One of the congress’ main topics was ‘Re-Branding Greece’. Here are three of the keynote speakers:

Andreas Andreadis:

Dinos Adrianopoulos:

Martin Knapp:

We can only wait now for the Country Brands Index, another celebrated nation branding index, where Greece is considered. I hope it’s released soon. Anyhow, for those interested in the results of this year’s edition of the NBI, you can read the results of the Nation Brands Index 2009 or an analysis of the Nation Brands Index 2009 at Nation-Branding.info.

The interview is as follows:

Professor Papadopoulos, as a renowned country branding scholar in Canada, which do you consider the primary factors for the success of Canada as a leading country brand (2nd place in Country Brands – Index 2008)?

Essentially there are two reasons. One has to do with quality of life, perceptions of people about the general level of development of the country. The other one is the perception of Canada as a peaceful country in international affairs. These two perceptions evolved partly because we are next to the United States, which makes it easy to think of us as a developed country with a very high standard of living. But the U.S. is also a very powerful country, so every time someone gets angry at them, by comparison they look of Canada as a friendlier country. Canada is like a bigger Sweden or Switzerland. It has no negatives, really. It has never done anything wrong: the peace-keeping efforts, the contribution of Canada to the solution of the Suez crisis and so on. All these things developed an image of a peaceful country that doesn’t bother anybody. The interesting thing about Canada, which is in some ways shared by Greece, is that the image of Canada doesn’t have so much content. In our research, every time we go and ask people ‘what do you think about Canada?’, the ratings are always very high. But when we ask them to tell us ‘why’, they just answer ‘nice country’. We ask ‘why is it nice?’, the answer is ‘well, I don’t know’. Yet Canada, much as Greece, has a lot of successes. Canadians have invented everything from basketball to insulin, the telephone and so on. But people don’t know that, they just like the country in a general sense. A very similar thing or even worse happens with Australia. Everybody loves Australia. There are three countries that everyone loves around the world: Australia, New Zealand, Canada. But try to ask people ‘why’… Australia has sheep, we’ve got bears, they are hot, we are cold and that’s it!

Do you think that the reputation of a country could influence the promotion of its products? Could you please elaborate on the Country of Origin Effect on Consumer Behavior?

Definitely there is an effect. Many times the effect is not direct. There are not many people who think that when consumers buy a product, they may buy it because of where it comes from. In another branch of international business, research in investment studies, there is actually a thing called the ‘liability of foreigners’. Foreigners have a disadvantage. Why? One reason is that they don’t know the local customs. However, in the case of imported products, there may be an advantage of foreigners in most countries, in that there is something exotic about them. We are doing some research at the moment where we compare how different companies present their products in advertising in different countries. We have collected about three thousand magazine advertisements from Canada and the United States, and about the same from Italy, Britain and Greece. Among other things, we find that many Greek companies advertise in Greek magazines, for Greeks, using the English language or the Italian language or French or whatever. Because there is an advantage in portraying yourself to be from somewhere else, which brings me to the country of origin. I prefer to use the term ‘country of association’. Take Wind, for example – this is a mobile network here in Greece, but the brand name is English and the country of association is Anglo-Saxon: it is English, it is American, it is British. It’s not German, it’s not Italian, it’s not French. Look, on the other hand, at L’ Oréal or any French brand of cosmetics, or Italian brands for shoes or suits for men. There are these associations between certain countries that are thought to be (and very often are) especially strong in certain product categories. So, companies try to find these perceptions and use them, even if their origin is different, by borrowing an association. So you have Greek wines that have French names. Country of association has a huge impact. Its effect doesn’t necessarily work at a conscious level. It may work subconsciously as well. You go to someone and you ask ‘why did you buy this?’ and he or she might tell you ‘oh, because it’s cheap’ or ‘because it’s the best quality’. They will give you rational reasons. But this is not the way we actually think and behave. People don’t necessarily behave rationally. Most of the time there is a combination of reason and emotion that makes us behave in a particular way, and very often the emotional side is the deciding factor.

