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To attract consumers ever more distracted and dispersed, and achieve cultural resonance, brand advertisers increasingly speak to discourses of diversity. These representations are often contentious, particularly when they refer to certain aspects of contemporary identity politics. As these controversies play out on social media such as Facebook, they reveal key insights into branding today: the discursive volatility that shadows representations of diversity, asymmetries of communicative power between brands and consumers in online discussions and the extent to which representations of diversity are rendered more or less divisive depending on their proximity to already existing anxieties and/or resistance. This article contextualises this interplay through three Australian brand campaigns from late 2015 to early 2016 and shows how social media further problematise what was an already dynamic, tense and dialectical relationship between consumers and brands.

After the national election win of the Liberal National Coalition in March 1996, Australia experienced more than ten years of contentious public debate. Discussions about Australia's history and future raged with an intensity that both highlighted and problematized the very notion of national identity. During this period, the television commercials for tea brand Bushells paralleled changes in Australia's political culture. In various ways, events of epochal significance, both in Australia and abroad, surfaced in the brand's promotions. These campaigns not only showed the increasing difficulty of picturing Australianness; they also showed that, no matter how fragmented Australian culture became, there remained a lingering bias to certain images, ideals and values. As the Australian electorate became more insular, parochial and conservative, Bushells followed suit. This article considers how Bushells drew symbolic markers from popular culture – the worlds of celebrity, sport, cinema and so on – in a bid to remain relevant, endearing and likeable. It therefore shows that, for a commodity as basic as tea, much can be gleaned about the contemporary political mood through the vernacular rhetoric of television advertising.

Since the early 1990s, numerous corporations have signaled their social responsibility by marketing goods and services in ostensibly ethical terms. This phenomenon rests on the discourse of ethical consumption. The practice is predicated on consumers’ interest in such matters, which are often of a humanitarian or environmentalist nature. In turn, consumers can either reward brands and businesses that are similarly inclined, or punish those that are not. This article considers both the efficacy and politics of such activity through the Green & Black’s brand of organic, Fairtrade chocolate. This was the first Fairtrade product sold in the United Kingdom. The nuanced dynamics of the Green & Black’s brand though underline the necessary compromise of ethical consumption, and reflect a complex grid of contingent ideals and institutionalized hurdles. This article shows how, in articulating a popularly agreeable narrative, the brand’s ethics involves an inherent trade between quantitative gains at a qualitative cost.

The Cloud Juice brand of bottled water parlays the conventional image of a small island – in this case, King Island – into a popularly agreeable narrative of prestige, purity and ecological responsibility. Whilst this is not the first or only brand of bottled water to exploit the exotic appeal of islandness, Cloud Juice has a particular advantage: much like King Island, its appeal rests less on some hackneyed cliche than a shrewd manipulation of small-scale production and big-picture politics. There is a very close fit between the marketing of Cloud Juice as 'gourmet and green' and the growing recognition of King Island as a site of environmental innovation. This article shows that such symmetry bodes well for both branding in general and the branding of bottled water in particular.

In the early 1930s, the Bushells brand of tea faced a market dampened by the grim mood of the Great Depression. In response and in contrast to the images it had pursued just a few years earlier, Bushells integrated a discourse of judicious consumption into its advertising. Sensitive to the atmosphere of caution and restraint, yet also mindful of middle-class aspirations, the brand forged a unique point of difference that would survive the recession. Given tea’s popularity in Australia in this period, and the extent to which Bushells was associated with middle-class tastes, this was an innovative and effective strategy.