A country impacted by armed conflict for more than 50 years needs a constant fuel on its international brand campaign to surpass the negative perception of those who have not visited the country and build strong reasons to vanish misconceptions.
ProColombia, the Colombian International Promotion Organisation and the manager of the country's brand, faces the challenge of creating a meaningful and deep campaign with powerful calls to action that invite target audience to discover the "New Colombia". We need to dig deep and understand the reasons for foreigners to choose Colombia as a place for living or visiting; going after this type of insight would give us strong clues to identify common patterns among all those visitors that claimed falling in love with Colombia, hoping to surpass aspects commonly shared with other countries like experience and landscapes.
This paper illustrates the main findings of a multi-country study carried out by Market Dynamics International between May and September 1999 on behalf of RAI International, the content provider for the international market (via cable and satellite) of RAI - Radio Televisione Italiana. The paper explores the issue of what cultural identity means in todayâs global world; what superficial and deeper changes cultural identities undergo (the original, the current, the local) when transplanted elsewhere (or inherited or adopted); how the original identity gets integrated into and combines with other cultural identities (within the same person, or a cultural community, and in different countries); and which identity features are the strongest and the weakest. It illustrates the benefits of using a rather unconventional, although rigorous, methodological approach to culture-specific multi-country research, from both the client's and the researcher's points of view.
It could be argued that the most significant development in recent years has been the growth of world trade. The benefits which have accrued to those countries who have participated actively in the phenomenal rise of world trade may also be seen to have provided the spur which ultimately provoked the profound changes currently taking place in Eastern Europe and South Africa. One of the first manifestations of the growth in world trade was the emergence of the multinational corporation - powerful global organizations often with turnovers exceeding the entire gross national product of half the countries in the United Nations. A more recent result is what has been described as the "increasing pluralization of consumption" i.e. people being exposed to more products from different countries. The latter development in particular raises the question of the image people have of different countries and the impact of this image on a wide range of purchasing decisions. This in turn raises the issue of national stereotypes. The question of national stereotypes has been dealt with extensively in the literature on prejudice and ethnocentricism. In some of its more extreme manifestations this century, racial prejudice or feelings of racial superiority have led to war. The major wars and all of the "minor" trouble spots that continue to erupt from time to time can be blamed partly on the consequences of the stereotyping of one community by another. But the subject of this paper is to do with the consequences of this stereotyping for a country's economic performance. The paper argues the case for considering countries as brands and discusses the problems of managing and measuring national brand images.
As international trade grows and consumer are faced with an increasing proliferation of foreign brands in their domestic markets, they increasingly use country of origin cues as an aid in evaluating products. At the same time, producers needing to establish unique positions in highly competitive markets, and government needing to protect domestic producers from imports, make increasing use of a variety of product origin cues in advertising, packaging, labelling, and branding. In spite of growing interest in the effects of the made-in concept on buyer behaviour, little is known about the correlates of product images and about the effects of such images on behaviour. This study proposes a model of the country of origin effects. The model was tested using LISREL, a second generation analytical procedure, on data drawn from a large-scale cross-national study of made-in images. The model suggests that buyer behaviour is affected by consumer evaluations about various foreign products, that product evaluations are dependent on consumer beliefs about these products' quality, and that these beliefs are strongly affected by consumer familiarity with products from a given country, and by beliefs about the country itself and its people. Strategic implications arising from the model, which was validated in eight separate tests, are discussed.
The research proved that a proportion of tourists, mainly in the German market who had never been to Cyprus, considered the island unsafe mainly because of its proximity to the Middle East and the existing situation with the Turkish army on the island. Following the results of this research, corrective action was taken to remedy this negative image and promote the positive aspects of Cyprus as a tourist destination. Today, the results are obvious. The arrivals between 1980-1987 have grown from 353,375 to over one million in 1987, an annual growth rate of 17%..
The 1969 saw the beginning of the civil disturbances which, as we all now know, were to escalate far beyond anything that could have been imagined back in those days of relative innocence. The small down- turn in visitors in that year coincided with an increase in budget for the Board, possibly because of the setting up of the brand new Boards in Britain. This fall in visitor numbers coupled with an increase in funding led to an advertising campaign in Great Britain (then, as now, our biggest market) in late December 1969/ early 1970. More than double the number of newspaper insertions in the previous campaign were placed and for the first time an N.I.T.B. campaign made use of television advertising.
This paper presents the results of a European study which examined the attitudes of the professional and managerial social classes in Belgium, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and West Germany towards the image of countries and companies identified with them. It indicates the importance of the image of the country of ownership of a company, when that company is trying to sell its goods or services abroad. The results, country by country, were strikingly similar.
Gallup International was commissioned by Hakuhodo Inc., acting on behalf of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, to conduct a survey on the Image of Japan in Europe today. Approximately 1000 people were interviewed by the Gallup affiliates in each of the following five countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. A feature of the survey was the use of standardised demographics across all five countries in order to facilitate comparable analysis for each country.