A identidade nacional na publicidade : as Havaianas e o Brasil.

Abstract

This work proposes to answer the following question: how advertising builds the cultural identities in their content? Through the texts of British cultural studies theorists, as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, that debating culture in contemporary society, we began a journey through the main reflections about cultural background of people. The understanding of process of globalization, and its consequences on society, enabled us to elucidate how the cultural identities of the groups are formed and modified over the time. The concepts of Stuart Hall, which examine in depth the question about identity, are complemented by authors who talk with the cultural studies and cast their look on the contemporary world, a society where culture is, largely, produced and consumed through the media and its cultural products. With the support of Latin American theorists, such as Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero, we study the process of culture in Latin American contemporary societies (in the specific case of our object, Brazil). The reflections of Renato Ortiz and Roberto DaMatta were fundamental to understand the Brazilian culture and how is formed the national identity of Brazil. This set of concepts supported our analysis of television ads of Havaianas (years 1994 to 2010), a brand and a product with a advertising communication idealized to represent a national identity of Brazil. After application of our methodology (analysis of plot, text and image of ads), and with the support of concepts studied throughout this work, we conclude that national identity of Brazil is represented by beaches, by people (beautiful woman, beautiful man, worker or group of friends) and by samba. These elements of national identity are, thus, in the content of media and are disseminated for different regions of Brazil, which have other cultural formations (which are not included in these messages). We understand that the questions studied here interfere in the development of the regions, by erased cultural identities, or by national identity that media proposes as a cultural hegemony.