ABSTRACT
It is not surprising that most of the world’s successful commercial brands come from the top ten place brands: America, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and South Korea. America is undoubtedly the world’s leading place brand, partly because it has been so thoroughly and expensively marketed to the rest of the world over the past century. Having Hollywood as your advertising agency certainly helps, and hiring NASA as your sales promotion agency, which periodically sends a rocket into orbit to demonstrate the superiority of American technology to a gawping planet, is a stroke of genius. (And what a place brand Hollywood is, by the way, just in case anybody doubted that smaller places than nations can have potent brand equities all of their own.)
For a brand’s home town or home country to add this helpful dose of free additional equity, the only requirement is that the product should ‘chime’ with its place of origin in the consumer’s mind, and that some kind of logic links the two. This logic may be simple or creative: in the case of manufactured brands, it could be the straightforward logic that links Benckiser, a manufacturer of household cleaning products, with a new household cleaning product; or it could be the more lateral sort of logic that links Caterpillar, a manufacturer of bulldozers, with rugged footwear. In exactly the same way, brands from countries can range from simple national produce – pizza from Italy or soft drinks from America – to more unexpected but equally attractive pairings, such as skis from Slovenia (Elan), clothing from Australia (RM Williams) or phones from Finland (Nokia).