You have supported that the key element of a successful nation-branding strategy is to provide an image of trustworthiness regarding both the country and its people at an international level. In your opinion, has Greece managed to develop such an image? Which actions should be implemented in order to enhance its trustworthiness towards public opinion?

The word ’trustworthiness’ doesn’t come up for every country. It comes up as a great strength of countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. People in some countries don’t trust the Americans, for example, and the ratings for France are quite low in some areas. I don’t remember where Greece might score, and I would not know to tell you because I cannot remember of any study that has used this measure for Greece. But I would not guess that this may be a characteristic of Greece.  That may not be a negative thing necessarily – or it actually could be, based on anecdotal evidence. There is an international saying, ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, because of the Trojan Horse. That’s actually a very widespread feeling. Is trustworthiness important in general? Yes, it is. Because it affects tourists, it affects a lot of individual parts of behavior, if you consider things in technical terms. For example, it is very important in business-to-business relationships. Trustworthiness may at times be more important than the price charged for a product or its other characteristics. Trustworthiness translates into things like reliability, the relative value of a product. An interesting case in point is Canada. Among consumers, Canada always scores very high on trustworthiness. Yet, among business people, it does not score as highly. Canadian business exporters to business have a reputation, which they deserve to some extent, of not following through. At the first difficulty some of them give up and run back home. This kind of thing hurts trust enormously. And there are a lot of examples like this. In Canada, we have a foundation called Asia-Pacific Foundation. They did a big study in six or seven countries along the Pacific and the levels of trust they found for Canadian business people were quite low. Independent of country of origin, trust has emerged as a major issue in marketing. Domestically and internationally, it is one of the hottest topics that people study. Trust in everything: trust when you decide what product to buy, trust when you decide to buy that skirt over the other one, from one dealer over another. Trust seems to be a very central theme in human relations, particularly in our time when things are getting busier, and it’s harder to cope with the world around us. That’s why branding has become so important, since a brand is a ‘promise’ that consumers can trust that it will deliver what it says in terms of quality, satisfaction, or its other characteristics.

Which specific nation branding strategies do you believe that Greece should adopt in order to build a competitive image and streamline a clear brand name abroad? Should Greece continue to lay emphasis on its traditional competitive advantages or should it re-orientate its nation-branding policy?

Here is where I will disappoint you because I don’t know, at least not on the basis of research. I don’t think anyone has done the research to find out. I participated in a conference organized by the Athens Institute for Education and Research just after the Olympics, and someone there was presenting the results of the Olympics and what might happen to the image of Greece – and yes, there was a positive image. We also had done some research here in Greece in the mid-90s, which is quite old by now – but I don’t see why anything might have changed – about investments. What we found is that even though there were a few investors who had the usual complaints (bureaucracy or whatever), there were a lot of very positive comments by current investors, by managers of companies that had already invested in Greece. I don’t know what people who are outside of Greece think. Lots of people would see Greece as what it really is in some sense, which is a point for distribution and accessing the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the European Union, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and so on. There might be other countries but Greece seems to have predominance, at least for the Balkans. The last thing I would say about Greece is that even the image about the antiquities and tourism is not necessarily the right image. How many times in Canada people come to me and say, ‘we are going to Greece, tell us where to go. Of course, we want to go to Santorini and Mykonos, we don’t want to stay in Athens at all, maybe one day to see the Acropolis and that’s it’. And I keep telling them ‘don’t even bother going to the Acropolis, you are going to be just another stupid tourist who goes and looks at just some more stupid marbles and columns which would mean nothing to you and you will leave. This way you gain nothing. If you want to enjoy the Acropolis go to Athens and stay for a week. The marbles and columns are important but to appreciate them you must ‘feel’ them. You must walk around, to more than just the Acropolis. You go, you know, to Plateia Kotzia. You look at how the antiquities are all over the place. You try to imagine how the city was, you go to the various museums’. It’s the same with tourism. Everybody goes to Santorini – ok, that’s interesting – and Mykonos – ok, I love Mykonos too – but there are so many other things. And they are not being promoted.  So as not to accuse just the Greeks, there is no country that anybody knows of, anywhere in the world, that has managed to have an overall strategy. All countries have exactly the same problem: they have a Ministry of Tourism that does one thing, there is another Ministry which does something else and so on. I was speaking, two months ago, with the Ambassador of Sweden in Canada, who participated in the development of an amazing new Swedish campaign for country branding. When I asked her ‘how do you coordinate all that’, she said ‘no way to coordinate’.  The only thing you can hope for is that the images presented by various ministries for various purposes would not be conflicting with one another. In Greece you don’t have such a problem. Because the existing images with the antiquities and tourism don’t really conflict with each other. They do hurt Greece, however, in that nobody thinks of the country as modern, industrialized, developed, which it is. In my view, Athens is one of the most beautiful capitals. I’m not saying this because I am an Athenian by birth. Everyone says that Athens is ‘lots of concrete’ and nothing else. Well, go to any city, go to New York – it doesn’t have the avenues we have, the trees in every neighborhood, and yet no says “lots of concrete” about it. Of course, London has Hyde Park and New York has Central Park – but we have the National Gardens and right next is Lykavitos and right above is Alsos Pagratiou and right below is Pedion Areos. So the city has as much green space as many others – but we let this kind of “all concrete” image persist.

