Whether based on individual national objectives of trade, investment, and travel/tourism, or vying for specific organization memberships such as inclusion in the EU, positioning a country's brand is more important than ever for the largest to the smallest of countries. In the last five years, Poland, Croatia, South Africa, Australia, and India are just a few examples of countries that have launched branding campaigns via the web, print, and television.

While the notion of nation branding is relatively new compared to the history of nations, the practice has always existed through public policies and economic development. In 1998, a British marketing consultant named Simon Anholt wrote an article arguing that places and nations can be equated as brands and was surprised by both the outrage and interest he received from academics and government officials alike at the notion of a nation brand. Since then a boutique field has not only emerged but is flourishing.

But, Anholt points out, like branding for the commercial sector, branding nations is a mixed bag with often mixed results. "The problem is there's no widely accepted theory of branding…about what it is and what it hopes to achieve. The consequence is that there are a lot of countries who are confused…and have a lot of different ideas of what branding is all about. And most of them, to tell you the truth, are achieving very little."

Anholt points out that a number of countries have spent quite large sums to create an expensive corporate identity with ad time on television channels such as CNN to essentially create a tourism campaign, when really what the countries were hoping for was much broader than just creating tourism awareness.

Lia Proedrou, founder and head of BrandExcel, a branding agency based in Athens, Greece, whose clients include the Greek Organization of Exports, points to some of the reasons why.

"The big problem with branding countries, in my opinion, is that there are many different organizations that operate within these countries—and this is especially evident within the European countries. You have the tourism organization which is an entity of its own and quite ‘dinosauric.’ Then you have export organizations, the ministry of development of economic growth, food products, etc.—and everyone's doing their own thing. It's nearly impossible to get everything together and really host it under the country's umbrella…Instead of developing one entire brand for the country that can host everything, everybody's doing their own thing."

Proedrou cites India and Australia as good examples of countries that are branding nearly everything they do under one umbrella successfully. Anholt's Nation Brands Index, an analytical ranking of the world's nation brands, ranks the UK as number one on its list based on consumer perceptions from 35 countries of the "cultural, political, commercial and human assets, investment potential, and tourist appeal of each nation."

Surprisingly, non-democratic countries are just as likely these days to be interested in nation branding as democratic ones. An interesting note is that democracy creates a lot of barriers to creating and controlling an image, whereas it's much easier to control a nation's image (for better or worse) through a dictatorship or otherwise non-democratic government. The dichotomy in governmental structures, as insidious as it sounds, is essentially akin to how corporations are run and branded, which as everyone knows are far from being democratically run.

While corporations are well known for taking strengths and weaknesses and essentially putting the sole focus on the strengths, Thomas Cromwell and other nation branding experts point out that positioning a country brand is about positioning the country in the best way possible given its strengths and weaknesses.

Every nation has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, but this is especially evident when a country's image and reputation are that of war ravaged, famine and poverty stricken, or otherwise corrupt and chaotic. Even if these factors are no longer actively at play, the stigma associated with the country obviously affects tourism, foreign aid, and investment—such as is the case of Croatia and the former Yugoslavia countries now a decade past their civil war.

As Simon Anholt points out, it's not about "pretending everything is fine when it isn't." The country's government has to change policy internally to effectively reposition its brand.

No amount of spin could have branded South Africa as a bright star in its days of apartheid. Over a decade since the country is not only democratic, it's a brand. "Brand South Africa," the creation of the International Marketing Council of South Africa, offers a vibrant, colorful, and unified website serving as the gateway for tourism and economic development. The government reported a record 2.5 million page impressions for its site in March 2007.

Clearly, it's a new day in the world.

Source : brandchannel.com