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!

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

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]

The report is based upon the tone of the mention every UNO country gets every time in leading world media. With algorithms, EastWest can analyze whether the mention’s tone is positive or negative. According to EastWest, the algorithm not only uses a vast lexicon comprising 16,000 words and phrases, but also analyzes grammatical connections, not just word proximity. I’ve done a bit larger mention of this new report on my website on Nation Branding.

Here are the top-27 results for Q2 2008:

Not a bad place for Greece, considering that 192 countries were analyzed, but I guess there’s room for improvement.

The GNTO, Greece’s National Tourist Board, has posted in its website the spots that will be aired on TV and other media -rich platforms. They intend to convey Greece’s “the true experience”, but in my eyes all of them fail to communicate it convincingly enough.You can watch them and make your own opinion by visiting http://www.visitgreece.gr/pages.php?pageID=951&langID=2

According to data released today by FutureBrand’s panel Country Brand Index 2007, Greece is the 9th most powerful country brand. While this is an impressive position, the fact is that Greece has lost appeal. In last year’s survey, as I mentioned in this previous post about Greece’s 2006 country brand ranking, Greece ranked 5th. As the authors of the study remark, Greece “has great country assets, but needs to be steadier with its brand efforts”.

Another paragraph relating to Greece says

Greece is a good example of a country brand that feels very advertising oriented. The campaigns are different year to year, with little apparent synergy or attempt to deepen any established equity. “Explore your senses” is an interesting idea, but it seems superficial. Ads focus only on the sense of sight and the idea does not appear to be extended in a meaningful way. If Greece is about exploring your senses, why not create ads for all five senses, orient the website this way, create materials that engage the senses, etc.?

You can check the 2007 study here

Greece is the ‘guest country’ of the Q2 2007 NBI: it was chosen because it has long been conspicuous by its absence – it is one of the few longer-standing members of the European Union and one of the few major tourism destinations not to have been included in the NBI.

Greece, of course, also has the Olympics in its bloodstream. Not only was it the birthplace of the Games, but Athens was host to the last Summer Olympics in 2004. In a relatively small country such as Greece, we would expect a successful Olympics to lead to more positive perceptions of the country as a whole, and not just the host city. There are indications that this happened in Spain and Australia after the Barcelona and Sydney Olympics.

Greece was ranked 17th in the Q2 2007 Anholt Nation Brands Index, just behind Ireland and in front of Belgium. As this was Greece’s first time in the survey, we cannot tell whether its brand is improving or not, and if it is, whether this is likely to have been influenced by the Athens Olympics. Nevertheless, the results in the latest NBI survey provide a comprehensive picture of Greece’s brand as a nation and some pointers to what may be influencing it.

Greece’s dominant brand dimension is tourism. The survey placed it only just behind Italy at the head of the tourism league, with strength in all three areas that make up the dimension. Its people were ranked 6th for the welcome visitors expected to receive.

Greece was the leading European nation for heritage, both built and cultural. Heritage boosted its score in the culture dimension where it was 10th, but it was also seen to have strength in contemporary culture for which it was ranked 8th.

Apart from these areas, Greece languishes in the middle and lower reaches of the brand tables. Considering its identification with sport during the 2004 Olympics, and its victory in the European Soccer Championships in the same year, its 20th position for sporting excellence is a poor result. This suggests that Greece has failed to consolidate and build on its reputation as a successful modern sporting nation. Greece’s exports come in at 26th out of 38. In governance, it is the lowest-ranked member of the pre-2003 EU, coming in at 19th place.

Greece’s strength is in tourism, but that contrasts with other areas, particularly Immigration/Investment and Governance. Greece is not at present a country many people would be attracted to live or study in, and its government has less credibility than most of its fellow EU members.

Greece may take comfort from the fact that it is doing better than Portugal in brand terms. Portugal joined the EU five years after Greece, and has also not managed to convince the world that its economy and governance are near the level of most members of the Union. What is more, its tourism sector, according to our survey, is built on weaker foundations than Greece’s.

