Jeremy HildrethCategory Archives: Branding: places
Keeping perspective on perspectives
There’s a great expression in American English: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is. It’s a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place [...]
Jeremy’s Vilnius mini-guide
Lithuania used to be the largest country in Europe, stretching, under the rule of Grand Duke Vytautas in 1430, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea (a feat achieved, incidentally, not by conquest but by inclusiveness and diplomacy). Lithuania was also a Soviet Republic for half a century, and Vilnius, its capital, wears on [...]
Everything I know about place branding
Everything I know about branding places
One great lesson from brand valuation
Something I’ve just run across has stopped me in my tracks and compelled me to write a quick post about it. If you work with marketing or branding in any way, this idea — it’s kind of a thought experiment, or in NLP terms a “re-frame” — may interest you, also. First, two seconds of [...]
The paradox of expectations
Sometimes a more ‘objectively’ attractive place can provide an inferior experience. This is often down to expectations, and whether they are met or exceeded.
My take on the Danish mother seeking
If you haven’t seen this (apparently more than a million people have seen it), watch it before reading further. (YouTube pulled the video after a few days, so this link takes you to the Huffington Post’s archive of the video.) It’s a hoax. ‘Karen’ is an actress named Ditte Arnth Jorgensen. It was perpetrated by [...]
Adventure in Timor 1: Something extraordinary happened here
Note: I wrote this in 2005; it’s only ever seen the light of day in the Saffron-produced ‘how to sell East Timor’ book I wrote and directed for an identity project in this tumultuous country. But I loved Timor. The country has just celebrated 10 years since its people voted for freedom from Indonesia (a [...]
Dispatch from Ghadames, Libya
With Saint-Exupery in a tent in the Sahara.
If you must have a logo
The best country brand logo ever.
The problem with first impressions
…is that you don’t know what you don’t know, sometimes, when you’re looking at something. Take, for example, this scene in Vilnius (where I am delighted to be living for the summer), which I photographed while jogging today. It is a normal scene, a bit of urban decay, some concrete blight. Very common around here. [...]
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