NARRATING MORALITY AND BRAND THROUGH PARODY

One of the main contributions of this article is to show the value of using linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic analytical tools to uncover how people employ moral stances for interpreting the effects of capitalism in oral narratives. Federico's critique that brands today lack any grounding in reality mirrors scholarly critiques of commodities, from Marx's (Reference Marx and McLellan2000) fetishism to work in anthropology on the financialization of brands (Foster Reference Foster2013; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013). These moral judgments regarding brand and capitalism, as well as the search for an underlying ethical basis for capitalism (Weber Reference Weber2005; Aho Reference Aho2006), have pervaded critical studies of capitalist consumption (Miller Reference Miller2001). Through his invocation of this new brand, Gregory Dry, Federico provides a platform for grounding his critique of transnational capitalist practices. Certain semiotic qualities of Gregory Dry index other brands, such as Canada Dry, as well as elements of transnational capitalism in general through the Americanized name. It thus serves as a ‘surfeit’—a form of consumer engagement with the brand concept that lies outside the control of official corporate marketing practices (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013). Anthropological studies of brand have looked at the moral discourse surrounding branding practices in the political sphere. In her work on satire and political activism in the United States, Haugerud (Reference Haugerud2013) opens this line of inquiry for understanding satirical critique of US politics. She focuses on the ways activists mobilize the brand concept to denounce corporate influence in US electoral politics. Similarly, Federico employs the Gregory Dry brand to illustrate how transnational brands have lost their connection to reality—a connection 3A, in his view, retains.

Due to the moral emphasis of Federico's narrative, I build on anthropological calls for an ‘ordinary ethics’ that accounts for the ways moral frameworks pervade society (Lambek Reference Lambek2010). Linguistic anthropologists have stressed the need to study the episodic nature of ethics—‘what actors do communicatively to make it manifest and keep it so’ (Lempert Reference Lempert2014a:466). One useful framework for this article is Keane's (Reference Keane2014, Reference Keane2016) concept of ethical affordances. In this work, Keane extends Gibson's (Reference Gibson, Shaw and Bransford1977) theory of affordances to ethics. For Gibson, affordances are ‘action possibilities’ within an agent's environment and which relate to that agent. A chair offers infinite possibilities of action to an individual, but it is the individual who acts in accordance with those possibilities, by, for example, standing on that chair to switch a light bulb. Keane defines ethical affordances as ‘any aspects of people's experiences of themselves, of other people, or of their surround, that they may draw on as they make ethical evaluations and decisions, whether consciously or not’ (Keane Reference Keane2014:7). While Keane has provided a useful framework for linking interactional dynamics with ethical life, the ways ethics manifest in lived experiences has been a central concern for phenomenological studies in anthropology (Throop Reference Throop2016).

One key aspect of ethics, Keane argues, is intention reading—the desire to understand what someone intended by an action, rather than the effect of that action. We all recognize how people attempt to read our intentions, and act with their reactions in mind: ‘These examples of ethical talk seem to require that the speakers see themselves from outside, taking another's point of view on their own thoughts and actions’ (Keane Reference Keane2014:18). In this way, Keane's argument is similar to a phenomenological approach to ethics, which pays attention to the ways ethical judgments pervade ordinary life and to the ways we act in anticipation to external perceptions of our actions (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2012, Reference Mattingly2014). This phenomenological approach to ethics in our informants’ everyday lives raises important questions about Federico's narrative: for whom is Federico giving an account? What are the ethical affordances of transposing a participant of our interview, an American anthropologist, as the protagonist of this narrative? Answering these questions will be key to examining how Federico uses the narrative of Gregory Dry to construct moral frameworks for understanding brand and its relationship to capitalism.

