My student, Jacob G., just returned from a semester abroad in Australia. He reports that Foster’s beer is nearly nowhere to be found in Australia and, when it is, it is not considered centrally Australian, but instead, cheap and nasty. This is in dramatic contrast to Foster’s beer commercials. For example:

So, Foster’s beer is being marketing to the U.S. with the notion that it is essentially Australian. Australian-ness, if you watch many Foster’s beer commercials, includes hypermasculinity. This is troubling for Australians–many of whom, I suspect, are not particularly hypermasculine–but it also interesting in that it illustrates how a product can be marketed by branding it with a nation.