nation branding
Four years after briefly stopping off in Ghana on his way home from a Group of Eight (G-8) summit, US President Barack Obama lands in Dakar on Wednesday night at the start of his first extended visit in his current designation, to the continent of his Kenyan father’s birth. But he is expected to give Kenya a miss, as its president is under indictment from the International Criminal Court.
Qatar, the smallest Gulf monarchy, has become a global brand. Securing the 2022 World Cup was a PR triumph. It plans to compete to host the 2024 Olympics. It has a glittering portfolio: Harrods, the Shard, Paris St-Germain football club. Doha's Islamic art museum is a brilliant example of money in the service of high culture.
A previous Culture Post explored cultural assumptions about who is the ‘public’ in public diplomacy and suggested an expanded vision of “the public” that includes the domestic, diaspora, and foreign publics. Failure to see a public and the role it plays can leave a nation vulnerable to blind spots in its public diplomacy.
Cape Town Tourism's Facebook campaign, Send Your Facebook Profile to Cape Town, has won a Cannes Lions Gold Award for Cape Town Tourism's advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather. The prize was awarded in the Branded Content Category (Best Use or Integration of Digital or Social Media) making them one of only two 2013 Gold Award winners from South Africa.
Some will say that after a considerable amount of time, expansion is the first piece of good news coming from Old Lady Europe. However, not everyone is enthusiastic about it, especially in Croatia – the 28th member as of July 1st. To put it more clearly, the very first toast could leave some with a bad taste in their mouth should they make it with prosek – the indigenous Dalmatian dessert wine variety. Accession to the EU could mean – hello EU, goodbye prosek!
An even more important lesson to learn from marketing, concerns the intricate fragility of Brand South Africa. Much as militant unionists might abhor the notion of globalisation and the principle of capitalism, a stark, non-debatable fact of life is that South Africa cannot survive in isolation.
To mark the five-year anniversary of that designation, organizers of the annual George Town Festival have amped up the island's cultural offerings, stuffing a huge amount of art, film, music, dance and food into a single month. Despite the heritage connection, the festival isn’t just an ode to the city’s history.
China’s President Xi may not have talked about his dream --- what he calls the “China Dream”--- during his first “face-to-face” talks with U.S. President Obama, but some perceptive China watchers and analysts have written about its meaning and implications for all countries of the world.