In his narrative, Federico attributes Gregory with an exaggerated self-serving personality, thereby using parody to critique the individualism of modern-day capitalism. Parody was an important aspect of textual analysis for Bakhtin, due to its importance in shifting social norms around dominant discourse. As Bakhtin notes, ‘there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse—artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday—that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic contre-partie’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:53). In order to understand Bakhtin's notion of parody, we must also explore how it is linked to his other concepts of dialogism and speech genres. Identifying how dialogism works in parody can help us understand more broadly the ways linguistic codes contest each other within everyday speech (Hill Reference Hill1985).

In his recounting of Gregory Dry, Federico gives Gregory a voice attributable to an aggressive, perhaps egotistic, entrepreneur. Through this voice and explicit references linking Gregory's actions to those taken by famous brands, Federico engages with circulating ideologies about how successful entrepreneurs talk. In this way, Federico builds on existing ‘ideas with which participants and observers frame their understanding of linguistic varieties and map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them’ (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000:35). In Federico's narration, Gregory's speech is individualistic, self-serving, and curt. Behind this parody of narcissistic entrepreneurial language lies a hidden message about how businessmen should speak. In this way, Federico also contrasts points of view: 3A's cooperative philosophy is morally superior to Gregory's short-term, individualistic motivations. In this case, we see Bakhtin's definition of parody as a hybrid ‘that nourishes itself on the stratification of the literary language into generic languages and languages of various specific tendencies’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:76). In this way, parody is dialogic—it engages directly with genres of speech that circulate within society. These speech genres emerge as people in different social classes, professions, time periods, and places codify certain ways of speaking (Bailey Reference Bailey and Heller2007). Parody draws on these speech genres and exaggerates specific linguistic characteristics associated with them.

Bakhtin most clearly develops his use of parody in his analysis of the satirical letters Epistolœ Obscurorum Virorum ‘Letters of obscure people’ published during the Renaissance in Germany. These letters arose during a dispute between a German humanist, Johann Reuchlin, and Dominican monks who advocated for burning all copies of the Talmud. They purport to attack Johann Reuchlin, but mock the medieval Latin used by these monks and lob personal attacks against them. ‘[T]heir native German tongue shines distinctly through: they take the syntactical constructions of the German language and fill them with Latin words, and they even translate specific German expressions literally into Latin; their intonation is coarse, Germanic’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:81). The letters exaggerate the German inflection of the ways Renaissance elites spoke Latin, making the linguistic qualities of their speech the object of derision. In this way, parody has a dual focus; ‘it, too, is oriented toward the object—but toward another's word as well, a parodied word about the object that in the process becomes itself an image’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:61; emphasis in original). The parodied Latin spoken by these monks becomes the object of Epistolœ Obscurorum Virorum’s satire, thereby confronting their speech with that of Johann Reuchlin and his defenders. ‘Thus it is that in parody languages are crossed with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and in the final analysis two speaking subjects’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:76). Thus parody mocks one point of view, intrinsically praising another.

In his narrative Gregory Dry, Federico similarly uses a parodic brand narrative to mock common tropes of corporate success. Further, Federico uses his narrative to mock the form brand has taken today, and the ways it abstracts from the actual manufacturing practices used to make a product. As with many forms of imitation, parodic brands are rarely perfect copies of the brands they mimic—the parody becomes an object of representation in its own right (Lempert Reference Lempert2014b). More than simply a ‘surfeit’ of another brand—‘the immaterial excess of social meaning that emerges out of engagements with branded goods’ (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013:112)—Federico's parody, Gregory Dry, takes many elements from different corporate brands. In this way, the parody becomes an ethical affordance—it becomes an interactional technique for connecting the current conversation into a broader ethical judgment. By incorporating elements of many brand narratives in his Gregory Dry story, Federico critiques the actions of many multinational corporations today.

