into a novelty aimed at making holiday planning slightly easier (Styhre, 2008). Advertising agency Ingo originally pitched the idea Call Sweden to Visit Sweden, but it was turned down due to concerns about costs and the potential risks of where the conversations might lead. The STF were then approached with a full concept and case video, and the idea of ‘real people telling real people about Sweden’ resonated with their strategy. Part of the plan was, therefore, that the STF’s members would to some extent comprise the volunteers fielding questions: ‘I felt good about it because we had so much knowledge about Sweden to convey and we wanted to use the competence of our members in the campaign. Our mission is to get people to discover Sweden’ (STF, personal interview). As authentic and open as the campaign may have been, it in many respects mimicked national interests and rearticulated them through the prism of the STF’s goals and leveraged its active membership as a the basis for what was not quite a ‘random’ brand public.

Publicity that cannot be bought

An attention-grabbing approach to nation branding appears to have motivated Brand Sweden since its origins. Previous research has, for example, observed that the Second House of Sweden received just 300–400 visits per day at its peak out of an estimated group of 1 million Second Life users, of which nearly half were Swedes rather than the envisaged target group of foreign citizens. However, in publicity terms, the initiative generated 1000 press articles in 42 countries, worth an equivalent of 5.4 million SEK in advertising space (Pamment, 2013b: 122–123). This was considered a resounding success, yet produced few determinable results in terms of concrete political or cultural outcomes. In this sense, the activity was of secondary value compared to the media attention generated around the activity. The association of Sweden with high-tech, innovative technologies seems to act both as a brand value and as a goal in its own right, at least at the level of the official nation brands (Pamment, 2013b).

Similarly, the average length of a phone call to the Swedish Number was just 2 minutes 41 seconds, which suggests that the actual participatory potential was rather limited. In media terms, the campaign featured widely in the Atlantic, Guardian, CNN, vlogs, podcasts, television programmes as well as virally through the major social media platforms. Both the Swedish Prime Minister and the leader for the opposition were filmed answering calls. Like the @Sweden project, it received international attention, including from President Obama who mentioned the campaign in a speech when visiting the Nordic countries in May 2016. The viral nature of the campaign was ‘professionally orchestrated’ by PR consultants based in North America: Gray and Cohne & Wolfe (STF, personal interview). The STF CEO’s participation on the Swedish morning chat show Goodmorning Sweden was complemented by press releases and direct outreach to encourage influential figures to lend their support:

We initially tried to convince ministers in the Swedish government to participate, but they were hesitant. After a few weeks they came to us and asked to participate in the campaign. The prime minister, celebrities and influencers turned us down at first, but later signed up when the campaign went viral. (STF, personal interview)

The snowball effect created the kind of attention that is impossible to buy. It was common to call the number on talk shows (e.g. CNN, BBC), and hence, the initiative rapidly turned into a media circus. This made it, according to the STF leadership, an ‘ideal campaign’. On one hand, there were volunteers who wanted to tell a story, and, on the other hand, there were those who wanted to ask questions, learn and interact; in other words, the brand public was ready to transform the initiative into trans-mediated hype. Thus, ‘receivers and callers fill it [the campaign] with content’. The extent to which this strategy was effective in generating publicity cannot be understated. The STF calculated the advertising value equivalence of the campaign at 1263 billion SEK (US$135 billion) including a total of 9324 billion impressions; that is to say more than one impression for every living person on the planet. Such remarkable metrics clearly place the actual telephone calls – those 2:41-minute conversations – in the shadow of the publicity. Hence, it may be argued that assets shaped for nation branding may be readily rearticulated and mimicked by commercial interests and that media engagement strategies are integral to the successful cultural circulation of these values.

The domestic dimension

As was observed in earlier studies of Brand Sweden, Swedes themselves were a major target of the campaign. The initiative and its close association with the Swedish national brand were envisaged as a means of invigorating and activating the STF membership, which had grown by 25% by the end of the campaign. In fact, the initial intention was for the majority of volunteers who answered calls to be STF members, and the expectation was that many callers would be Swedes who might be persuaded to take a holiday in Sweden or ex-pat Swedes. As the campaign snowballed and its principles increasingly aligned with international brand publics and the core values of the nation brand, it appears that the STF was able to leverage the nation brand platform to maximise exposure internationally:

Our primary target groups are within Sweden, but we thought it would be exciting to reach an international audience and the Swedes that work and live abroad. I also saw this as a possibility to build pride in our country and attract interest to our organisation. Most Swedes enjoy telling about Sweden, but of course there are those who have stated that they dislike Sweden – I hate Sweden – and then they hang up, but that becomes humorous in a way. (STF, personal interview)

This aspect of the campaign is underscored by the app’s intended target groups. The initial focus on domestic audiences was coupled with marketing aimed at the 10 largest foreign markets, but international interest in the campaign exceeded all expectations. In total, people based in 186 countries dialled the number. However, the citizens of just 10 countries were able to make their calls at a local rate. ³ Others had to pay the full cost of the call. The STF is an independent tourist association with 300,000 members and around 350 tourist properties around Sweden, and the 10 selected target markets were based in part around an analysis of potential tourist expenditure, and in part on the expense of securing telephone contracts for the duration of the campaign in different markets. Hence, for all the high-minded associations with freedom of speech and participation, the aim was not to empower citizens of developing or non-democratic countries through this liberation technology but simply to enable citizens within key (and affordable) markets to ask any questions they might have about visiting Sweden and to ensure that Swedish tourism received maximum publicity.

