A good thing about the global financial crisis is that you now often have to improvise and work with what you got to reach the previous goals, which sometimes leads to creative solutions. Here’s my “creative solution” – to treat a country as you would treat a product.
If you plan to market the product for better sales, you usually tend to look at the products good sides and its competitive advantages and try to promote those in a striking, creative and honest way. However, this strategy works usually only if you have a good product to begin with.
But.
If you have a crap product or a product with a bad
reputation, you also have to look at the product’s bad
sides and denounce them first in order to get to the
stage where you promote the good sides.
Let’s take McDonald’s as an example of a crap product that is at the same time successful. The main problem with McD is that it’s not very nutritious or healthy, plus it’s obviously too expensive for what you get. In order for us to forget these things, the advertisers always point out the opposites – healthy-looking people eating burgers, sponsoring the Olympics, nutrition details, always claiming that the products are made of organic food, etc. While this looks like a superficial way of masking the bad product, what they are really saying is “we are aware of the bad things concerning our product and look – we’re trying to fight them as much as we can.”
The people behind McDonald’s ads are the ad companies chosen by the McDonald’s share holders. If you want to advertise a country, it’s a bit more complicated than that – the citizens are obviously the share holders, and the people they choose to represent them – ie, the politicians and MPs – are supposed to create the advertising campaign.
Of course, McDonald’s would never have the mentioned approach if the public, the customers didn’t point out the bad stuff in the first place – by pressing charges, making anti-campaigns, pointing out the dangerous ingredients etc.
Acknowledging the possibility that there is something wrong with your product and trying to remove those things is something that the Ministry of tourism and those involved in ‘re-branding Serbia’ tend to forget. Good news is that this part actually doesn’t cost all that much.
What are the bad things associated with the product “Serbia”?
In short:
Wars, war criminals, nationalism, corruption, and
similar things in that general direction.
To get rid of the bad associations, what one has to to is find the opposites to all of them and promote them and stick to them. In fact, it’s so obvious nobody ever thinks of that.
In short:
Put an accent on peaceful future with former “enemy
nations”, arrest those charged with war crimes, stop
using nationalistic rhetoric and denounce those using
it, admit the mistakes from the past and mistakes in the
present.
How much would all this cost? I’d say lot less than 135 thousand euros all together.
If you believe this
can’t ever happen in Serbia than we might as well stop
talking about re-branding the country in the first
place.
