In the age of information, the consumers become increasingly more perceptive about the common strategies that marketers employ in order to promote their product, as well as have it stand out in comparison to those of competitors. This is due to over-exposure to trending branding paradigms, which the customers grow resistant to these techniques. This leads to the necessity to differentiate one’s brand and find a manner of alternative strategies, which involve the employment of unconventional techniques.
The goals of the paper are achieved through the method of critical discourse analysis that is applied within the research section of the paper, where it is used to extract information that helps define the initial brand identity of “Vytautas”, as well as the way it was changed through the unorthodox advertisement.
The paper draws strong inspiration from Holt’s 2002 text, that defines the idea of context of advertisements’ relying on varying, alternate reality, present within the content of the advertisement. Furthermore, the examples of cultural and historical marketing, as noted by Holt (2004), Kaptan (2010), and Klumbyte (2010) are similarly referred to, due to their insight on the branding paradigms.
The paper relies on social phenomena, such as identity, stereotypes and truthiness, which provide an insight on the context of the primary analyzed advertisement, allowing the primary character, as well as his discourse to be assessed. Ultimately, definition of terms, such as brand and its identity, allow the understanding of the concepts, within the context of the paper, providing a common ground between the author and the reader.
Drawing inspiration from authors who explored examples relying on marketing trends, the paper takes a point of departure from brand identities, built through use of the common techniques. Taking the example of a 2013 commercial “Eastern European Men School”, created to promote a Lithuanian brand of mineral water “Vytautas”, and conducting an analysis of the discourse of the advertisement, as well as its subjects, the paper studies a bizarre marketing example that strays from the conventional branding paradigms. The example was chosen due to the fact that while it was meant for a local audience, it had attracted a large international attention. The paper strives to define the brand identity that the product’s marketing team had created for it via the chosen example of advertisement, as well as how its discourse differs from the conventional branding paradigms.
The findings of the paper note that the discourse of the analyzed advertisement causes the brand’s identity to partially shift from its initial roots, leading to assumption, that while the commercial employs some of the previous techniques (such as product placement, humor, and some cultural and historical context), they are used in a more sardonic manner. At the same time, the brand also seems to shift its discourse from the common branding paradigms by employing the aforementioned marketing techniques to indirectly promote safety and social tolerance.