On the other hand, Spain, which joined the EU at the same time as Portugal, has built a more robust brand, stronger than or equal to Greece and Portugal in all six dimensions. Spain is a bigger country, which usually helps in brand building. It also hosted a successful Summer Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 and continued to build on that success.

Turkey’s image of Greece

Of course, not every nation has the same view of Greece. The most positive perceptions about Greece came from the Americas, where Mexico ranked Greece 13th. Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the USA also placed it above average. However, what is most remarkable about the range of positions Greece was given by our panels is how narrow it was compared with most countries. Only eight places separated 90% of its rankings.

The major exception was Turkey. The world’s view of Greece is summed up in the chart up, while that of Turkey is shown in the graph with a moustache-like shape. Turkish panel respondents acknowledged Greece’s strengths in tourism and culture, but not to do so would to some extent undermine their own. Aside from these dimensions, however, the Turkish panel were extremely ungenerous in their responses. Overall, they placed Greece at 27th. It seems that intra-regional public diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean still has some work to do.

Given that images trigger perceptions and perceptions help shape decisions, states place great emphasis on building and projecting attractive images of themselves. Especially in today’s competitive world, countries around the world meticulously design and carefully implement their national communications strategies.

Gifted by Nature with a remarkable landscape and by Man with an outstanding Ancient civilization that is as relevant in modern times, Greece has always been loved and admired. In addition, she is identified with some of the most powerful brand names in history, such as Democracy, Philosophy or the Olympics.

Her recent successes, with the Athens 2004 Olympics being a prime example, have come to build and expand on such positive perceptions. Since the Games offer by default any one host the chance to present oneself before a watching world, Greece seized that opportunity to unfold the full spectrum of her comparative advantages. It was Greece as a competitive market in a plethora of sectors, like energy, the maritime industry, the financial sector, or infrastructure; it was Greece as a gateway to all of South-Eastern Europe, a region that, once a cleavage impeding our contact with friends and partners, currently aspires to follow in our steps of economic development and active participation in the Euro-Atlantic organizations; and it was Greece as a secure and reliable international partner in carrying out challenging tasks. Hundreds of millions of citizens around the globe — from state leaders and opinion makers to tourists, businessmen, investors or students— were engaged in the image and the pulse of today’s Greece.

The General Secretariat of Information conducted an international survey, questioning a single sample in two different phases (i.e. “waves”), before and after the Athens Olympics, and observing potential shifts in attitudes. The data indicate that while traditional attributes identified with Greece remain strong, the new stereotype has now been enriched with new ones.

More specifically, the attributes most strongly identified with Greece are the following:

• Beautiful Landscapes
• Culture
• Family Values
• Patriotism
• Hospitality
• Fun
• Cooperative
• Emotional

The following attributes present the highest increase between the two waves:

• Creativity
• Progress
• Teamwork
• Security
• High Quality of Services
• Stability
• Discipline

Significant improvement is also observed in attributes like:

• Cooperative
• Social Sensitivity
• Order
• Rational
• Care for the Environment
• Modern Infrastructure

Telling is the fact that the following traits present the most significant rise in their respective ranking, among the 30 observed attributes:

• Progress (from the 16th to the 11th position)
• Security (from the 20th to the 14th)
• High Quality of Services (from the 25th in the 17th)

It becomes apparent that two clusters of attributes now make up the modern stereotype on Greece: on the one hand, there are the emotional attributes like “sun,” “sea,” “fun” and “hospitality” that favor traditional comparative advantages of the country, such as Culture and Tourism. The second cluster, on the other hand, refers to rational attributes such as “High Quality of Services”, “Security”, “Progress”, “Creativity”, “Discipline”, and “Teamwork” and embraces non-traditional Greek comparative advantages. The fact that Greece is now perceived as a stable and reliable environment and Greeks are seen as credible partners has an invaluable added value that is transferred to our products and services. All in all, Greece has been repositioned on the global map of perceptions.

