Looking back through history, international events are coveted by their host countries to promote their nations’ brands. The Olympics had successfully repositioned Greece and Spain as attractive nations. And the 1933 Chicago Expo is regarded as a marker for the US recovery from the recession. With the 2010 World Expo on Shanghai’s horizon, can China’s…
In this days of globalization more and more countries are recognizing the need to have a positive brand image. After all, if people perceive a nation in a positive way they will be more likely to visit it, invest in it and buy its products. So governments are spending more and more money on nation…
On March this year, the Ministry of Tourism of Romania launched a call for tender with the overall objective to carry out a “tourism destination brand” for Romania, a project whose maximum budget allocated is 2 million euros. The contract, which was to be awarded following an international public procurement procedure, is to include: research…
Bangladeshis have a persistent grievance that Bangladesh is not justly portrayed in international forums. It has become commonplace for the country to be associated with natural calamities, wavering political situation, corruption and other negative attributes. In most cases, propaganda is blown way out of proportion relative to other parts of the globe. It is unfortunate…
If you follow Nation-Branding.info, you will know that Chile is developing its own nation branding project with the help of Simon Anholt, the reknown nation branding consultant. In a keynote he did last month within Chile’s nation branding project, Anholt delivered the following speech – an illuminating and impressive speech worth reading that somehow summarizes…
The Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index (NBI) is an important benchmark for measuring a country’s brand image and for future management of that image. How the world perceives a country has a dramatic impact on business, tourism and diplomatic influence. Lisa Merriam interviews Laura Latshaw, Senior Vice President, GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media on how the Index was calculated,…
Rime Allaf, a Syrian international consultant specializing in Middle East affairs and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, has written an entry in which she discusses the convenience of Syria entering a nation branding program. According to her, “Syria is not ready for nation branding, not…
This is certainly not an article about nation branding specifically, but it’s interesting to read nonetheless, since it revolves about the relationship between the Che, the revolutionary Cuban leader, and by extension any prominent leader, with the country he is most associated with, Cuba. The author Carlos Alberto Montaner explores the avantages and risks of…
A book on how the Canadian government brands Canada, “Branding Canada: Projecting Canada’s Soft Power Through Public Diplomacy”, was just published last week. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the origins, development and implementation of Brand Canada. University of Ottawa professor, Evan H. Potter, shows how the combined efforts of the federal and provincial…
Luckily most nations were named before the existence of nation-branding. If people would have been as business-minded in medieval times as now we would never have heard of Iceland. Our glorious semi-arctic island of midnight sun and hip nightlife would have been named “Cool-land”. Greenland would have been sued for false advertising. But finally, for…
Argentina has handed Bell Pottinger‘s international PR division a brief to raise its profile in Europe and the US as a business and tourism hub. The brief is thought to be worth close to seven figures. Bell Pottinger Sans Frontieres will manage a nation branding campaign to boost the impact of government tourism and export…
Jose Filipe Torres is considered a world renowned specialist in Country Branding. He is the CEO and Head of Strategy at Bloom Consulting, a Spanish branding consulting company with offices in 7 countries. Since the age of eighteen, Mr. Torres has been working in the consulting and design industry and in 2003 he established Bloom…
