ABSTRACT
Recently I saw an advertisement on BBC World for ‘Wallonia, Belgium’ (the Frenchspeaking, autonomous region in the south of the country), which was obviously aimed at the global marketplace, with well-dressed, good-looking business folk surrounded by hi-tech offices and buildings, impressive infrastructure and pleasant scenery. That countries, regions, or cities are products to be marketed should come as no surprise; that has long been the case, for instance, in the tourist industry. As Beckerson (2002: 133) notes in relation to Britain, ‘marketing and place promotion have become important areas of local and regional government policy’, reflecting Britain’s transformation from a manufacturing to service economy. Consumer culture too has affected our individual identities in terms of the range of ‘personalised’ or ‘off the peg’ identities available for us to buy into, and the global context is seen as having effects on the shape of national and cultural identities (Morley and Robins, 2001: 10).
