Irishness and brands

For the last few months I've been intermittently working on a project about the differences between the mobile phone markets in Britain and Ireland. As a result I've been over to Ireland a couple of times to chat to people about what they're into, whether they care about brands, and, then, at the end of the conversation, what they think about mobile phones.

Ireland's an interesting place at the moment. It got very rich very quickly and then, about a year ago, the money taps turned off. For while there was a big party and people got a bit crazy, now they're trying to figure out what happened.

An idea you hear a lot is that Ireland, and especially the richer parts of Dublin, lost its Irishness during the boom and that now, with the crash, people are getting back to who they really are. They weren't just talking about authenticity, realness, or leaving your roots - which is a more personal thing and something I've heard in Britain - this is a universal Irishness that is an adjective and a mythology.

It's difficult to describe what this Irishness is without getting wrapped up in the Craic and the Guiness cliches so I'll leave that to the poets. The thing is it exists.

The interesting question for brands is how they fit with the national myth. It occurs to me that strong national myths fill up people's understanding of themselves and leave less room for brands. People don't look to brands for answers about themselves (which I think they do a bit in the UK). As a result people simply expect less from brands - the idea of a mobile phone brand having a "personality" was ridiculous to many people.

The second thing is that Irishness, like other national myths perhaps, seems to line up in pretty direct opposition to brands. A good bit of Irishness, it seemed to me, involved not giving much of a toss about brands].

And so, finally, these national myths are almost cetainly going to grow stronger as economies fail. Less room for brands but potentially a far richer cultural space to live within. We'll have to see how it plays out.