PARTICIPANT TRANSPOSITION IN ARBOREA, SARDINIA

In order to understand how Federico transports me, an American anthropologist, into the narrative Gregory Dry, it is important to investigate the role of participant transposition in Arborea more generally. Drawing on Wortham's (Reference Wortham1994) participant examples and Haviland's (Reference Haviland, Gumperz and Levinson1996) notion of transposition, Perrino (Reference Perrino2005, Reference Perrino2007, Reference Perrino2011) has shown how narrators control the relationship between representation and interaction through the use of what she calls participant transposition, a particular narrative technique through which audience members are transposed into the narrated event. In this way, the audience member becomes a local metric (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2003:330)—an object from the narrating event ‘encrusted with a range of meaning, affective valence, and so forth’—that is used as a metric for describing the narrated event. Participant transposition is thus one of many narrative techniques that bridges between current experience and a separate, external time-space framework (Murphy Reference Murphy, Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron2011). This body of research has demonstrated how narrators use the context of the narrating event to understand, and at times to manipulate, the meaning of the narrated event.

Many of my interlocutors in Arborea used participant transposition to provide examples during our interviews. While the use of participant transposition in my dataset varied in terms of length, there were some key similarities between how different interlocutors transported me into their narratives. All examples of participant transposition in my dataset position me in the protagonist role of their stories, whether long or short. Some examples of participant transposition seem to integrate personal aspects from my own background, such as Federico's narrative of Gregory Dry, while others, such as the example below in (1), do not. All of the uses of participant transposition were in explanatory circumstances, where the narrator aimed to illustrate some aspect of 3A or the dairy industry to me. In the following example, this interlocutor, Giancarlo, explains how some Italian dairy farmers would commit fraud with milk that arrived from outside Italy but which was subsequently ‘Italianized’ by being stored on an Italian farm as if it had been produced on that farm.

1. (1) G: Giancarlo, I: Interviewer

   

After Giancarlo explains that milk ‘was Italianized’, in line 1, I respond with some hesitance about what that might mean (‘ah, so milk from…’). Giancarlo quickly interrupts me and clarifies with a participant example: ‘milk arrived from Germany, made a strange tour, passed through Gregory's farm in:: in Arborea and became Italian milk’ (lines 3 and 4). This example lacks any framing that might suggest that this is hypothetical—no ‘if’ clause and no use of a conditional verb tense. In addition, this participant example is in the third person, with no use of second-person pronouns. Participant transposition was a common strategy among managers of 3A in the interviews I conducted during the summers of 2013 and 2014. Out of forty interviews, I found thirty-five instances of interlocutors using participant transposition in their hypothetical examples, which ranged in length from a brief mention of my name, such as in example (1) above, to fifteen-minute-long narratives with an impersonal ‘Gregory’ as the protagonist. In this article, I focus on the longest instance of participant transposition, Federico's Gregory Dry narrative, to which I turn now.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

I interviewed Federico after taking a tour of the dairy processing facility with him, and we settled into an empty lobby. In the interview, Federico recounts how 3A gained its success. Federico makes sense of his place within 3A and its role in the local and global economies by parodying the behavior of multinational brands as aggressive and rude. He hinges this parody on children, who represent one of 3A's most important consumers, but who are often deemed innocent and easily manipulable. Soft drink companies, with which Federico relates Gregory Dry, notoriously market to children, thus hooking them to the product before they know any better. In Federico's narrative, Gregory strips his milk of its nutritional value and instead fills it with sugar and empty carbon dioxide. By following the fictional character through clear sequential steps in the process of founding his new brand, Federico uses voice and parody to associate aggressive and rude behavior with multinational brands and their associates. Through his portrayal of Gregory's voice, Federico links Gregory to this characterization of aggressive and manipulative businessmen, as excerpt (2) shows.