Do you think that nation branding can be influenced by negative incidents of current affairs or it is something more “steady” with long term effects?

There can be a great negative effect, but how long will it last, and how bad it is going to be, depends on the nature of the event and which is the country, among other things. For example, we did a study with a colleague in Australia in 1992 and in 1995. Between those years the image of  France declined significantly because the French sank that ship of Greenpeace which was protesting against the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. I don’t have more recent evidence of my own, but a colleague of mine did a new study in 2005 and the image of France was back to where it used to be. It took about ten years but they fixed it up. Why? Because France has a generally good image. It is a big, stable and important country. Greece is not. It starts from a negative point, partly because it is thought of as part of the Balkans, a region with quite a negative image abroad. If a country starts with such an image, it has to be running twice as fast to stay in the same place. On the other hand, for every negative aspect, there are a lot of positives that can be used to balance them. In the case of Greece, there was some positive image created because of the Olympics but it has to be capitalized on to prevent losing it.

In the future, will nation branding last or is it just a temporary trend?

I don’t think it is a temporary trend. l think it is a huge, permanent development. It is very early and a lot of the problems we just talked about occur exactly because it’s too early. It takes time for people to think things through. Nation branding has not existed for more than about 10-15 years. Marketing has been around since antiquity and still most people don’t understand it. We need to get away from the word nation branding, because ‘branding’ is only part of marketing. The correct term is ‘nation marketing’. But since many people still don’t understand what ‘marketing’ is all about, it will take us a long, long time to achieve a correct understanding of ‘nation marketing’. I will give you an example. In Canada there is a TV channel, CPAC, dealing with public affairs. They have a show called ‘The World Today” or something like this and a few years ago they invited me to participate in a discussion about Greece. They had the Greek ambassador, myself, and a lady of Greek origin, a member of the parliament in Ottawa. I said something like ‘we need to promote our country and country branding is important’ and the ambassador became really upset and said something like ‘you cannot promote a country like a detergent or soap, a country is an important sacred thing’. The journalist was a bit surprised at the level of vehemence of the ambassador, but l have had this reaction before. Half an hour later the journalist asked the ambassador what does the embassy in Canada do to attract more investment to Greece. And the ambassador replied that ‘we do a lot of promotion, a lot of advertising’ and the journalist was smiling. At the end he asked how this differs from what the professor had said before and the ambassador graciously accepted that he had been wrong. This is a typical image from people who have grown up to believe that marketing is something bad. We need another ten or twenty years to get away from that logic.

