The new issue of the Monocle magazine is devoted to how nations can change how they’re perceived, that is, nation branding. “With corporate brands more powerful than country brands, there’s a lot of work out there for agencies keen to…
Category: Short Blog Posts
The Blog is the place for quicker and shorter entries, as well as for multimedia content.
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…
How the brands of Spain, Portugal and Greece compare
Nation branding guru Simon Anholt’s latest Anholt Nation Brands Index report brings data on Spain, Portugal and Greece. This generated graph shows how the brands of Spain, Portugal and Greece compare according to the report. The first conclusion to draw…
Simon Aholt’s top 10 most striking phrases in Nation Branding
Simon Anholt likes to speak hard. And that’s one of the reasons why as many people love him as hate him. Here are his 10 most striking quotes: “You wouldn’t believe the number of countries which come to me and…
What are ‘touchpoints’ in nation branding?
Branding specialists like to refer to ‘brand touchpoints’ as the instances when consumers interact with a brand. It might be a technical support service, a website, a shop or an employee. When we speak of nation brands, what can be…
Nation Brands Index or Country Brand Index – Which is best?
There are a handful of good nation branding indexes including the Nation Branding Perception Index, the Reputation Institute Soft Power Survey, the Nation Image Index, BrandFinance’s Global Nation Brands league and the always attractive Monocle’s Soft Power Survey, but two indexes usually steal the…
Israel’s brand aids its public relations
An old and dusty article from 1997! has been recovered from my library. In it, the polyedric Sam Vaknin wrote about how Israel was able to manage its image/brand to their convenience and how place-marketed itself to a hotspot in…
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 –…
Nation Branding: A new sort of beauty contest
The Economist newspaper has published an article about nation branding, coinciding with the scandal unleashed with Borat and Kazakhstan: For 15 years you have tried to make the world aware of your newly born country. It is huge—the size of…
I’ve been published at BranDNA magazine!
I am proud to say that Malaysia’s most famous branding magazine, BranDNA, has published one of my articles, “The Need of Branding Greece” in its last issue. It’s a real pride that they asked me to publish it considering the importance…
Brand Malta campaign “a total failure”
At this post about Brand Malta campaign I was skeptical about this branding project by the Maltese authorities. Now it has come out that the campaign has been a failure. Reported at Malta Star: Kurt Farrugia 09 September 2006 Outgoing…
Sloganeering in nation branding
Stolen from www.whisperbrand.com: We found this country slogan analysis performed by the Wall Street Journal. From Incredible India to Uniquely Singapore, each of these place brands make the often repeated mistake in believing that cheerleading is branding. An approach of…