1. (2) F: Federico, G: Gregory

   

Federico uses a parody of branding practices, as embodied by the brand ‘Gregory Dry’ in the text above, to criticize the production and branding activities of many beverage manufacturers today. Here we see how narrators can use participant transposition to take moral stances within the narrative. In this excerpt, I am no longer just a co-present speech participant of the narrating event, but also the protagonist of the hypothetical narrated event starting in line 54. This Gregory, the protagonist of the narrative Gregory Dry, has specific personal characteristics that Federico associates with negative corporate business practices. The drink Gregory invents is milk with a twist—a splash of carbonation to ‘leave a sensation of satiety’. Unlike the managers of 3A, however, Gregory does not have the needed knowledge to develop, produce, market, and distribute his drink. Throughout the entire narration, Federico describes each step of Gregory's journey from development to the point of sale. Along the way, he details each interaction with specialists who complete these processes for him. In each of these fictional interactions, Federico illustrates and emphasizes Gregory's lack of knowledge. In this segment, Gregory has hired market researchers to come up with a name for his product, which he then patents. Other than providing the money to finance the project, Gregory does not perform any of the labor needed to complete the development of his product. He has abstract, financial business acumen, but lacks a concrete and practical knowledge of the dairy industry's day-to-day activities.

Federico not only represents Gregory's voice in this narration, but directly dialogues with it. By engaging with Gregory's voice, he applies the ‘ethical affordances’ of interaction—how ways of speaking become the basis for character judgment. He parodies the language of aggressive, transnational businessmen. The brand Federico assigns this new drink, ‘Gregory Dry’, semiotically (and poetically through rhyme) links Gregory Dry to a multinational brand, Canada Dry. Federico thus associates Gregory's actions, and the morality of those actions to the actions of multinational brands. Although the name Gregory Dry itself might have been a mere creation of Federico, its semiotic qualities seem to point to the transnational corporate ethics Federico criticizes through his narrative.

Federico links this new brand to an ethos of unethical business practices constructing a sense of otherness through the ‘sensuous’ (Chumley & Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013:3) material qualities—the qualia—of my name. My name is not Italian, and even in Italian, the name Gregorio is very rare. Although Federico never mentions the brand Canada Dry, the syntax of the name Gregory Dry is iconic of Canada Dry. Both have a name—Gregory, a proper name, and Canada, a country name—and end with the adjective Dry. Most importantly, both Gregory and Canada have three syllables each and the same cadence (in both English and Italian). By inventing a name for Gregory Dry so similar to Canada Dry, Federico iconically links this new company to Canada Dry and also hints at a general critique of the business practices of multinational corporations.

Through his critique of Gregory Dry, Federico discloses his own attitudes to corporate practices and their link to morality. By linking Gregory Dry with the brand Canada Dry and its associations as a multinational, North American brand, Federico indexes various ‘schema of cultural knowledge’ (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2013). He draws on this knowledge to argue that 3A is morally superior to its transnational competition. The immoral behavior of Gregory in (2) above serves to index 3A and Federico's moral superiority to aggressive, transnational businessmen.

PARODYING BRAND AND MORALITY

As he launches into the narrative of Gregory Dry, Federico frames it as a story similar to the founding of Müller, a famous German yogurt brand. After doing so, he acts out the first of five imaginary interactions between Gregory and his business partners. In the following excerpt, he interacts with the marketing agency that performs a market survey in order to come up with a new product:

1. (3) F: Federico

   

In this segment, Federico sets the stage for a meeting where Gregory will consult the representatives of a marketing agency—the first of five fictional meetings that Federico acts out in the example of Gregory Dry. While narratives are often situated in past events and based on the narrator's personal experience, the narrative of Gregory Dry is a hypothetical event situated in the nomic present—a present that exists in relation to ‘an ontically distinct realm, like the world of myth or abstract generalization’ (Dick Reference Dick2010:281). Federico situates this narrative in the present through the use of reported speech in which he employs present verb tenses, such as ‘what do you advise me [to do]’ in line 7 and ‘how much will it cost me?’ in line 8 (the Italian costa is present tense, though the sense is better rendered here by English will). In addition, he references current participants in the narrating event and present and future space-time frames (such as line 2, ‘Gregory has one hundred million dollars tomorrow’). Through his narration of these meetings, Federico positions himself, 3A, its competition, and me in three ways: (i) he positions 3A in contrast to its multinational rivals; (ii) he places me, Gregory, into the narrative as an aggressive, international businessman, thus contrasting me with 3A's managers; and (iii) he implicitly comments on my position within 3A as an external researcher.

