You can insult a South African's home town. You might even be able to insult his mother and get away with as little as a ringing ear. You might even be lucky enough to escape death after whistling at his "chick". But insult his choice of beer and you'd be lucky if your forefathers didn't feel the beating you'd be in line for.

Maybe slightly overstated, but South African men are immensely passionate about their choice of beer. More so than the rugby team we support, the type of beer held in your hand seems typify what type of man you are. Such identification with a brand is testament, in my mind, of how powerful a self-brand connection can be. I'm fairly convinced that this identifcation has absolutley nothing to do with a beer's taste. Mike even reckons that most of us would fail to distinguish between the brands in a blind taste test.

It has everything to do with the self-brand connection (SBC) that occurs. As a holy grail in marketing, the SBC, if mined correctly will result in patriotic loyalty to a brand. Need I say much about Apple in this regard? One of the ways in which marketers can establish a solid SBC is to use narrative in their adverts. Using a well-crafted, experience-based narrative scenario creates SBC's because people generally interpret the meaning of their experiences by fitting them into a story. This is called narrative processing (click here to read Jennifer Escalas' seminal research in this regard).

The idea here is that a brand becomes more meaningful the closer it is linked with the self. If we integrate a brand into our self-concept, a solid SBC has been achieved. Based on this, I'm largely dissapointed when marketers don't even try to establish a SBC using narrative.

Back to the beer …

One company who is establishing excellent SBC's through narrative processing is Namibian Breweries' Windhoek Lager. The stories communicated in the recent Brandhouse advert series are, in my opinion, some of the best! With Frankie Valli's "Can't take my eye's off of you" song, they testify to how men, will forsake their wives for Windhoek, ignore a burning arm for the beer and regard a six-pack of Windhoek as the ideal present … ending off with Frankie's words, "I love you baby …" (Seriously, click here to see the ads, right at the bottom of the page, if you have not already seen them).

Not yet available on the site is a recet addition that portrays typical scenarios where people forget things on-the-go and need to scamper back to turn off: a running bath, an oven left on, and ultimately … a guy who leaves the the golf course mid-game to get a six-pack, that he forgot out of the fridge, back into the fridge.

Once marketeres begin to see the value of narrative processing, we can look forward to better advertising. Until then, I will continue nagging.

"Beer in hand" image courtesy of CJScott