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In an interview with the Telegraph, nation branding guru Wally Olins says that he has paused his involvement with Poland’s chamber of commerce, which had brought him to change the grey and gloom image of the country abroad. At Nation-Branding.info news of Olins’ contribution to the branding Poland project had been reported here and here,…
Swiss graphic designer Julian Bittiner explores in and this article and this booklet the idiosincracies of the Swiss Made label. One of the most interesting paragraphs: “Seemingly more than any other flag, the Swiss flag, or rather, the symbol that represents it, is used as a marketing device in advertising and commerce as a powerful…
The new issue of the Monocle magazine is devoted to how nations can change how they’re perceived, that is, nation branding. “With corporate brands more powerful than country brands, there’s a lot of work out there for agencies keen to rethink a nation’s identity. Monocle looks at the construct of countries.” Very interesting for nation…
Six designers have been asked by travelling magazine Condé Nast Traveler to “rebrand” graphically a country of their choice for the magazine’s September issue. Pentagram’s Paula Scher has chosen Slovenia, a country most people has no idea of where it is except that it sounds small, backward and Eastern European. To challenge this image, Scher…
Nation branding guru Simon Anholt’s latest Anholt Nation Brands Index report brings data on Spain, Portugal and Greece. This generated graph shows how the brands of Spain, Portugal and Greece compare according to the report. The first conclusion to draw is that Spain has a more solid, consistent and powerful brand than those of Greece…
Simon Anholt likes to speak hard. And that’s one of the reasons why as many people love him as hate him. Here are his 10 most striking quotes: “You wouldn’t believe the number of countries which come to me and say “We’ve got a rubbish image, can we fix it?” and my question is always…
Branding specialists like to refer to ‘brand touchpoints’ as the instances when consumers interact with a brand. It might be a technical support service, a website, a shop or an employee. When we speak of nation brands, what can be “nation brand touchpoints”? Here’s a list that may come in handy: Airline companies Exported goods People…
There are a handful of good nation branding indexes including the Nation Branding Perception Index, the Reputation Institute Soft Power Survey, the Nation Image Index, BrandFinance’s Global Nation Brands league and the always attractive Monocle’s Soft Power Survey, but two indexes usually steal the show: the Nation Brands Index (NBI) and the Country Brand Index (CBI). It’s easy to confuse them since…
An old and dusty article from 1997! has been recovered from my library. In it, the polyedric Sam Vaknin wrote about how Israel was able to manage its image/brand to their convenience and how place-marketed itself to a hotspot in the planet: The small (20,700 sq. km.) State of Israel was established in 1948. Its…
Because of well-known reasons, by 1989 countries in the former Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe had acquired a grim image in the West. The former Communist nations in the so-called ‘Eastern Europe’ were imagined as backward, grey, poor, uneducated – somewhat inferior to the West. It may have been the work of an efficient Cold…
The Economist newspaper has published an article about nation branding, coinciding with the scandal unleashed with Borat and Kazakhstan: For 15 years you have tried to make the world aware of your newly born country. It is huge—the size of western Europe—rich in natural resources, modernising fast. But progress is frustratingly slow. Then a pestilential…
I am proud to say that Malaysia’s most famous branding magazine, BranDNA, has published one of my articles, “The Need of Branding Greece” in its last issue. It’s a real pride that they asked me to publish it considering the importance of the magazine in the Marketing and Branding fields in Malaysia, and the fact that…
