Branding National Identity in an Unequal World

Abstract

Market intermediaries such as location consultants, tourism promoters, and branding specialists exploit the symbolic value of national territories to promote economic development. Although these practices are often justified as a way to “level the global playing field” of market interactions, they typically achieve the opposite effect, reinforcing or creating inequality and status differences. This chapter reviews some of the theoretical assumptions and pragmatic features of place-based marketing and branding, with particular emphasis on the role of judgment adopted by market intermediaries in the cultural economy. The argument advanced here is that symbolic and material systems are co-constitutive in the production of place; and that market intermediaries engage in ongoing practices of valuation to link national identity with material advantage.

Building strong nation brands

“…As a consequence, a nation branding campaign runs the danger of encompassing everything, and as a result may not stand for anything. Aronczyk (2013) provides an interesting case study of the challenges and internal divides over the strategy to turn Canada from “bland” to “brand.”…”

Visual identity of cities: designers’ tools and meanings

“…This search for universality in the work of semiosis shapes and delimits a message with a place that everyone seeks to recognize: a city (Augé, 1995). A city VI is, therefore, the materialization of a very specific reality (Aronczyk, 2013). More complex responses to a city VI include assessing those values that the city is seen to embody in this case, and the judgments on the cultural associations they evoke (Crilly et al , 2008).…”

A cocreational approach to nation branding: The case of Chile

“…Aronczyk (2013) expanded many of Kaneva’s arguments in the book Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity . The key premise in this book emphasized that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, different governments started hiring the services of a group of branding and marketing experts to aid them in the creation and execution of nation branding campaigns.…”

“…Even though Anholt has shied away from that approach in the last few years, proposing now that countries should focus on public policy actions that foster international cooperation to turn them into “good” countries (Anholt, 2020), nation branding was first conceived with a business mindset. Because of its marketing focus, several scholars have criticized nation branding due to its commercialist and capitalist nature (Aronczyk, 2013; Kaneva, 2011).…”

“…These attempts end up being futile because national identities are multifaceted, heterogenous, and contested (Bonikowski, 2017). Nation branding campaigns have also been criticized for using stereotypes to brand the nation, misrepresenting the authentic image of a country to please an international gaze (Aronczyk, 2013; Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016; Kaneva, 2017). These scholars are less interested in advancing theories or models to inform the practice of nation branding and its applied science.…”