Research Question: What is it that determines if large companies in the same country and industry use their Country of Origin or not when they want to attract new customers abroad? Purpose: Our purpose with this Minor Field Study is to find out if companies within the Brazilian textile industry are using their COO and identify which factors that determine why they use it or not. By analyzing these factors, if and why they are important or not, we can develop a model with the purpose to give companies an idea of how close they are from to being able to use their COO. Method: We have worked with a qualitative research method where we interviewed two Brazilian companies, CI Hering and Karsten, which is working within the Brazilian textile industry. Theoretical framework: Our theories are mainly concerning the subjects of branding, nation brands, COO and competitive identity. We have also studied the so called Nation Brands Index and its hexagon. We will use theories of nation branding and COO to illustrate their importance to a country’s international companies. Empirical framework: This part will show the outcome of our interviews with Hering and Karsten but also present some data on the nation brand of Brazil and activities linked to it. Conclusion: We have found that there are six factors that mainly determine if a company will use its COO when trying to attract new customers abroad, and how appropriate this will be. The six factors are: Strong identity/image, brand awareness, knowledge, consistent and strong nation brand, research and willingness. Our final conclusions are that international companies that want to manage their reputation can benefit from relating their identity to some of the aspects in the national identity of their country. Associating to your COO is a way of doing this that aligns your company´s image to the image of your home country.

Abstract Title: To Market a Company with the Help of Nationality – A study in how marketing and branding works and is being perceived when it focuses on nationality Author: Frida Hansson Subject: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Fall semester 2010 Length: 38 pages Tutor: Else Nygren Aim: Companies and various corporations are always on the hunt for the next big thing in marketing. One idea to market themselves and give them a chance to separate themselves from the cluster of companies aspiring to take your costumers away could be to market themselves with nationality. To investigate why and how some company’s chose to market themselves with nationality, and also study how this kind of marketing is being perceived by customers and non –costumers. Method: The research is conducted through personal interviews with representatives from IKEA and MediaMarkt and also focus group interviews with an association test. Theory: Three theories will be the theoretic base for this essay; nation branding, Country of Origin and Product-Country Images. Main results: For companies marketing with the help of nationality is a good way to separate themselves from other similar companies. Although, they need to be cautious about which country they want to be linked to. Commercials with stereotypes from certain countries are fun, but not when you are the one the commercial are making fun of. Some countries are also seen as better than others when it comes to marketing and branding. If you want to associate your company with a country, you should first se where the potential country ranks for an optimal result. Finally, it is also that presented companies around the world works with this kind of marketing strategy and most of them successfully. Furthermore they work consciously or non-consciously with the three theories. Keywords: nation branding, Country of Origin, Product-Country Images, IKEA and MediaMarkt

Aim: Nation Branding has become an important phenomenon during the last couple of years. The concept talks about how to promote a product by using the features of a nation to gain profit. Among the years many countries has established a strong Nation Brand abroad. In the long run many companies have chosen to use these benefits in an efficient way by promoting their own country brand, especially in their internationalization process. The aim of this study is to see what factors that influence companies in the Swedish food industry while using the fact that they are Swedish when they enter foreign markets.   Method: Data was collected through interviews with export managers and sales managers at 6 Swedish companies exporting products within the food industry. The study was also based on secondary data with the purpose to give a complete image how Sweden is represented abroad. The chosen literature is based on a couple of the biggest researchers among the fields of Nation Branding and cultural dimensions.   Result & Conclusions: One result that was obtained after our study was that brands or products with characteristics consistent with the image that the consumers had about the country before, can gain its value by highlighting its origin. Further, it was being proved that a company’s use of Nation Branding in some way could be affected by the countries cultural distance, or in what stage of the internationalization process the company is.   Contribution of the thesis: The contribution of this thesis is to give more knowledge about which qualities a country like Sweden can generate with its products. A country being perceived with its values like reliability, trustworthiness, uniqueness and quality can create an image and a successful strategy to establish on new markets and to gain profit from that.