You are a member of the Greek Marketing Academy. How do Greek Marketers stand internationally?

On the practitioner side, I don’t think that there is anybody internationally who knows much about Greek marketers because Greece doesn’t export anything world-known except for a few agricultural products and some processed product brands, like Metaxa brandy. But there are many success stories on the academic side. We have a rather large number of very well-known Greek professors internationally. George Avlonitis, the president of the Greek Marketing Academy, ‘Father George’ of Greek marketing, is well known abroad. Internationally, there is myself, Adamantios Diamantopoulos, who is extremely famous and he works at the University of Vienna. There is another fellow by the name of Konstantinos Katsikeas at the University of Leeds, UK, also very, very well known, and also Antonis Simintiras, who is now in at least part of the time in Thessaloniki but he used to be full time in Britain. There are a disproportionate large number of Greek names in international marketing and international business research in general, which is good.

Public Diplomacy and Nation Branding: Is there difference between the two terms or do they mean exactly the same thing?

They are a little bit overlapping but I wouldn’t say that they are the same. I would imagine that public diplomacy would include some activities and concepts that normally one would not classify as marketing. But that depends on how one can understand public diplomacy. What is public diplomacy? l worked together with Simon Anholt when he launched a journal called Place Branding and Public Diplomacy and we had a lot of discussions about this at that time. One of our big arguments was that if you say public diplomacy and place branding, it means two different things. My view was, why don’t you leave it as ‘place branding’ and let it include everything. Many people call it ‘nation branding’, but as I said before I prefer the term ‘nation marketing’ – and the fully accurate term is ‘place marketing’, because it is not only nations, but also cities and other geographic areas that are relevant to it. Place marketing, since it is marketing, includes a lot of things that go very much beyond diplomacy and communication. Marketing includes pricing, distribution, packaging, corporate design, and so on. Therefore, I see public diplomacy as one manifestation of place marketing. Traditionally, whenever there was an attempt to apply marketing to a non-commercial field, the people in that field didn’t like it. They are always trying to find some nicer way to refer to it. In Ottawa, we have a National Arts Centre and many years ago they established a marketing department to market it – and do you know what they called it? ‘Audience development’ department. Similarly with ‘public diplomacy’, it seems to be a more agreeable term. There is an overlap if you define public diplomacy very very strictly. There would be some differences, there are some activities that diplomats would do that marketers would normally not do but that’s about it.

My compliments to the ICP Forum for another great interview! It seems Greece is finally grasping the need and importance of managing its country brand!

You are the editor of “Nation Branding – Concepts, Issues, Practice” (2008). What is actually NB, besides a logo and a smart, moto-driven advertising campaign?
Nation Branding (NB) does not always require an advertising campaign. The goals of nation branding are extremely diverse and for some of those goals the power of advertising is probably quite limited. For example, when I have conducted research with inward investment agencies, the people working in such organisations do not appear to believe strongly in the power of advertising. Instead, they advocate face-to-face meetings and continual networking with potential investors into their country. On the other hand, the power of advertising is probably much greater in the domain of tourism promotion, where consumer perceptions are perhaps more malleable than those of business investors. Other important techniques of nation branding include diaspora mobilization and public diplomacy, neither of which are advertising-based.

Sophisticated NB theories have started to emerge only recently. Do you believe that NB could at some point constitute a distinct academic field or discipline?
I hope that NB will soon constitute a distinct academic discipline, but the academic world can sometimes be slow to identify phenomena that do not easily fit into pre-existing disciplines. A challenge in establishing NB as a distinct academic field is to bridge the gap between business on the one hand and international relations on the other. This dichotomy is apparent in the gap that separates Nation Branding from Public Diplomacy (PD). Frequently, NB and PD focus on the same issues but there is very little overlap between the business scholars who write about nation branding and the international relations scholars who write about public diplomacy. NB and PD resemble ships passing in the night.

