Sunday,
May 06, 2007
Newsweek Calls Italy Best in "Branding"
for Tourists ...Their Secret......
Creating
an effective brand identity for a company is difficult. Doing the same for a
country is practically impossible,
Newsweek
says, it has been so difficult for so many countries, BUT, Italy does such
a damn good job, mostly because Italians have such a healthy love for
their own country.
Indeed,...
the best way to turn your country into an attractive destination for visitors
is to make it a place you'd like to visit yourself.
Branding
a country for tourists requires vision, honesty and citizens who love
themselves.
Japan may be an export
powerhouse, but it has a serious problem when it comes to importing tourists.
Most travelers in the world, it seems, would rather go somewhere else. In 2005,
the most recent year on record, Japanese visitors to other places outnumbered
inbound tourists by 60 percent. So the government decided to launch a
full-barreled advertising campaign to promote the delights of Japan to an
international audience. There was just one problem: the approved slogan, "Yokoso Japan!" a
perfectly nice sentiment requires translation before the people it's aimed at
understand that "yokoso" means "welcome."
Creating
an effective brand identity for a company is difficult. Doing the same for a
country is practically impossible, and yet countries from Australia to Israel have mounted image-makeover
campaigns in recent years. Israel
has been promoting bikini-clad beachgoers and Tel Aviv nightlife, rather than
its contested holy sites. Uganda
prefers to advertise the fact that it is "gifted by nature" instead
of plagued by a brutal past.
Simon
Anholt, founder of the National Brands Index, argues that a country's
"brand" is nothing less than the sum of its politics, culture,
religious traditions, business practices, landscape features and natural
resources. Building an image dependent on so many variables?and subject to the
stereotypes of faraway audiences?is a long and painful process. "The
reality is that most governments never really have an opportunity to think in a
strategic kind of way, and branding offers a good opportunity to discuss
this," says Anholt, whose clients include Botswana,
Iceland, Bhutan and Latvia. The best way for a country
to generate a good image, he argues, is not by conducting clever ad campaigns,
but by implementing good policies. "The most important thing is to tell
the truth," he says.
Or
get others to do it for you. Countries ranging from Costa
Rica to Morocco
have burnished their national brands with clever public-relations offensives
that eschew the pictures of pristine beaches in favor of visitors' telling
their stories. Singapore's
"Uniquely Singapore" campaign, which officials cite as one of the
reasons tourism has grown dramatically in the past few years, included TV spots
that featured foreign visitors describing their trips to the country in their
own words. The Singapore Tourism Board also created a $6.5 million program to
subsidize international film and TV productions in the city-state. "We
believe that movies and TV are an excellent way of creating more awareness of Singapore and
generating buzz in a competitive tourism market," says Lim Neo Chian,
deputy chairman and chief executive of the STB.
The
quirkier the campaign, the better. Tim McColl Jones of M&C Saatchi in
Sydney was one of the architects of the Australian national tourism bureau's
"So where the bloody hell are you?" campaign, which shows Australians
extending a characteristically blunt but friendly invitation to tourists to
check out the country's unique natural wonders. His agency, says McColl Jones,
conducted research suggesting that many outsiders' picture of Australia was
"stagnant," and the campaign aimed at "disrupting
attitudes." It certainly did that; government censors in Britain found the
ad's language offensive rather than cheeky, and threatened to ban it; though
unintended, McColl Jones says, the controversy did help to generate "tens
of millions of dollars in free PR" and sparked debate within Australia as well.
"It's certainly stirred up enormous interest and discussion, both locally
and overseas," he says.
That's
no accident. Experts say that no one should expect to shape a national brand
without taking into account the people who live in the country. "In the end it's the Italian people
who brand Italy,
and they do it so damn well," says Anholt. "And
the countries that haven't quite succeeded at that are the countries that don't
quite love themselves." Among the latter Anholt lists Germany, Japan
and the U.K.
But that may be changing; in 2006 German government and industry used the World
Cup to showcase their country with a multifaceted branding campaign emphasizing
Germans' openness and friendliness. It all helped to make the Cup an undisputed
success, but the main beneficiaries may have been the Germans themselves.
"The Germans made a huge step forward after the [2006] World Cup,"
notes Anholt. "They
suddenly felt what it was like to be Italian to have a healthy love of your own
country." Indeed, perhaps < STRONG>the best
way to turn your country into an attractive destination for visitors is to make
it a place you'd like to visit yourself.
With
Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop in Singapore
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
id/18505688/site/newsweek/
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