Video keynote – I feel Slovenia

We’ve refered to Slovenia’s nation-branding efforts before – and also to the country’s promotional ‘I feel sLOVEnia” tagline as early as in 2007. In this speech, Valerija Mencej, Head of the Slovenian State Promotion Section explains the strategy behind the tagline:

Is this a viral video for Slovenia’s promotion?

Is this a viral video for Slovenia’s nation branding? If not, it should! It has everything it needs: it’s fresh, it’s natural, it’s fun and it tells a genuine story about Slovenia and Slovenians. See for yourself: So, there you have it. This video says something about Slovenians: that they are young, that they are…

The Slovenia brand book

In late 2009 an article was published titled “Branding Slovenia”. Even if it was just a nation branding experiment, it shed some light on Slovenia’s brand image and how the half-Alpine, half-Adriatic country was trying to manage its reputation. Some weeks later, we had Maja Konecnik as guest writer, sharing her opinion on the Slovenian…

A follow-up to the Branding Slovenia story

After publishing the Branding Slovenia story in early November 2009, I got an interesting response from an accredited source, Ms. Maja Konecnik Ruzzier, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Ms. Konecnik has been involved in Slovenia’s national re-branding from the core, so her vision on the issue is…

Branding Slovenia

Slovenia has an identity crisis. People confound it with Slovakia. The names of the two countries, and even their flags are virtually interchangeable. Their languages are also both Slavic and so similar that both nationalities call their language with the same name: Slovenians call it “slovenski” (“slovenian”) and Slovaks also call it “slovensky” (“slovak”). The…

Slovenia launches branding initiative

From Greek mythology and Russian roulette to Japanese technology and Brazilian football, references to countries are all around us. Slovenia possesses many wonderful and distinct features; its government earnestly working on its global reputation. At the end of October, the Ministry of Economy received the business document and handbook of the Slovenia brand. The Ministry…

Re-branding Slovenia

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…

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…