An update on Finland’s country branding programme

The Finnish Foreign Ministry’s press release, according to which former Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila was to start work on creating a country brand for Finland, took many by surprise in September 2008. According to the press release, Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Stubb had set up a high-level delegation to develop a national brand for Finland….

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…

The Slovenia brand book

In late 2009 an article was published titled “Branding Slovenia”. Even if it was just a nation branding experiment, it shed some light on Slovenia’s brand image and how the half-Alpine, half-Adriatic country was trying to manage its reputation. Some weeks later, we had Maja Konecnik as guest writer, sharing her opinion on the Slovenian…

Chile’s nation brand – mind the gap

Think about Chile and if you’re just like most people, you’ll think about a narrow strip of land in South America where there was the infamous Pinochet dictatorship and little else. Probably it’s a poor Latin American country with lots of barefoot indigenous children on the streets, like in Ecuador or Guatemala. The reality is…

Branding Slovenia

Slovenia has an identity crisis. People confound it with Slovakia. The names of the two countries, and even their flags are virtually interchangeable. Their languages are also both Slavic and so similar that both nationalities call their language with the same name: Slovenians call it “slovenski” (“slovenian”) and Slovaks also call it “slovensky” (“slovak”). The…

Welcome to Costazzurra!

As we mentioned in our last post, the new issue of the Monocle magazine is devoted to nation branding. One of the main stories in this issue is about Costazzurra (or Costazzurria) , an imagined country born after a succession crisis within the Grimaldi dynasty. “A failed Italy and a Grimaldi household in shambles presents…