By Bertrand Benoit

BERLIN -- Iconic U.S. brands have a new pitch for European consumers: We're from here, too.

Over the summer, Coca-Cola wooed Germans with a "made-in-Germany" campaign and stressed its British credentials with a miniseries about mom-and-pop retailers.

Earlier in the year, another American icon, McDonald's, trumpeted its local ties in its own ad campaign, telling Germans it was employing more than 60,000 people in the country and would invest 3 billion euros, equivalent to roughly $3.5 billion, in the market in coming years.

For decades, illustrious brands from Pepsi to Levi's have traded on their American identity, much like Louis Vuitton stresses its French DNA or IKEA plays up its Scandinavian sensibility. But shifting global views about the U.S. are now complicating this calculus.

The re-election of Donald Trump as president, his imposition of hefty tariffs on friends and foes alike, and his America-first foreign policy have coincided with a sharp deterioration in how some countries view the U.S.

Some 59% of French, 66% of Germans and 79% of Swedes see the U.S. unfavorably, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in June. Even in those countries where a majority still holds a positive view of the U.S., such as Poland, that proportion has dropped since last year.

Asked whether this would affect their purchases, a majority of people in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and Italy said they were likely to buy less from U.S. brands in the future, according to a YouGov survey conducted in late April and early May.

In perhaps the starkest example of a U.S. company facing a consumer backlash abroad, Tesla has seen its sales and market share plummet in most European markets this year. CEO Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and acted as his adviser, told investors in July that the company was facing no headwinds in Europe.

"Trump's attitude toward his European partners has caused deep insecurity in Europe," said Franz-Rudolf Esch, founder of the ESCH brand-strategy consulting company. "That's definitely impacted how consumers feel. Whether it's having an impact on their purchasing behavior is another story."

Coca-Cola is taking no chances. The brand's Made in Germany campaign, developed by ad agency fischerAppelt, launched over the summer. It claims that 97% of the drinks Coca-Cola sells in the country are produced there. The ads say the company, its suppliers and partners contribute EUR9.1 billion to Germany's annual gross domestic product.

Coca-Cola has been present in Germany for almost 100 years and is its largest drinks company, according to its made-in-Germany brochure. In a podcast ad, it says some of its products -- Fanta, an orange soda, and Mezzo Mix, a mixture of orange soda and cola -- were even invented there. One of its videos focuses on workers, featuring upbeat testimonials from Jana, Daniel, Mohammed and Jessy, four employees in its Mannheim plant, in Germany's southwest.

In August, Coca-Cola celebrated 125 years in the U.K. by producing a six-part documentary "celebrating the most British of all retailers -- the local corner shop boss." The episodes zero in on small shop owners who carry Coke and other drinks across the country, from Sunita Aggarwal in Leicester to Sophie Williams in Edinburgh.

While Coca-Cola's focus on its economic contribution and on individual blue-collar success stories hit populist notes that are particularly of-the-moment, other campaigns occupy a more traditional register by using locality as a guarantee of quality.

In this year's "Made in Germany" campaign, McDonald's says 60% of the ingredients in its German offering are sourced in the country, including 100% of its beef, milk and eggs.

In Procter & Gamble's "Where Quality Is at Home" campaign, celebrity TV host Kai Pflaume takes consumers through the company's 10 German plants and R&D centers, exploring "what quality means today, how it is seen, felt and lived."

McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski told CNBC earlier this month that the company had commissioned four global consumer surveys since the end of last year.

"Maybe the aura around America has dimmed a little bit... We are seeing in those surveys as well that consumers are making choices to not maybe frequent American brands as much," Kempczinski said, though he added traffic at McDonald's restaurants didn't seem to be affected.

Most U.S. companies say ad campaigns focused on local ties are nothing new and aren't motivated by the current geopolitical context.

Coca-Cola ran made-in-Germany campaigns in 2018 and 2019. It has used the slogan "Hecho in Mexico" in a similar context and has featured made-in-France logos on its French bottles since 2017, though these past efforts were on a much smaller scale.

"We've conducted similar initiatives in the past, both at the brand and at the company level," said a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble. "Locality is always an element."

A spokeswoman for McDonald's said campaigns focused on the company's local ties were "not new. We've implemented similar communication concepts before."

One executive at a U.S. company in Europe said that regardless of the political context, it was important to stress proximity with customers and remind them regularly that these brands employ locals and contribute to the economy.

A survey commissioned by Coca-Cola in June showed 62% of respondents underestimated the share of drinks the group produced locally. Nine in 10 respondents said it was good for the company to produce in Germany.

Yet while local ties may have a positive connotation, marketing specialists say such made-in campaigns aren't necessarily effective.

"It's largely nonsense," said Franz Schmid-Preissler, an independent brand strategist based in Munich. "Global brands have one market and that's the world...Their main asset is authenticity, their reliability, their originality, and they're above the daily travails of politics."

Nor is there much evidence that global consumers who say they resent a more assertive America are actually changing their purchasing behavior. In China, there are signs that Trump's tariffs are hastening a yearslong trend toward buying local products. But Tesla's experience in Europe seems largely isolated. Boycott campaigns haven't gained traction outside Canada and Denmark -- Trump has said he wants to annex Canada and take over Greenland, an autonomous territory under the Danish crown.

Likewise, companies that haven't actively embraced America First positions haven't seen a negative impact on global sales. Swiss e-commerce platform Galaxus said in June that its data showed European consumers continued to buy American products at about the same rate as last year.

"It's the old attitude-behavior gap," said Jan Dirk Kemming, a professor of marketing strategy and the head of sustainability consulting at communications agency Weber Shandwick. "Professed intentions often don't necessarily translate into action."

Write to Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 13, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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