Simon Anholt on Brand Sweden

In early July 2010, nation brands expert Simon Anholt was invited to the city of Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland. He was invited by the Council for the Promotion of Sweden, which includes Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Enterprise, Energy and Communications, the Visit Sweden office, the Swedish Trade Council,…

2010 Country Brand Index: Brand value goes North

A noteworthy trend can be seen by looking at the rankings in the 2010 Country Brand Index. In Europe, nation branding value is moving from South to North. Without a doubt, the countries winning more nation-brand value this year at the Country Brand Index were the Scandinavian ones. They all have improved their ranks in…

Nation Brands Index 2010 released

A new edition of the popular Nation Brands Index has just been released today. According to the Nation Brands Index 2010’s earliest known details, the United States continues to have the world’s most valuable country brand, a place it obtained in in 2009 after Obama’s election. There are minor changes in this year’s edition of…

How do you build a country brand?

You can’t really, but you have to start somewhere. Big global brands such as Nike and IKEA are large enough in revenues to surpass the GDP of a small country. However, their brands are managed better than most countries. This is a shame because powerful country brands that are carefully managed tend to yield massive…

‘Brand Sweden’ goes local

Part of Sweden’s celebrated image can be credited to the fact that the country has a unified brand platform, the result of incorporating the Swedish Institute, VisitSweden, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Invest in Sweden Agency and the Trade Council into the Council for the Promotion of Sweden, which generated a common brand platform for most of…

The brand symbiosis of Sweden and IKEA

Countries and corporate brands are often interlinked. Commercial brands often feed country brands, and vice-versa: corporate brands are sometimes ambassadors of their country of origin and, at the same time, they get further traction by appealing to their country of origin. Corporate brands whose corporate values match those of their country of origin include Apple…

Sweden should improve its nation brand in Asia

Liselott Bergman, senior analyst at the Swedish Institute has written a short piece here claiming that Sweden, which usually gets great scores in all nation branding ranks, should not forget that its good reputation tends to disappear as one gets far from the Nordic country. Thus, Bergman claims that Sweden should improve its brand in…

Discussing Brand Sweden

The classic image of Sweden is a very Scandinavian one with a lot of blond people capering around in the woods, diving into frozen lakes, and so forth. It’s very much a protestant, white, northern European and somewhat bucolic story, but a growing number Swedes are not white, male or protestant. As a consequence, this…