Simon Anholt identifies NB with almost all of a country’s important policy areas. Is NB a technique? Or, is it a political concept?
A conceptual problem with NB is that it is so wide-ranging that it defies easy categorisation. In the terms of your question, the answer would be ‘yes’ to both points – yes it is a technique, and yes it is a political concept. It may not appear to be a very sophisticated definition, but one government official working on nation branding in Asia told me that “nation branding is a big elephant”. In some ways that is an apt metaphor.

Is it possible to influence the way the mass media present and comment on a specific country? Could there be a national strategy to this end?
We need to draw a distinction between ‘influence’ and ‘control’. It is possible for national governments (just like corporations) to exercise a certain degree of influence over the media coverage of their country through the hiring of PR consultancies and the cultivation of positive relationships with media organisations. However, it is not possible for governments to control the mass media, apart from domestically in the case of dictatorships. Governments should worry less about damage limitation and concentrate more on getting a wider range of positive news stories about their country out into the international media.

NB emphasizes on coordination and a single message. Yet, modern democracies are often based on argument, differences and even distinct national identities. How can this issue be strategically managed by the country itself?
The benefits of coordination are often speculated about but there are few concrete examples of successful coordination for other countries to follow. More research is required into this area. As for a single message, my view is that it is impossible to encapsulate the rich diversity of a whole nation in a single message or slogan. There should be different messages according to which objectives are being pursued and which audiences are being targeted. I believe the trend in the coming years will be away from a monolithic approach and instead towards a more segmented strategy.

You have recently participated in the Conference ‘Images ?f Nations: Strategic Communication, Soft Power and the Media’ by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs (January 2009). In the past, you stayed in Greece for quite some time (1989-90). Is Greece changing?  How do landmarks such as  December 2009 Riots or The Museum of Acropolis 2009 affect Brand Greece ?
I think there is a huge difference in perceptions regarding the December 2009 Riots. On the on the one hand, Greek politicians and media are extremely concerned about the negative effects of those riots on foreign perceptions of Greece. But on the other hand, I have not seen any evidence that Greece’s image in terms of foreign perceptions has suffered anything other than very short term damage. When I was at the ‘Images of Nations’ conference in February, one of the other foreign delegates told me that in his opinion, the film ‘Mamma Mia’ has had a much more powerful effect on Greece’s image than the December riots. I think he was right. ‘Mamma Mia’ is an appalling film but it has probably been wonderful for Greece’s image, and will be remembered by most people long after the memories of the December riots have faded.

Are there any countries, which are considered models vis-à-vis NB policies? Could you give us some concrete examples?
I don’t believe that any country has yet mastered the full range of techniques that constitute nation branding strategy. But two countries that are often presented as examples of best practice are Spain and New Zealand. Both countries appear to have established strong nation brands (but not across the full range of nation branding dimensions), although there is debate about just how much – if any – contribution that conscious nation branding strategy made to the successes enjoyed by those countries.

More and more diplomats, academics and marketeers, imbued with distinct cultural identities, are actively involved in NB policies. What is the place to be reserved for each category within the overall NB strategic planning?
It would be wrong to propose a standardised template which categorises the roles of different stakeholders within NB strategy. Every country needs to develop its own, unique solutions. While it is true that more people are taking an interest in nation branding, for many people nation branding is still a new and unfamiliar concept. I have been conducting numerous interviews at Embassies in Tokyo, where I currently live, and I often have to explain to my interviewees what nation branding is before I commence the interview. Also, in many countries, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is deeply conservative and actively hostile to the concept of nation branding because the concept of nation branding does not fit with the traditional professional training of career diplomats. It is obviously extremely difficult to develop a coherent and comprehensive nation branding strategy if a country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has no interest in it. This situation will probably change as a new generation of more communication-minded diplomats assumes responsibility within their respective Ministries of Foreign Affairs, but that process could take several years.

