Wally Olins on Brand Mauritius

An old interview in which the reknown branding expert Wally Olins answered some questions about Mauritius’ nation brand: Interviewer: After some initial resistance, today more and more countries are turning to branding as an effective way to make their voices heard on the the global marketplace. You have personally been pioneering Nation Branding for the…

Brand Qatar – To B or not to be?

In today’s increasingly global marketplace, where plethora of choice and successful mass production have resulted in thousands of advertising messages bombarding us every day, it is interesting to note the rise of the brand. As a measure of quality, consistency and trust in a company’s products and services, the brand has taken centre stage in…

Branding conference to be held in Belgrade

The 7th International Brand Conference “Branding regions and cities – foreign direct investments, export growth and tourism development” is going to be held on 10 June 2011 in Belgrade, Serbia. This year’s edition is particularly interesting to Nation-Branding’s audience since the Fair has a particular focus on place branding. With the program of highest quality…

How Acanchi won Isle of Man branding tender

In January 2005, the government of the Isle of Man, a tiny island in the middle of the Irish Sea (between Ireland and the UK mainland), appointed nation branding agency Acanchi to raise the island’s profile by developing a country brand. A long list of possible consulting companies were drawn up and the opportunity was…

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…

The top 10 most influential country branding experts 2010

The time for our biannual Top Nation Branding Experts panel has arrived! As in the previous 2008 edition, this list contains the top 10 most influential nation branding experts. But this year, we have developed a Gartner-like magic quadrant with the leaders, the experimeted, the emerging and the followers. See it below. And finally here are…

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…

What is nation branding, Brand Ghana CEO writes

Some days ago we published a blog post at which we listed 10 things nation branding isn’t. Now we have the opportunity to define nation branding by the what it is and not by what it isn’t. That’s because Mathias Akotia, the newly-appointed Chief Executive Officer at the newly-founded Brand Ghana Office, has written an…

David Lightle: an unconventional nation branding expert

Nation branding is a newborn field in the crossroad of marketing, public diplomacy, international relations and political strategy, and most aspects of it remain to be invented. Within this context, one can find many different approaches to the science of nation branding, from the Simon Anholt’s policy-making approach to the corporate identity-inspired approach as proposed…

Austria brand image hit by Fritzl scandal

“Land of the Lost Children”, “Land of the Dungeons”, “Horror land” – there are growing concerns among Austrians about the international image of their country. One commentator in the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard sums it up by quoting a German taxi driver as commenting on the country’s “beautiful mountains – and such ugly cellars”….