In his narrative, Federico transforms, or ‘transposes’, me into a protagonist of a hypothetical narrative that draws on the foundational narratives of the brands Müller, Red Bull, and Gatorade. In Federico's narrative, I become a measuring stick, a ‘local metric’ (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2003), with which Federico can describe a broader phenomenon—in this case, multinational brands. This narrative could be interpreted as a type of cultural negotiation in which Federico attempts to negotiate between my more global, American business culture and his more local, Sardinian business culture. He puts me into the role of the foreign, exploitative businessman, which he then contrasts with 3A's business model.

Just as Perrino's (Reference Perrino2005) case of participant transposition serves as a pedagogical tool, Federico tells the Gregory Dry narrative to teach me 3A's moral ideals through a ‘hypothetical narrative’ (Koven Reference Koven, Holstein and Gubrium2011). While the plot of Gregory Dry is clearly hypothetical, Federico does not use any grammatical devices to evidence it as such and bases the narrative on what he sees as the foundational narrative of one of 3A's biggest competitors, Müller. By transporting me into this hypothetical narrative, Federico blurs the boundaries between the ‘narrating event’—the here and now of the interview interaction—and the ‘narrated event’—the ‘timeless present’ of the Gregory Dry narrative (Jakobson Reference Jakobson, Waugh and Monville-Burston1957; Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993; Dick Reference Dick2010; Perrino Reference Perrino2011).

Through participant transposition, Federico also transports elements of our relationship into the narrative and comments on my role within the company. Indeed, both the ‘denotational’ and the ‘interactional’ texts (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Sawyer1998) in this narrative are heavily influenced by my previous interactions with Federico. In his narrative (and in our day-to-day interactions), I am a foreigner and an outsider with little knowledge of the dairy industry. As my principal informant within the company, Federico is an insider in the dairy business and an expert on 3A's manufacturing processes. In his narrative, however, the boundaries between the two events are blurred, and so are our participant roles.

All of these elements together serve to construct a parody of multinational brands in this narrative. By constructing a corporate identity for Gregory, Federico also selects events in his story that borrow from popular conceptions of corporate foundational narratives, making this a token of a broader type of narrative (see Bruner Reference Bruner1991). In his telling of Gregory Dry, Federico copies details from the corporate foundational narratives of Red Bull, Müller, and Gatorade. As Bakhtin remarks on the parodied sonnet, ‘it is not the form of a whole but is rather the object of representation: the sonnet here is the hero of the parody’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981:51). Similarly, the story of Gregory Dry, and the brand itself, is not the form, but an object of representation. It is the form of the corporate history that Federico mocks.

Federico copies from other brands’ stories in order to construct a clear link between his criticism of Gregory Dry and a broader critique of transnational brands. With his words in lines 1 and 2—‘if you are a product like Müller. Müller is a brand. Müller is a Gregory’—Federico frames the example of Gregory's brand as the narrative of how Müller built its brand image. At first, he directly connects me, his interlocutor, in the storytelling event, with the story of Müller's success. Almost immediately thereafter, however, he distances me from the story by referring to me in the third person, ‘Müller is a Gregory’ in line 2. Also, the subject in this clause is not Gregory who is like Müller, but rather Müller who is ‘a Gregory’, which casts the following narrative of Gregory Dry as a type that many brands fall into. We could similarly cast other brands into this type, which Federico later does by equating the histories of Gatorade, Red Bull, and Coca Cola with the narrative of Gregory Dry. The use of these widely recognized brand names is not unusual, as Coca Cola in particular often becomes a stand in ‘for the problematic nature of commodities in general’ (Miller Reference Miller and Miller1998:170). By explicitly linking the brand Gregory Dry in the narrated event to Coca Cola, Gatorade, and Red Bull, Federico comments on the relevance of this narrative, and Gregory's actions within the narrative, for interpreting the actions of multinational brands today. Although the use of the brands individually could each represent the ‘problematic nature of commodities’, taken together they represent a broader critique of 3A's multinational competition.

