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…
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…
Something’s going on in Africa. Just a few days after a summit was held in Accra to explore a country brand identity for Ghana, another large-scale nation branding event took place in the continent, this time in Johannesburg, South Africa. Over 300 representants from the African media, business and political leadership, together with nation branding…
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 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…
On a recent essay published some weeks ago titled Aid: The Double-Edged Blade, country branding expert Simon Anholt wrote that eminently good, humane initiatives like charity and foreign aid, while done with the noblest intentions, usually harm a country’s image to the extent of branding it as poor, hopeless, unable and disgraced (hence the need…
Ireland is on the spotlight lately from a nation branding perspective, and not only because of its beautiful green fields and good beer. The country has gone financial turbulences in the last months, and the country is in a process of re-thinking itself. This is a process other countries like Greece, Iceland and Dubai, which…
Ireland will launch a national website that aims to promote the country’s by accumulating existing information and resources and amalgamating it at one location, as an exercise of nation branding. At a seminar in Dublin on May 26th, 2010, where the concept was officially unveiled, it was announced that the portal would be a funnel…
Jason Dobbins from Politicsinvivo.com has written a good piece about some aspects of the nation branding industry – from his own personal perspective as a politics blogger: The arrival of the World Cup is always a great time to remember that nationalism ain’t going anywhere. The best matches, well for someone who writes a political…
In this article, Slovak author Martin Búr explores nation branding examples such as the UK’s, New Zealand’s, Australia and South Africa. He also discusses the importance of the filming industry in shaping perceptions, and traces some ideas on how Slovakia could elaborate a nation brand story. As a result of globalisation, many regional characteristics are…
Does the continuing debate on the rights of Muslims in the Netherlands affect the country’s nation brand? Does the rise of anti-immigration politicians in Dutch politics affect the image people have of the Dutch? Does hosting international insitutions like the International Criminal Court improve the country’s brand image? The Dutch government has investigated these perceptions,…
“If countries were cars, which would be the fastest, the safest and the sexiest? The answers are no accident. Nations are increasingly calling on advertising agencies to rebrand them as they have done other big business”, writes journalist Jo Bowman. She has written such a good story for CNBC magazine on the field of nation…
