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It is now a fairly established assumption amongst branding experts that a country can, to a greater or lesser extent, be regarded as a brand. Numerous examples of branding places (regions, cities, nations) emerged throughout the twentieth century, from international fairs such as that of Paris or Seville where representatives of countries competed to promote their countries economically or the “I love new York” campaign of the 1980´s. A more contentious question amongst experts (academics and business leaders included) is the extent to which a country branding strategy really impacts a nations balance sheet. The age of the practice of country branding is in part to blame for the difficulty involved in answering this question. It is only in recent years that businesses have really started to capitalize on country branding and begin to sell focused brand strategy management to countries, regions and cities. This means that the actual economic impact of a country branding strategy has never really come into question because in the past no one claimed so boldly that good place brand strategies = more money. It also means that any place brand strategies that have been implemented have only been done so recently and cannot really be expected to yield tangible results this quickly. Another question all together is the difficulty of measuring the direct financial impact of a brand strategy. This dilemma applies equally to country branding as it does to any other type of branding and valuing brand equity is a notoriously difficult and inaccurate practice. The three traditional approaches are i) Take the difference between the value of all the tangible assets of a company and the companies overall value ii) Compare ´no-name´ products with branded products iii) Derive the value of the brand from the positive effect of the brand on the consumer´s psychology. The main difference in difficulty I see between measuring a companies brand equity and a places is the amount and complexity of data required to come up with meaningful measurements and conclusions. i.e. a companies shareholders and possible consumers is a minute figure in comparison to the amount of people that could possibly travel to or invest a country. This could be half the population of the planet. (Rob)
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