In addition to positioning Gregory Dry as an unhealthy, multinational brand relative to 3A, he also contrasts Gregory with 3A's managers by positioning him as aggressive, domineering, and rude. As shown in lines 5 and 7–11, Federico uses direct speech for both Gregory and the employees of the marketing agency, thus applying a distinct voice (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist and Emerson1981) to the different characters. In this interaction, Gregory is direct, aggressive, and selfish. He keeps a distance from all of his business partners, using them only as a means to an end. As a sign of his aggressiveness, half of the verbs he uses in the second person are in the imperative mood, and he continually stresses that Gregory Dry is his product that cannot be copied by anyone else. Gregory requests their services not through a question or with use of the conditional, but rather with a curt use of the imperative mood at line 7 (‘Do a feasibility study for me’). He also implicitly threatens that he will not pay them if they don't provide him with a good service by adding a hypothetical construction of the first type (lines 9–10: ‘ok, I will give you five hundred thousand dollars if you come back to me, come back to me in a month with an offer with which I can do business’). The advertising representatives, by contrast, only fit in two words, ‘five hundred thousand dollars’ in line 9. In addition, while voicing Gregory, Federico increases the pace of his speech and changes to a brusque tone. In this way, Federico gives Gregory the voice of a stereotypical American entrepreneur.

Similar patterns emerge throughout the entire narrative of how Gregory founds the brand Gregory Dry. Federico acts out various scenes and roles, including scenes in which Gregory meets with marketing agencies, chemists, and finally 3A itself as the producer of the final product. In these scenes, Gregory is placed in the powerful role of outsourcing many of the tasks in creating Gregory Dry, and thereby holding power as a client. Gregory's authority is further evidenced by Federico constantly mentioning the vast sum of money Gregory has at his disposal, one hundred million Euros. Gregory also spends relatively small sums for each service except production (ten million Euros).

The directness Federico attributes to Gregory could also be read as a veiled comment on my own research at 3A, as he accompanied me on many of my interviews and assisted me in moving in when I first arrived in Arborea in 2013. During my first week in Arborea, for example, he frequently expressed dismay at some of my decisions. Perhaps he saw my activities as being too focused on results for my own benefit, rather than the benefit of the company. The residence I had booked online, for instance, was in an inconvenient location for the company, and Federico was in charge of shuttling me back and forth. His positioning of Gregory in the narrative could thus have been a way for him to subtly show me the negative aspects of my American directness, while encouraging me to emulate the more cooperative attributes of 3A's managers.

In example (4) below, Federico continues to represent Gregory as direct and imposing. In terms of deictics, Gregory uses first-person pronouns often and directly to address his interlocutors, while still using the imperative mood. This emerges more clearly in another meeting that Federico narrates between Gregory and managers of 3A.

1. (4) F: Federico, G: Gregory

   

In this excerpt, Gregory goes to 3A to outsource the production of his new drink to them. Federico again performs an aggressive voice for Gregory through ideolectical dialogism—the social and national background reflected in his speech (Harris Reference Harris1990). Gregory is direct, a trait often associated with Americans. In addition, Gregory focuses on his own contributions, thereby dominating discussions with 3A's representatives, who seem submissive to his demands, as evidenced by their only response in line 101, ‘ten million dollars to package this’. This statement conflicts with 3A's emphasis on cooperation and deference.