in many daily forms of media we see the nation being represented by or alongside images. These images of the nation inform the way we see both others and ourselves. This thesis attempts to understand the way the nation is visualized, a topic that has been largely overlooked by theorists of nationalism. The visualization of the nation is explored by researching two national tourism campaigns in Croatia. Croatia was chosen as a case study in which to examine the visualization of the nation due to its recent accession into the European Union alongside the country’s economic dependence on tourism and its current attempts at rebranding. In order to achieve the aims of this research I ask two main research questions: 1. How is the nation visualized in Croatia through tourism advertising and by whom?, 2. How is this visualization received by members of the nation? These questions were answered by combining three methodological steps which consisted of a visual analysis of the images of the campaigns, interviewing those involved in creating the campaigns and other members of the design or tourism community, and finally photo elicitation interviews with members of the Croatian public. This research found that Croatia is often peripheral within these tourism campaigns. The nation is represented passively with the main focus of the advertisements being the experience of tourism. Croatia is merely the backdrop that these tourism activities are being advertised through. This passive representation of Croatia is a consequence of an industry that is focused on increasing tourism numbers and that relies heavily on marketing data. The representation of Croatia is not the aim of these tourism campaigns. The passive image of the nation is additionally the consequence of Croatia’s uneasy relationship with presenting something as national. National pride is often equated with violent forms of nationalism and therefore visual representations of the nation are often eliminated from the positive marketing images of the tourism campaigns. Both members of the nation and the industry downplay the importance of tourism advertising arguing that these images are solely for the tourist and therefore they are largely insignificant. However, I use du Gay’s (1997) concept of the ‘circuit of culture’ to argue that tourism advertising is not just influenced by national identity but rather it is also influencing national identity. These tourism campaigns contribute to the construction of national identity. Therefore, this passive image of the nation is not just for tourists, it is part of a circuit of identity construction that reaches far beyond the target audience. Overall, these tourism images are simplistic and reductive imitations of the nation while national identity is complex, inconsistent, and often contradictory. Branding and design often aims to condense identity into easily recognizable and quickly communicated images making any attempt to brand the nation inherently lacking. While this reductive identity is useful when branding a company or product, when applied to the nation ethical questions emerge about who has the right to construct the nation’s image. I argue that this new phenomenon of commercialized branding that is now a responsibility of the nation is evidence of the changing role of the nation from a modern construction to a postmodern brander. This opens up questions about the democratic nature of these tourism images and consequences of nation branding efforts that continue to represent the nation in reductive and passive terms.

On September 18, 2015, the U.S. Environmental Standards Agency (EPA) filed a Notice of Violation of the Clean Air Act to the Volkswagen Group regarding software used to intentionally deceive the EPA’s emissions tests. Social media is an efficient way for organizations to release information and respond quickly during a crisis. Not only are organizations posting on social media sites, but consumers are increasingly turning to social media sites, such as Twitter, during crises to share information and opinions. The VW crisis may impact Germany’s nation brand, as predicted by more recent country-of-origin literature. The country-of-origin effect occurs when the reputation of a country impacts consumer perceptions of products produced by that country. When consumers had favorable perceptions of a country, Xu and Wu (2015) found the country’s products were more likely to receive positive after-crisis reactions. German products are considered to be of high quality. “So, in the case of Germany, the development of its national brand identity is an integral part of the growth and development of its exports, the ‘Made in Germany’ label that has a world-class reputation,” (Joseph, 2014, p. 4). A content analysis was performed to examine the international conversation on Twitter through the analysis of tweets that included at least one of the following hashtags: #VWGate, #DieselGate, #VWscandal or #Volkswagenscandal.

The diploma thesis introduces the term public diplomacy and examines it in the context of Czech Republic. The aim of the thesis is to explore, describe and evaluate Czech Republic's practice in the field of public diplomacy. The study also focuses on the term nation branding and brand image of countries. A whole chapter is dedicated to the "brand Czech republic". The last part of the diploma thesis analyzes the Czech presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2009 from the view of its presentation and communication.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyse current public diplomacy and the specifics of public diplomacy in small and medium-sized states. As an example of such a state it studies South Korean public diplomacy and nation branding policies. The first part of the thesis focuses on theoretical frame of public diplomacy, its goals, actors, instruments, specifics of small and medium-sized states, difference between public diplomacy and nation branding and evaluation possibilites. The second part analyses the public diplomacy in South Korea, one of the representatives of small and medium-sized states. The third part focuses on nation branding, an important part of South Korean foreign policy.

The thesis focuses on relationships, structures and processes that fundamentally influence the implementation of the nation branding mechanisms to the scope of activities carried out by Czech republic´s institutional actors; on the mutual communication between the state and the European cultural environment; and on the role that the Czech republic´s institutional actors play in the communication with the external environment of the country. The thesis elucidates the extent of involvement of relevant actors in the process of nation branding of the Czech Republic and its position in the international relations on the European territory. It critically interrogates models and approaches towards the nation branding and brings detailed insights into the matter through the perspective of supranational, national and local actors (both formal and informal) that contribute to the creation of a country´s image. It provides an insight into the institutional framework of the nation branding in the Czech Republic and identification of the sources of double-track processes in the distribution of agenda and a level of involvement of public diplomacy actors and other institutions responsible for the presentation of a country. Based on the analysis of the formal and informal level of such relationships and interactions, it brings a plan of formal simplification of the implementation process of the nation branding strategy in the Czech Republic.

