Investigating Miss Fisher: The Value of a Television Crime Drama

This article explores the concept of value in relation to the Australian television crime drama series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Drawing on a range of approaches to the economic valuation of culture, it argues for a nuanced approach to capturing the total cultural and economic value of a television crime drama series. While this may include the quantifiable, direct monetary benefits to be derived at all stages of development, production, distribution and consumption, the case is made for consideration of the unquantifiable, indirect non-monetary benefits that may also accrue to creators, to audiences and to society in general, as are clearly evident in the case of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.</p

Nordic Branding:an Odyssey into the Nordic Myth Market

The idea of the Nordic has witnessed significant attention in popular culture globally. However, little has been done to explore how Nordic brand actors perceive and enact Nordic values. We set out to explore this through a journey from southern Denmark to northern Norway, via Stockholm. The study was conducted as part of a collaborative project that focused on how myths work as a foundation for developing Nordic branding strategies. The results identified several symbolic resources which also revealed a number of cultural tensions, e.g. balancing modern Nordic aesthetics with Viking imagery and Norse mythology; egalitarian inclusiveness with fine dining/haute cuisine culture; traditional gendered fashion with post-gendered/LBTQ fashion; and ethnocentrism with multiculturalism. We discuss how brand actors try to construct compromises of these tensions, so that Nordic values as expressed in brands and products are amenable to the market, with branding strategies utilising a mode of sanitised Nordic mythology.</p