Is Tyler Brûlé a new nation branding evangelist?

The flamboyantly punctuated Tyler Brûlé, the known global style guru and editor in chief of Monocle magazine, has in recent weeks shown strong interest in nation branding and country brands. In ‘Fast Lane’, his weekly column at the Financial Post, the chieftain of “the Lufthansa audience”, as he calls Monocle’s reader base, has touched the…

Britain at the Nation Brands Index 2010

In mid October we reported about the release of the 2010 Nation Brands Index. Information about the survey results was scarcer than in previous editions, yet substantial details were known across a number of print and online media news. The Nation Brands Index is certainly not a survey for public consumption, but a tool for…

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…

Monocle re-brands Britain

Monocle magazine has in its September edition a special feature on ‘rebranding Britannia’. For those who don’t know, Monocle’s editor in chief is the flamboyantly punctuated Tyler Brûlé, former Wallpaper founder and columnist at the Financial Times – a style icon and a trendsetting guru. As Brûlé himself explains, ‘For our September issue, we’ve decided…

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…

Google Suggest reflects fame of countries

Just a quick research. The new Google Suggest feature of the search engine helps find out the real fame of countries… England is… a nation of shopkeepers Italy… is a part of what continent Scotland… is not a real country Portugal… is located where Belgium… is boring Sweden… is socialist (neutral atheist) Iceland… is green and…

Re-naming the UK

One of the tenets of a powerful brand is to have an inequivocal name. The same rule applies to nation branding. Quite recently, Paula Scher addressed this issue, among others, in her essay about America’s identity (and awkward name). But the United States is not the only example – what about the UK? “United Kingdom” is not…