Your presentation in the upcoming (6-9 July 2009) Conference of the Athens Institute for Education and Research (?????R) is entitled ‘Cyprus - A Stakeholder Identification Perspective’. Could you briefly elaborate on your approach?
My ATINER paper represents an application of stakeholder identification and prioritisation principles commonly applied in the corporate world but rarely applied in the domain of nation branding. This approach involves stakeholder mapping, that is, an attempt to identify the full range of stakeholders that could contribute to a country’s nation branding strategy. The next step – which is politically sensitive – then involves prioritising those stakeholders in terms of their power, influence, potential contribution and so on. It may be that the term ‘prioritisation’ is inappropriate and that it would be better not to ‘prioritise’ stakeholders, but rather to develop ways in which every stakeholder can make a positive contribution, no matter how large or small, to the overall nation branding effort. In the case of Cyprus, it was interesting to explore possible ways in which Cyprus can extend its nation brand beyond the twin pillars of tourism and shipping towards a more multifaceted nation brand.

Interview by Nikos Nenedakis and Athina Rossoglou, first published here.

Thanks to Daily Frappé for sharing them!

In fact, now the measurements count many factors besides the tourism and travel dimensions, which were the factors traditionally considered by FutureBrands’s Country Brand Index. Obviously, the inclusion of factors away from the traditional Greek strengths of travel, tourism, culture and history makes the country inevitably rank pretty worse.

Greece only appears twice in the top-ten ranks, in the Art & Culture and History categories, which remain Greece’s country brand stronghold:

More information on the Country Brands Index 2008

Greece is a truly blessed country. With over 2,000 sun-drenched islands, a rich culture and history, world-famous philosophers, and the undisputed birthplace of democracy and the Olympic Games, Greece has inherited many branding treasures. Even through mythology it has 12 gods, presided over by Zeus, unlike the single God of most cultures. It’s simply an irresistible nation of beauty, culture and history. And, in recent times it has become the linchpin of Southeast Europe, leading investment in the region.

Yet despite hosting the Olympics in 2004, Greece has not managed to capitalize on these great brand assets. If managed properly, Brand Greece could produce great rewards for tourism and investment, and elevate Greece’s role as a regional leader in a market of 300 million consumers. In short, Greece is highly undervalued and held back by its own inabilities to successfully mould a brand that directly supports the government’s agenda in political, social and economic terms.

The article can be found here.

1. Give us your own definition of a destination brand
To me, a destination brand is the first mental picture that comes to mind when you hear the name of a tourist destination.

2. What are the reasons that lead countries in establishing a destination brand?
Countries aspire to have one or several (for example, regional) destination brands, because they are attractive, become popular over time and bring a confidence that unbranded destinations do not. Most people looking for a place to spend their vacations prefer to go to Spain or Ireland rather than Bulgaria or Wales respectively, because the two former countries have long-established, better brands. Unless you are really into going to unknown places, Spain or Ireland carry more value, more expectations and better perceptions than Bulgaria or Wales. Less branded destinations mostly appear to provide less value.

3. What are the tools used in order to establish a destination brand?
Countries, regions and cities use several tools to build their brands, which in the tourism-related industries are destination brands. Among them you can count Public Relations, Advertising, even Public Dipomacy, all of them across all media, from print to TV, from the internet to events to policy-making… They are all tools which, if they are properly employed with consistence and persistance, eventually help in building a brand, in this case a destination brand.

4. What are the general characteristics of a destination brand?
The characteristics of a destination brand are the attributes, the feelings that you have towards a destination. Through branding, a destination can earn a brand, which will operate as a shortcut for many exciting sensations and comfortable ideas to the tourist’s stomach. If the branding is very powerful, these sensations are the same for a great number of people in all continents. For example, Switzerland has a powerful brand because it means very similar things to all people in the world. If these impressions are positive (as most of Switzerland’s are), then it is worth zillions of dollars. They save people’s “thinking time” and work as a shortcut to the buyer’s pocket: people trust instinctively most things of Swiss origin.

