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, it seems.
These problems haven’t prevented Olins to mantain a relationship with Poland. On November 2010, Wally Olins was invited to a conference at the Polish chamber of commerce in Krakow. In this interview, Grzegorz Kiszluk, chief editor of Polish business portal Brief.pl, asks Wally Olins a few questions about nation branding and Poland.
And here’s a short speech by Wally Olins at the press conference:
Can you please clarify: is Wally Olins working with Poland or not at the moment? The interview is from November 2010, so what is the situation now, 5 months later?
I am not quite sure what this news piece is about? Is Wally Olins working or not working with Poland? The underlying tone seems to be that Poland is a complex project! Nation branding is a complicated process and questionable if it is possible to brand a nation or not. I wrote about the issue of Nation Branding in the Place Branding Journal in 2005 and came to the conclusion that branding a nation is probably not achievable due to the complexity of a “nation”. What is possible is to use the tools of branding to raise positive awareness of the nation and its brands or the country in a market with the end goal to increase the nation’s prosperity.
As far as I know there is no branding Poland project active. Wally Olins was only invited to the Krakow Chamber of Commerce, that’s all.