In this segment, Federico uses voicing to directly contrast Gregory's aggressive style with the calm and calculated stance taken by 3A's managers. Gregory stresses his importance for Gregory Dry in lines 93 and 94 (‘you should make the Gregory beverage for me, here is my recipe, however, you cannot use it, because it's mine’). In addition, his use of first-person pronouns and the imperative mood is much starker than in excerpt (3). Gregory uses the imperative mood two times in lines 96 and 97 (fate ‘make’ and preparate ‘prepare’), while stressing that Gregory Dry is his product and therefore 3A cannot copy it. He also employs the deontic use of the modal verb potere ‘can/may’ in line 94 (non potete ‘you all cannot’). The deontic modal verb is often performative, as it either grants or refuses permission (Verstraete Reference Verstraete2001). By denying 3A permission to use his beverage recipe, Gregory evidences his authority over them. He also uses the verb invadere ‘to invade’ to describe his business plans, almost as if he were a military leader.

This portion of the narrative parodies the brand narrative by portraying Gregory's story in a negative light. Gregory is a domineering, self-centered and aggressive American capitalist who tries to bully 3A's managers to accept his contractual terms. Given the similarities that Federico has already established between Gregory Dry and large multinational beverage brands, this portrayal of Gregory might index Federico's feelings towards managers and founders of multinational brands. Near the end of the Gregory Dry narrative, Federico discusses 3A's success and confronts that with Gregory Dry. In the narrative of 3A's success, he indirectly emphasizes his role in the company, while also demonstrating that 3A is morally superior to companies like Müller, Coca-Cola, and Gregory Dry. In the following lines, he says:

1. (5) F: Federico, G: Gregory

   

In this stretch of discourse, Federico describes 3A's marketing strategy that relies on word of mouth. Although he never directly references his role in 3A's success, he does so indirectly by repeatedly mentioning the importance of marketing to children. Federico specifically mentions ‘communicating [Arborea's] qualities to the children’ in lines 182 and 183, which is his role at 3A, as he leads tours of Sardinia's school children through the factory to show them 3A's high quality production process. In this portion of the narrative, Federico also dismisses the effectiveness of marketing by saying, ‘we don't want testimonials’ in line 171. By testimonials, Federico means celebrity endorsements in TV or radio spots. Earlier in the interview, he also claimed that 3A does not advertise with billboards, radio spots, or TV ads, because there is no need. By attributing 3A's success to guided tours of the factory, Federico here elevates his own status in 3A's hierarchy compared to many managers.

Federico's assertion is also in stark contrast with his earlier comments about Gregory Dry, Müller, and other multinational brands, whose success he attributes to their large advertising campaigns. By emphasizing the value of teaching children about 3A's qualities—its richness and freshness—Federico establishes a hierarchy of corporate morality. He affirms this in line 179, ‘it's not invented at the table, it's not invented’. At various points in his narration of Gregory Dry, Federico highlighted that Gregory's product was ‘invented at the table’ indexing the distance many managers and company founders have between themselves and the production process. He frequently emphasized that Gregory does not actually get involved with any of the production steps, but merely finances other people's work. This follows a longstanding western critique of finance as parasitical, nonproductive, and immaterial (see Maurer Reference Maurer and Miller2005). Thus, by setting up the narration of Gregory Dry as a parody of the business practices of multinational brands, Federico elevates 3A as an ethical company.

By establishing a connection between the quality of Arborea's milk and the close proximity of 3A's managers to the production process, Federico creates a moral distinction between Gregory and the managers of 3A. He distinguishes 3A from other brands by claiming that it is una realtà ‘a reality’. 3A's managers not only refer to their work with the inclusive first-person plural pronoun noi ‘we’, but they also attribute their success to the children who will grow up and buy their products. Rather than advertising on TV and on the radio, Federico argues that 3A focuses on acquainting children with their products so that they will understand firsthand the difference in quality between 3A and its competitors, who are often large multinational corporations. This creates a moral distinction between the two, as Federico ties 3A's milk to its ‘naturalness’. Indeed, 3A sources it locally and ensures high quality by minimizing bacteria levels and increasing protein content.