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Turning Consumers into Italians

, by Luca Massimiliano Visconti - direttore del Mimec, il Master in marketing e comunicazione della Bocconi, translated by Alex Foti
If Italians united as a people over a century and a half, they also owe it to pizza and fashion, in addition to media consumption. The article takes a brief look at how consumption forms a web of common language, products and imagery that help define the notion of Italian cultural nationhood

The concept of national unity has always been linked to ideology, choice and representation. Nations are not born united, they become so. This is often forgotten, and we lose sight of how much will went into building a sense of shared identity, so as to motivate altruism and build a common culture.

Italian unification was, too, built around social narratives, which are, only in part but from the start, also market narratives. Consumption has accompanied the first 150 years of Italian Unity, by providing a mirror in which the country can see its historical reflection. Comparing the various ads that a brand has produced in the course of the years is telling. In 2009, Barilla aired a TV ad which celebrated in 132 seconds the 132 years of its existence as a brand. Basically, it spanned the history of united Italy. From an agricultural nation, Italy gradually turned into an industrial nation, while its family shops were increasingly supplemented by vast retail chains.

In this article, I intend to discuss whether consumption has actively favored or hindered the process of social unification. In this respect, media consumption has been paramount. Press, radio, movies, television, and now the Internet have made Italians literate on many fronts. First of all, they literally created a shared language, which progressively crowded out local dialects hitherto spoken by the popular masses. And not only that. The diffusion of advertisements through media and in public spaces has slowly but surely created shared social imageries, by stimulating similar needs, emotions, behaviors. In terms of the brand economy, more and more consumers found themselves desiring the same product or eating, wearing, vacationing the same as their neighbors.

There are also products that helped connecting the Italian people, think about cars and trains, freeways and railways. Finally, a few local products have been turned into global icons of Italian identity: pasta, pizza, and espresso have become symbols of Italy for Northeners, too, just as design and fashion are now part of the DNA of the Southern consumer. On the other hand, the revival of localism (and of traditional agriculture, country fairs, controlled designations of origin, and the like) remind us that Italy is still a collection of microcosms, not yet fully interconnected.
However, in the 150 years since Italy has been country, consumption has done its share in building its common history.

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