Nicholas Karides, the director of Ampersand, writes about Branding Cyprus: At the end of Marcos Baghdatis’ defeat at the Gerry Weber Open final in Germany earlier this month, the organisers brought out a small unappetising cake to celebrate the Cypriot’s tennis star’s 22nd birthday. A polite and genuine gesture for a colourful sportsman whose temperament and…
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…
An old (from 2002) yet interesting article about some of the aspects Poland approached in its nation branding effort (source here): Hitting on the idea of the kite was ”like finding gold in the street,” Szymon Gutkowski says. Gutkowski is the managing director of DDB Corporate Profiles, an advertising agency in Warsaw. A kite, he…
Now that Ghana has been on the spotlight for its new nation branding effort, it’s pertinent and opportune to undig this 2002 article. Ghana to be ‘rebranded’ at $2 million A British consortium has been appointed by the new president of Ghana to rebrand his country and lead it away from a past in which…
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…
Taken from here: Israel Looking for an Extreme Makeover – by Bill Berkowitz It hasn’t been the easiest year for Israel. There was this past summer’s widely condemned attack on Lebanon and the recent disclosure by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that his country has a nuclear arsenal, not to mention the ongoing death and…
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…
[Taken from here] The tools of brand marketing throw useful analytical light on the problems Israel faces in the court of world public opinion. Sophisticated salesmanship cannot solve Israel’s fundamental problems, but the discipline of brand management has some useful lessons nevertheless for a nation that must trade, attract investment and tourists, and participate in…
Larry Defner has written extensively about Israel’s image in the world at this page: Nobody and nothing in the world has an army of advocates, defenders, PR people, marketers, spin-meisters and image-polishers like Israel has. This army isn’t made up just of the government, but of Jews and Judeophiles all over the world, especially in…
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…
At Nation-Branding.info city or region branding projects are strictly not featured. However, in this case an exception will be made with a supra-national brand, the brand of the Baltic Sea Region which is being constructed for some years now – an initiative which is still somewhat away from completion*. The Baltic Development Forum is behind…