This paper analyses the reframing strategies (Baker, 2006) and transfer of communicational functions (Nord, 2010) in some news translated by state-owned Peruvian News Agency Andina (Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina) from Spanish to English. This media platform uses translation to expand its readership to foreigners that might be interested in visiting and investing in Peru (Andina, 2016, par. 14), thus helping the nation's economy to grow. The study is based on a bilingual corpus of 114 news articles published in the economics and tourism sections during 2019. The contrastive text analysis showed how Andina reframes the translations to adapt them into a new sociocultural context, reflecting the discourse of the Peru brand. Andina translations reveal the use of reframing strategies to recontextualize events having an impact on Peruvian economy, to herald a "patriotic" discourse that highlights government's achievements, targeting Peruvian readership, and to provide information related to Peruvian tourist attractions. The changes in communicative functions inform change in text type focus in a set of translated news towards a tourism genre.

<p>Dans la mondialisation d’aujourd’hui et dans un monde plus démocratique et ouvert, la diplomatie publique est devenue un sujet qui suscite de plus en plus d’intérêt. Selon Anholt, un analyste de société anglais, tous les gouvernements doivent, pour le compte du peuple, des institutions et des entreprises, développer une stratégie pour améliorer et fortifier la perception du pays. La théorie utilisée est celle d’Anholt appelée <em>Nation branding</em> où il applique une théorie commerciale dans le monde des sciences politiques et sociales en comparant les pays aux marques commerciales. Dans ce mémoire, en utilisant les méthodes de l’étude du corpus et l’entretien, je compare les stratégies et les objectifs de la diplomatie publique de la France et de la Suède. Après avoir fait un inventaire des cinq grandes voies de promouvoir un pays à l’extérieur et après avoir regardé les stratégies actuelles des deux pays, on trouve de nombreuses similarités, surtout dans les stratégies des cinq voies de promouvoir un pays. Les différences se trouvent ailleurs. Par exemple la Suède n’hésite pas à comparer l’image du pays avec une marque commerciale selon la théorie de <em>Nation branding</em> tandis que la France est plus hésitante, mais le nouveau ministre des Affaires étrangères et européennes en France est favorable à la notion. D’autre part, j’ai pu constater que l’optique suédoise de la diplomatie publique correspond plutôt à une volonté de placer la Suède sur la scène mondiale et d’instaurer un sentiment de <em>good will</em> tandis que la France souhaite avant tout sauvegarder son rang de puissance mondiale et considère la position forte de sa langue comme une condition nécessaire pour ce faire. L’action culturelle extérieure suédoise s’organise surtout depuis la Suède, parce que la Suède n’a pas de réseau culturel comparable à celui de la France. La mise en place du Conseil de la promotion de l’image de la Suède dans le monde permet partiellement de contrer la grandeur de la France.</p> / <p>In the globalization of today, in a more democratic and open world, public diplomacy has become a subject that gets more and more attention. According to Anholt, a British social analyst, all governments should, on behalf of the people, the institutions and the companies, develop a strategy to improve and strengthen the perception of the country. The theory applied is Anholt’s <em>Nation Branding</em> where he uses the ideas of branding for the public diplomacy of a country. He likes to compare countries to commercial brands. The aim of this minor thesis is to compare the strategies and objectives of the public diplomacy of today in France and Sweden. To reach my conclusions I have collected information from Anholt’s books of <em>Nation branding</em> and from the official websites of the different national administrations. I also made interviews with people involved in the matter. There are five ways to communicate the image of a country abroad. France and Sweden have similar strategies within these fields. The differences are to be found, foremost in the way of talking about the country as a brand and the value of <em>Nation Branding</em>. It’s a part of the Swedish strategy while the French are more reluctant. At the same time, the French minister of foreign and European affairs, Kouchner, seems to be influenced by the ideas behind <em>Nation Branding</em>. I have also come to the conclusion that the aim of the Swedish public diplomacy regards primary to place Sweden on the world map and to create a sense of good will while the main priority of France is to stay a leading world nation and considers the language aspect very important to do so. The Swedish cultural diplomacy is organized at the head office in Stockholm while the French have an immense network of cultural institutes. As Sweden is not represented worldwide, the Swedish solution is a national council of international representations that work together to form a strategy to promote Sweden.</p>