Close monitoring of printed and electronic media by the Greek Press and Communications Offices Abroad (which operate in 33 countries and under the supervision of the Secretariat General of Information) confirms that positive perceptions are increasingly stronger. Specifically, Greece now attracts the interest— mostly in a positive light— of the international community as a whole and on the whole range of her comparative advantages: economy, tourism, culture, banking, shipping, energy, infrastructure and sports. Greece, with numerous successes ranging from her brisk growth rate and the historic agreement for the construction of the Burgas – Alexandroupolis oil pipeline to successfully presiding over the United Nations Security Council and actively supporting humanitarian missions around the world, is perceived as an attractive partner on a plethora of fronts.

In fact, some titles speak loud and clear: the leading French newspaper Le Figaro calls “Greece, the New Energy Crossroads”, while The Wall Street Journal makes reference to “Greece cuts deficit, keeps robust growth; a lesson for others?”. In another indicative example, George Pauget, Cr?édit Agricole – Executive Director, notices in the Greek newspaperKathimerini that “[Greece] provides us access to a developing market and a fast-evolving region”.

Capturing the world’s feelings as we read and heard them during the Games (phrases like “They Did Wonders” still echo in people’s hearts), we designed a communications strategy about a…“Wonderful Greece”.

The logo, which embraces all of Greece’s comparative advantages under a unique communications identity and sends out a unified message, is widely used in the international campaign of the Ministry of Tourism and the various activities of the Hellenic Foreign Trade Board while it has been adopted by the City of Athens and appears on communications projects of the Secretariat General of Information. At the same time, it embraces an increasing number of important exported products, with the virgin olive oil being the primary example.

In recent years, Greece has “seized the day” to project her true image abroad: the image of a credible and prospering country, a beacon of peace and stability for the whole world and an efficient gateway for Southeastern Europe, a region of more than 160 million citizens. The world has thus come to perceive her anew. The communications strategy designed and implemented by the Greek state only aims to maximize what is a Wonderful time for Greece!

Greece ranked 5th for overall country branding according to the second annual Country Brand Index 2006 (CBI). The Index was released in London at the World Trade Market, an annual exhibition held for the global travel trade. This is the official release text:

The CBI identifies countries as “brands” and emerging global travel trends in terms of foreign exchange earnings and job creation. The world’s fastest economic sector pertaining to country branding is travel and tourism and accounts for more than 1 of every 11 jobs worldwide.Greece ranked very high in a number of categories, reflecting the country’s exquisite historical and natural resources, wide variety of holiday options, and the all important “enjoyment” factor. The categories in which Greece excelled are:

• Value for Money
• History
• Art and Culture
• Resort/Lodging Options
• Rest/Relaxation
• Beach
• Natural Beauty
• Nightlife

The summation quote by the branding experts is “Greece: Friendly people with great surroundings and great food.”The international study of country branding was developed by FutureBrand, a leading global brand consulting firm in co-operation with Weber Shandwick’s Global Travel Practice, a public relations firm. It focused on more than 1,500 international travelers, recruited from a globally diverse sample including the Americas, Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East and screened to include only frequent international travelers who travel internationally more than once a year- between the ages of 21 and 65, with a balanced split between men and women. Business and leisure travelers were both included, as well as travel industry experts and hospitality professionals. The study examined how nations can be branded and ranked according to key criteria, such as emerging trends, travel motivations, challenges and opportunities within the world of travel and country branding.According to the CBI report, new trends for travel and tourism are emerging and unique criteria are making a big impact on the average traveler who is no longer satisfied with the ordinary. Some of those trends include the emergence of people who write on blogs and countless websites about their own travel experiences.With new trends in the travel industry and an ever expanding travel community, come new audiences, all with different needs and expectations during their time away from home. They crave the exotic, “feel at home” accommodations, and want to make weddings, anniversaries and reunions an unforgettable and special time when abroad, wherever their destination may be.Other contenders who ranked on this year’s CBI list were Australia (1) and the United States (2) and Italy (3). In addition to the top 10 rankings, the top three “rising star” countries that are likely to be major tourism destinations in the next five years are China, Croatia, and the United Arab Emirates.For a complete list of country ranks and a look at the Country Brand Index 2006, visit: www.webershandwick.com