3.4 Authenticity and the consumers’ gaze

In the Brand Strategy, benefits of Bon Appétit were defined as a set of ‘promises’ that would be communicated to the consumer. ‘Functional promises’ included a wide selection of dishes and portion sizes, time saving, convenience and simplicity in the sense that the dishes would not require any skills to prepare. ‘Emotional promises’ were defined as an experience of a tasty meal, a healthy convenient food, and a meal that would provide more time for other activities. In addition, the product range would be slightly less expensive than main competitors.

The Bon Appétit case illustrates the complex set of interrelations between the material and the symbolic properties of food products. Sometimes these links are merely accidental, such as, for instance, when a sudden material problem related to a specific product forced Henrik to withhold the testimonial with Greta Granfoss for about half a year, thereby causing a far more male-oriented promotion of the product range than was originally intended.

At other times, the interrelations are due to a more consistent interplay, such as when certain material advantages of a product such as pasta contribute to the Italian image of the Bon Appétit product range, or when the need to adapt the products to requirements of mass-manufacture contributes to a growth of ‘exotic’ product varieties at the expense of the more familiar ones. The relation between the material content of the product and its visual and symbolic properties may also be analyzed in relation to claims of authenticity, a topic which seems to pervade marketing in relation to both product development and advertising. In his attempt to construct a cultural theory of modernity of the Western world introduces the concept of ‘modern inwardness’ as a descriptive feature.

Modern inwardness refers to an underlying opposition in our languages of self-understanding between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside,’ in which thoughts and feelings are thought of as somehow resting inside, awaiting the development which will manifest them in the public world. These aspects of Western modernity are relevant to an analysis of food products in the making. To the extent that a product manager succeeds in establishing a brand product, the product’s image or ‘personality’ ought to reflect some ‘inner core’ of the product. However, the awareness among product managers with regard to the arbitrariness of the relation between cultural categories and their material representation, the realization of such coherence is somewhat problematic.

On the one hand, product managers may literally pick and choose among a wide range of cultural idioms in order to construct a distinct brand. Through this process they both utilize and contribute to an arbitrariness characterizing the relationship between a signifier and its sign in modern marketing.

On the other hand, in their efforts to establish brand products, they try to construct products with an image that is coherent and stable over time: an image which reflects some kind of authentic character of the product. Through these interrelated processes, product managers evoke a conceptual framework of Western modernity according to which the ‘true’ core resides on the inside. Similarly, as consumers, may conceive products as more or less authentic representations of whatever they claim to portray, be it ‘nature,’ ‘Italy’ or typically ‘Norwegian cuisine.’ Particularly with regard to claims of foreign origin, a wide range of products are, in fact, ‘Italian’; yet at the same time some of them are more ‘Italian’ than others. Thus, the competition in the market place is partly structured in terms of another contest in which different products are ranked according to their ability to represent authentically what they claim to represent.

However, the anticipation of consumers’ gaze provides some restrictions. Exotic food from New Guinea, or ‘strange’ food from more familiar places, such as Deutsche Knödeln, were not appropriated in the routinization of the exotic, in spite of their authentic and exotic potential. This is because product managers knew that the ‘authentic’ is only valuable in so far as it is made comparable within a common format, and this common format is defined by the gaze of Norwegian consumers. Thus, when Henrik constructed the Bon Appétit product range, he acted in accordance with an immediate and general knowledge of Norwegian consumers. At the same time, he demonstrated that the quest for authenticity had its limits. It was precisely this awareness, and the disengaged instrumentality with which he selected certain properties, and discarded others, that enabled him to construct and market products that ‘met the desired specifications.’