Here are some deeply academic comments about kiwi blokehood which I have tried to simplify for you. Worth a look. I can't find a good image of Barry Crump but here is one from a recent Toyota ad in which the bulls have taken on the kiwi bloke persona. Link to here for a description of the ad.
In media studies terms, the Kiwi bloke is a representation. Media do not simply reflect reality; they represent it through codes and languages which are socially constructed and privilege certain points of view. Discourses of the Kiwi bloke do not arise "naturally" from our pioneering past – they serve a hegemonic function (that means they suit the people in power in society.) They have a history, which is anything but a "natural evolution". Benedict Anderson argues that nationhood as we understand it today is an "imagined community" constructed through mass media. Media do not simply reflect the nation that is; they also help bring it into being, by reproducing ideas of identity, for example the Kiwi bloke.
Hence it was to advertising that the Kiwi bloke migrated. Corporate interests have associated themselves with Kiwi masculinity and its association with national identity as a way of normalising their activities, through sport, for example (brewer Lion Nathan and the All Blacks, financiers Fay, Richwhite and the America's Cup) . Multinationals such as Toyota, McDonald's, Sky and TV3 (CanWest) use representations of Kiwi blokes to naturalise their products in a local setting, as for example Barry Crump's notorious 1980s Hilux ads for Toyota. Crump is well known in New Zealand as a modern exemplar of the pioneer tradition, having written numerous novels of male hunting exploits, such as A Good Keen Man. The Hilux is a "ute" (utility vehicle), such as pakeha working men often use. The ads contrast an urban and naive character played by former Playschool presenter Lloyd Scott, who is gushingly enthusiastic about the product, with "bloke" Crump - a sardonic, laconic rural type who establishes his domination by verbal sarcasm undercutting Scott, and physical accomplishment, in the form of his hair-raising driving exploits.
Clearly viewers are expected to identify with Crump. But this gives rise to a paradox: that rural masculinity is being used to sell products to a largely urban audience. A key to understanding how these ads negotiate such a contradiction is in their over the top tendencies, for example, Crump driving his Toyota up an almost vertical incline. They self-consciously highlight an mismatch between their rural heritage and the urban audience they are selling to.
An idea of rural masculinity is being used as a way of legitimising the market: selling cars and other products to city dwellers - the final irony is that the vast majority of Toyotas sold here are not "utes", but ordinary family cars. The ad is a branding exercise that employs the normalising tendencies of the rural myth to enforce its own hard sell. The Good Keen Man is complicit with the good keen manager. So the Kiwi bloke now serves new masters – not colonial, but multinational.
Toyota has since conducted at least two more "local" advertising campaigns: "Welcome to Our World" (1990), which featured the Jim Reeves' song and shots of iconic New Zealand landscapes, and the "Bugger" campaign, which featured comic mishaps of rural farm workers and their "utes", each ad ending in the swear word. Ironically, Toyota closed its last local assembly plant in 1998, so the ads' matey rhetoric was precisely the opposite of what was occurring at the everyday local level.
It suggests that global capital's employment of representations of working men and appeals to local nationalism in its sales talk are not underlaid by any commitment to such groups. Moreover, if, as I have argued, the "bloke" as a representation of locality was to some extent created by New Zealand's historic position in the global economy, then it should not be surprising that he and his related symbols have continued to be relevant in the "branding" of New Zealand.
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