More and more countries have decided, rightly, to pay attention to their national identity.

You may call it your brand or the identity of your people or your national reputation.

Each of these names denotes something a little different. But the issue is the same: the idea of your country evokes a reaction in the mind of every foreigner (citizen, corporation and Government).

And indeed, no less importantly, at home. National pride is as live an issue as external reputation.

You recognise that if you do nothing, the image of your country will continue being made, and changed, daily by many factors over which you have little or no control.

But you can coordinate a number of the messages being put out by your Government: your promotion of exports, inward investment and tourism, for example. Indeed, your advertising and promotion budget is the most obvious and direct tool under your control.

We do not advocate an advertising message as the only route to a positive country image where previously a negative one existed. That would be propaganda and not advertising and would not work. On the contrary, we believe that effective campaigns are always rooted in reality. We believe that we can work with you to find which positive aspects of your country we can use to build a credible international positioning. And image. Branding, in other words!

We will also advise you how to use tourist visits and appropriate products for those tourists, to accelerate better appreciations of the real strengths of your country.

Country rebranding: why choose The Hat Factory?

To re-brand, or to brand, or to intensify the branding of a country requires a particular mix of skills if it is to be done effectively. Firstly, your agency has to understand that a purely cosmetic operation will not work. The Hat Factory knows how to work with you so that you can – objectively - find the elements in your country on which effective and relevant branding can be built. Real elements: real strengths, real things, real people, real holiday products.

We can work on real policy initiatives that give concrete meaning to your ideals.

How does all that feed back into branding? Well, we will have a clear idea of how you want the public to react to your country. We focus on the actions that build tourism, of course, AND lead to increasing absorption into their attitudes of what you are trying to say to them. We can do this, because we understand Brands.

All branding work today in this field requires:

• Experience of how consumers react to communications
• Experience of how brands are built and how brands are refreshed
• An understanding of when market research is essential and what kind of market research gives useable information
• A knowledge of how tourism can be used to accelerate the process of re-appreciating the country
• A knowledge of the new groups of tourists and their habits.
• understanding of how online media , used to communicate tourism messages can be also used as the prime public vehicle for a re-assessment of your country
• Experience of how politicians’ minds work and how political journalists react

Tourism - the acceptable public face of your national brand

We have already implied that you may well retain different campaigns for your country. These might include, for example, exports, inward investment, trade fairs, etc. All of these can produce variations on a single theme but they must all be contributing strategically to the establishment of a clear identity for your nation that advances the interests of your people in every dimension.

This is a difficult task. But it has to be done. You cannot afford to attract tourists to a country of quaint medieval charms if your prime economic goal is to attract dynamic, high technology industries.

It is your tourism promotion - in whatever form (advertising, PR, websites, etc) - that will have the biggest impact on attitudes to your nation. It is the easiest option open to you to counter prejudice and to build warm and positive feelings to your nation.

We are talking politics - and public opinion

Your diplomats are doubtless highly skilled. Your own relationships with Ministers of other countries may be excellent. But their ability to treat with you as you would wish is affected by the attitudes of their own electorates. It is conditioned by the headlines in their domestic press.

You can only alter public opinion, in the countries whose goodwill you need, if you talk to them. And as we have said, your tourist promotion is the best and perhaps the only effective medium under your control.

We have said elsewhere that merely to create slick advertising campaigns with a punchy slogan is not enough. The best kind of Press Relations will be required, and you will have to make sure that the messages about your country are underpinned by the reality of policy initiatives and facts on the ground.

But the sad truth is that many countries do the right things at home, but still fail to get the credit abroad. The Hat Factory believes that success requires

• astute and appropriate communication with relevant journalists, politicians and civil servants.  THF will work with you to set up such a programme and to develop initiatives that will interest these three groups and get coverage in the countries of your choice.
• The second aspect is to create public goodwill towards your country and your people. THF will advise you how to do this, incorporating your tourist promotion to be your public face abroad. We will discuss with you what you need to do domestically first and then how to structure a tourism strategy that takes the above objective into account.
• We will advise you on the role to be played by different media in changing public attitudes - and, crucially, in actually bringing more tourists, the kind that you actively want, to your country. (THF believes that an active policy in which you choose the type of tourists and the type of tourism appropriate to your national resources, is preferable by far to passive tourism whereby you adapt to the opportunism e.g. low cost airlines, self-interested tour operators, and the accidents of the web to bring to you. The active policy we recommend elsewhere on our website not only creates popular goodwill to tourism in your country and spreads the economic benefits of tourism widely through the population but is sustainable in the long run).

All of this is entirely consistent with the use of every element of your tourism budget to actively promote a favourable and informed view of your country.