5. PR in Destination branding: Is it more important than advertising?
Sure. Advertising has an inherent handicap, which is that it is less credible than other tools. In essence, advertising is you saying that you are the best. What if you went to your friends and say that you’re the best friend of the world? It is not credible, it becomes more credible if it is other persons the ones say that you are the best friend of the world. Advertising has its role in brand-building, which is communicating in a persuasive way a message, but you can’t pretend to change the image, that is, the brand of a country with advertising alone. PR, in contrast, allows external sources to speak of your country in a positive light – that is far more credible because it is not you yourself who is saying good things about you.

6. Can you give any examples of successful destination brands that owe their power to PR practices?
Spain is an example of a country that not only has changed a lot, but also has been able to communicate it properly, especially with PR. It has been host of extraordinary events, from the Olympics to the America Cup, from F1 to first-line cultural endeavours. Besides, the government has adopted innovative and modern ground-breaking initiatives, some of which have overcome more advanced countries such as the Scandinavian ones. It all together has resulted in a dramatic shift of the internal and external perceptions about Spain: from a backward and isolated country full of Catholic prejudices to a country which is forward-looking, non-aggressive, friendly and ambitious without being arrogant, certainly a country everybody would like to live in. It attracts because it has a nice behavior to the world, no less.

7. Greece as a destination brand: What are the positive and negative characteristics of Greece’s destination brand?
In all tourist rankings, Greece scores formidably well, so there must be more positive characteristics than negative ones in Greece’s destination brand. However, I do doubt that this good standing can entirely be credited to us Greeks. A very important ingredient of Greece’s destination brand is the landscapes and the weather. These are assets which are not earnt, but inherited. We are very lucky to have one of the most picturesque and beautiful geographies in Europe. Like Croatia with its thousand islands, Switzerland with its Alpine landscapes or Norway with the fjords, Greece is a country truly gifted by nature. Greece’s sun is also a relevant asset in Greece’s touristic brand. However, when you take these assets off, Greece does not perform very well. The service is somewhat poor, attention to detail scarce, and other countries are more welcoming than we are (we are a bit xenophobic). Transport is mostly bad and outperformed by other countries in our ranks such as Italy, Portugal or Spain. We are also pretty inconsistent in pricing: you can get very, very different prices in different locations, which may give the impression that prices are invented. These things are known outside Greece, and thus are part of Greece’s brand. Of course, one good characteristic of brand Greece is Greece’s history – even if the Greek history of the Middle Ages is absolutely non-existent for foreign travellers. A lot can be done in that direction, because we have a wealth of medieval assets which are underrepresented.

8. What was the strategy followed by the Greek Tourism Organisation in order to establish a destination brand for Greece?
I don’t think that the GNTO has followed any strategy to establish a destination brand for Greece. In order for a brand to be established, repetition, consistency and persistance during a large period of time are fundamental, and the GNTO is not in that direction. They change almost every year the ads, the claims, the images, the logos. In essence, they change every year the message of what Greece stands for. If it was not for Greece’s strong image (which resists all of these changes), these changes would lead to fragmentation and weakness. The GNTO is also underperforming in attracting niche markets – they only do mass tourism, which in reality has a lesser income-per-tourist rate. Greece has a brand, but it is a brand built by foreigners with their experiences in Greece over dozens of years, not because the GNTO has tried to establish one. I don’t think it has ever managed Greece’s reputation as a tourist destination.

9. Are you aware of the PR activities that took place in order to establish Greece’s brand?
As I said before, I don’t think the GNTO is pursuing any branding effort, so all of the PR that Greece has done touristically is not aligned with a proper branding effort.

10. Cyprus as a destination brand: Positive and negative characteristics
I am not very well aware of Cyprus as a destination brand. From the distance, I would say that tourism-wise Cyprus stands for great weather (a Mediterranean asset in general), picturesque countryside and above all, big dancing and boozing parties in cities such as Ayia Napa. I don’t think Cyprus has any other feature to the eyes of the casual tourist. I don’t even believe that most people hearing “Cyprus” can place it on the map other than putting it in the Mediterranean. It’s like the Faroe Islands for a Cypriot person. You know it’s going North, but you don’t know exactly where.

