Viva Polonia – Wally Olins on Poland’s re-branding

In the last weeks we’ve tracked Wally Olins (not Wolff Olins as some say) involvement with Poland. We published a video about Wally Olins on Brand Poland, and the following week we published the entire speech (Wally Olins’ keynote speech in Poland). Now here’s an article written by Wally Olins himself on Poland’s nation branding….

Wally Olins’ keynote speech in Poland

Last week we published an interview with Wally Olins on his efforts to brand Poland (a project he worked for the Polish Brand Institute (www.imp.org.pl), as well as a short speech by Mr. Olins at a press room. Now it’s time to watch Wally Olins’ full-length keynote speech in Poland. As always, wonderful speech from…

Wally Olins on Poland’s country brand

No doubt, Wally Olins is one of the world’s most experienced and influential nation branding experts. He has worked with many countries including Portugal and Poland, but with the latter he’s gone through his ups and downs. He paused his nation branding work for Poland because of political reasons, but also because of  cultural misunderstandings,…

A weird nation branding story

One of the most curious and successful nation branding efforts was that of the Polish plumber, who came into life in 2004 in France. Before the European Constitution referendum in May 2005, heated debates started in France about the newly joined countries. The ‘Polish plumber’, a persona created by French anti-constitution campaigners, emerged as the…

Wally Olins on his Branding Poland project

This is a conversation between branding guru Wally Olins and Polish magazine Brief.pl representatives. In the conversation, Wally Olins explains some of the fundamentals of nation branding, the Poland nation brand case and context, the similarities with Spain, the differences between nation branding and commercial branding, and explains “blandly” why the Branding Poland project had…

Poland at the Country Brand Index

Two short articles have appeared making reference to Poland’s progression at the 2008 edition of the Country Brand Index. The first article says the following: Poland moved up the list in this year’s edition of the Country Brand Index (CBI) covering best value tourist destinations. It ranks fifth in the world in the Best Country…

Wally Olins pauses Branding Poland effort

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,…

Branding Poland

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…

How Eastern Europe hired nation branding agencies

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…

Wally Olins on nation branding and Brand Poland

Branding guru Wally Olins has contributed an article to the Said Business School at Oxford. “You only have to look at slogans, straplines and brochures to see that most national tourism programmes are interchangeable”, he says. Here is the article: For most of the twentieth century nationalism was the property of extreme right-wing political movements,…