Much of the public debate around the Swedish Number was arranged in a polemic way around either affirmative or critical contributions. Affirmative contributions followed the ideal line of reasoning proposed both by the campaign and Brand Sweden, mainly reiterating stereotypes of the country. Critical contributions tended to criticise Swedish implementation of the law and particularly the media for limiting freedom of speech due to Sweden’s consensus culture (see, for example, Ehn et al., 1993). The critical contributions received immediate responses by the STF and were spun into positives. For example, a representative of STF enthusiastically stated that critical contributions were exemplars of Swedish freedom of speech. At times, they were also singled out as parenthetical comments made by ‘Sweden-haters’ (Färlin, 2016). Critical contributions thus endorsed and reproduced the objectives of the campaign, at the same time as potential opportunities to challenge or reconfigure the values of the nation brand were minimised.

Much of the press attention in Sweden was directed towards those brand ambassadors who responded to the task in a non-conformist manner. Critics argued that trolls and Sweden-haters hijacked the Swedish Number in order to subvert the initiative. For example, a well-known Swedish journalist who phoned in several times pretending to be a foreigner claims to have been connected to people who expressed negative views. Sweden-haters were also a popular theme in an influential podcast. For example, one Sweden-hater claimed, ‘It is not allowed to express one’s opinion in Sweden. You can only say things that have been approved by the government, otherwise you lose your job. It is horrible. There is no freedom of speech here’ (Färlin, 2016). However, because of the sheer number of calls and the breadth of volunteers, it was not possible for one group or perspective to dominate the project. On the contrary, the STF’s CEO claimed, ‘A constant worry was – but what if a Sweden democrat ⁴ answers the phone. But one the other hand, if you come here as a tourist you are likely to meet them anyway’.

Conclusion

The Swedish Number campaign relied on a developing heritage of Swedish nation branding initiatives. Its modus operandi was to use media technologies to encourage citizen participation, primarily for the purpose of generating publicity. The participation model fits within what Volcic and Andrejevic (2011) have defined as a form of free labour, in the sense that citizens volunteered their time as labour that produces content for the brand. Yet, we suggest that participation in these kinds of exercises could also act as a means to make sense of national communities, as it provides an arena (or playground) for engaging with nationalist tropes, values and identities (Jenkins, 2006). When signing up as brand ambassadors, individuals are offered the opportunity to ‘answer for Sweden’ (The Swedish Number, 2016, emphasis added). Of course, this is merely a layer of mimicry of the kinds of national representation enacted by royalty, politicians and diplomats, drawing on a simplified version of the national interest codified within the nation brand.

This engagement strategy fits with previous activities conducted in support of Brand Sweden at the level of official government departments, yet was the work of an independent association of tourism actors. Indeed, initially, the volunteers comprising a major part of the brand public were expected to come from the STF’s membership rather than the population at large, and the campaign justification mimicked national efforts to leverage the anniversary of the Freedom of the Press Act for diplomatic ends. Hence, it could be said to mimic and reproduce aspects of the Swedish nation brand, drawing on nationalism to provoke citizen engagement in the service of a narrow set of economic interests. The notion of mimicry is an important point, particularly when considering nation brands as a space for symbolic ‘play’ with artificial national values. Participants get the chance to mimic official representatives of the state through a set of symbolic resources that are of themselves little more than mimicry of the national character and interest.

It is also clear that the campaign was more than the sum of 200,000 telephone conversations; indeed, the ways in which the story of those conversations circulated was intrinsic to the success of the campaign. Media technologies were central to the circulation of knowledge about the campaign, with social media platforms and traditional broadcasting media functioning as actors in the rearticulation of brand assets (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015). The coordinated circulation of information under conventional PR management encompasses familiar transmedia engagement strategies such as celebrity endorsements, posts tailored to different media affordances and elements of co-creation and lifestyle choices among brand publics (Arvidsson and Caliandro, 2016; Jenkins, 2006; Lury, 2004; Pamment, 2015). While this does not prove that nation brands necessarily reconfigure national identity in the service of neoliberal forces (cf. Aronczyk, 2013; Kaneva, 2011a), it does help to further understand the role media technologies play in the circulation and rearticulation of tropes, symbols and values asserted in nation brands and hence begin to unpack the participatory modalities of nation brands as cultural commodities.