The beating to death of an Australian tourist on Mykonos has woken Greeks up to the question of how the rest of the world perceives this country. It is a periodic awakening, usually following senseless deaths of tourists.

Last year two French tourists drowned in the bowels of the cruise ship Sea Diamond, run aground by its captain off Santorini. In 2006 two British siblings died tragically of carbon monoxide poisoning when the boiler of their rented bungalow on Corfu malfunctioned. In 2003 a young Briton was slashed to death with a broken bottle in the Rhodes resort of Faliraki following a night of binge drinking. Such stories are inevitably going to generate headlines in countries whose nationals suffer.

Sometimes the tourism-related stories are objectively important. In the biggest such story in recent years, 121 passengers and crew were killed in 2005 when a Cypriot Boeing 737 failed to compress at high altitude and plunged into eastern Attica. And Greece made international headlines in 2000 when 85 people drowned on board the Express Samina in the country’s second-worst maritime disaster.

Travel and tourism-related stories, along with natural disasters such as last year’s forest fires, also happen to be the biggest international headlines Greece has generated since the 2004 Olympics. This is both good and bad. As one veteran foreign correspondent points out (see article on page 5), it is a sign of how economic and political progress have moved Greece on from the upheavals of civil war, reconstruction and dictatorship between the 1940s and the 1970s; but it is also a signal that Greece is politically and economically trivial – a resort country the rest of the world remembers when the second home market heats up.

The trivialisation of Greece is not all its own doing. The country is partly a victim of the trivialisation of world news. As print media and even television begin to go into the red, news-gathering budgets are being slashed. The only news bureaus in Athens are run by the workhorses of the industry – the wire agencies – which act as a press pool for their clients. Besides them, few news organisations here offer salaried positions. Even active freelancers are few, and a press ministry demand that their dispatches be their chief source of income is a bit of a joke.

The dearth of news-gathering cash is leading to travesties; wire agencies now see their stories cannibalised by would-be correspondents, or sometimes stolen wholesale by desk editors in London and New York who can’t afford to field a journalist (or can’t be bothered to).

Greece is also partly a victim of each country’s natural introspection. With so many foreign nationals visiting (they were the majority of 16 million arrivals last year), any deaths during the news-starved summer months will cause disproportional headlines back home and displace other, perhaps more important, stories.

But if Greece cares about its image globally – and all the indications are that it does – it only seems to remember half the time. Television talkfests buzz with concern over the fallout on tourism and national pride every time a foreign medium criticises Greece; but when the furore is forgotten, it does not seem to occur to anyone that the country’s self-determination is its biggest story.

In the postwar stories, the political and social revolution that was the coming to power of Pasok in 1981, in being the eurozone straggler in 2001 and the country with the lowest expectations to hold the Olympics for some time, Greece was seen as striving for something. Our spectacular foreign policy turnaround in 1999 took Turkey by surprise and we leveraged the European Union effectively enough to nearly solve the division of Cyprus in 2004.

Increasingly, though, Greece seems to be getting bogged down in complacency and an inability to pass economic and social reforms. Either they are not passed to the extent that they are necessary (each administration seeming to be in conversation with the next) or not addressed at all. That is the case in the environment and the perception of corruption and lack of transparency, meritocracy and accountability in the public sector.

When a country seems to be at a stalemate with itself the media tend to lose interest. When it seems to be on the cusp of change the microphones come closer. Without a slew of reforms Greece will only be subject to the stories it cannot generate or suppress – human tragedy and natural disaster. It will be in terms of the media and real terms in the hands of fate.

One foreign correspondent speaking to this newspaper put it best: “There’s no sense of the country having any specific task to complete.”

[Via]