Besides, the truth is: there are times when you just want mentoring — a dash of practical advice and useful perspective from a clear-headed, compassionate outsider with considerable know-how.

That’s why I’m offering this affordable package to give you personal attention and professional insights, deep and double-quick.

And it is quick. As one of my clients from 2009 testifies:

“We had Jeremy here in Swedish Lapland for two days only, and we were impressed and a little surprised how quickly and fully he grasped our situation and could speak meaningfully about it. The ideas he came up with were both imaginative and appropriate. We are happy we found him and are looking now to involve him in several more projects.”

Here’s the thing: in the last decade, it’s been my immense privilege to visit more than 60 countries and 200 cities, and to advise clients on every continent. From Northern Ireland to East Timor, from Rio to Riga, I’ve given PowerPoints saying “Here’s what you guys should be doing.” Few if any place branding practitioners working today have anything like the worldliness and experience I do. And since I also write travel articles (for The Wall Street Journal) and hold two business degrees (from Wharton and Oxford), I’m uniquely capable of relating to your most important customers, be they tourists or investors or both.

My career and my passion for studying the world up close up have cultivated my ability to think both critically and creatively about places big and small. They’ve imbued in me a powerful sense of place. And crucially, they allowed me to hone the skills and understanding required to listen to my clients and make my insights and wisdom relevant and valuable and actionable — fast.

With my 3-day immediate-benefits consulting package, I will:

• Research a destination, then visit and explore it, in order to audit its strengths and weaknesses;
• Meet with the important players, discuss place branding issues and principles, ask probing questions and listen carefully;
• Compile my best ideas about the branding policies, marketing strategy and communications tactics of that place.

Importantly, I will make sure that some of my recommendations are “quick wins” that you can implement right away, and if possible, within existing budgets.

Write me now for details. Please summarize your most pressing branding or marketing issue so that my response can take it into consideration.

Thanks–   Jeremy

Editor Simon Anholt asked Jeremy Hildreth for his ‘ big picture ’ thoughts on the state of the place branding field – where it is, and where it might be going.

This article employs many evocative metaphors to define and describe the benefits and hazards of place branding. The article takes the view that, broadly speaking, successful place branding results when certain mistakes are avoided and certain other challenges are imaginatively and thoughtfully resolved.

The article proposes a generic, narrative meta-model of place branding, which any place may refer to regardless of the present level of development of its product, perception or promotion. Some of the tools of place branding – including graphic design, advertising, marketing communications, architecture and exports – are explored. And mention is made of the innovations and refinements that are needed in the near future, including cross-fertilization of the place branding discipline with insights from such fields as evolutionary science.

The article concludes by likening the current state of place branding to an old map of the world, where the continents have all been discovered and are in the right places but some of the landmasses are misshapen and many are are still marked unexplored.

You’re welcome to download the full article for free here, HOWEVER, in order to keep within the bounds of the publisher’s [rather hidebound in my view] notion that posting the paper to a public website would discourage people from purchasing an expensive subscription to the journal (whereas I reckon a free sample would spur business, more than likely), to gain access to my lovely paper you’ll have to shoot me a quick email and I’ll send you the password.

So I guess that's not the wine cellar, then....

Just as a writer bears ultimate responsibility for being understood, “If you’re a place, it’s up to you to present yourself legibly,” to make sure people can get your story.

This is some of the advice I give in a casual but insightful essay that Thinkingplace have published in their quarterly. I use examples from my work in East Timor and Northern Ireland. The piece was inspired by something I saw on a jog around Vilnius last year — something which was there but wasn’t there (you’ll have to read my tale to find out what I’m talking about).

I called the article The Seen an the Unseen. The title is an homage to my favourite 19th century economist Fredric Bastiat, who wrote an unbelievably brilliant polemic of the same name which you should stop everything and read immediately even before you read my article (or at least, certainly, before you vote in the next election).

PS The idea of legibility in place branding is immensely pragmatic. I’ve loved it since I laid eyes on it six years ago via the Bristol Legible City project.

Something to be said for stick-to-it-ness: Jamaica still uses the same typography, and seems to follow the same rules, as it did 45 years ago.

My copy of Ogilvy on Advertising sits on a shelf miles from here. I wanted to re-read the section on advertising tourism for Jamaica, as that might be the closest this genius of promotion came to weighing in on nation branding. I found, however, a student’s book report which summarizes Ogilvy’s tips on tourism advertising: “Ogilvy then addresses how to advertise foreign travel. A classical campaign in travel advertising is Doyle Dane Bernbach’s (DDB) Jamaica campaign [from 1960s]. When Ogilvy started an ad campaign for Britain, it was the fifth most visited European country by the time he wrote this book it was first.”

About the communications side of nation branding, David Ogilvy says:

1. Advertising for countries should be designed to plant a long term image in the reader’s mind.
2. Choose to illustrate things that are unique to the country concerned and not something people can do at home.
3. The job of the advertising is to convert people’s dreams about visiting foreign countries into action; this is best done by combining “mouth-watering photographs with specific how-to-do-it information” (Ogilvy 133).
4. Whenever the advertising is for a little known country, it is important to give the people a lot of information in the advertisement such as the weather, language, food, etc.
5. Charm and differentiation work well in tourism advertising.

Everybody, please take particular note of 1, 4 and 5 on that list.

Now, a final, and separate, point about these particular Jamaica ads, I want to draw your attention to the original campaign. The only example of it I could find online is at the AIGA archives. It’s a grainy black and white full-page magazine ad from 1964 that shows a photo of the Blue Mountain Inn followed by an evocative long-copy story:

Under cover of darkness, the town’s lonely bachelors climbed to this secluded inn on Blue Mountain. And it wasn’t for dinner.

Blue Mountain Inn has led a wicked, wicked life. For years, she was the queen of Kingston’s bordellos.

Can you imagine a more beautiful location? A thousand feet up a mist-touched mountain, on the banks of a crystal stream, with its own waterfalls and surrounded by giant tree ferns, climbing vines, flaming wild flowers and gorgeously plumed tropical birds.

No wonder there were mumblings of discontent among certain segments of the population when the lady was rehabilitated into an elegant inn. (Even though she’s reformed, she’s lost none of her appeal. Jamaicans still climb there. But, now, for dinner.)

In this once-scandalous stone great house, you can now order Chateaubriand and Mouton Rothschild, ’47. These days, a plump bed costs you $10, including breakfast. On another mountain, four miles from Kingston, is Casa Monte, of a style best described as neo-Italian-Jamaican. $6.50 buys you a room with a view so fantastic, visitors have been known to cap their bottles of Jamaican rum—just so they wouldn’t miss anything.

At the other extreme of the island is a hotel room (if you can call something that’s 50’ X 35’ a “room”) that’s at the other extreme of price. It’s the Honeymoon Suite at the Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, $100 a day for two, including your own private outdoor swimming pool. At that price, you may want to leave here under cover of darkness.

For more information about formerly wicked inns, $6.50 views and $100 a day suites, see your travel agent or Jamaica Tourist Board, Dept. IA, 630 Fifth Ave., N.Y.C.

Now, my question is, why don’t more advertisements tell real stories like this? My suspicion is it’s because writing a good story requires, among other things, massive selectivity — a knack for including the telling detail, the discipline to eschew the arguably attractive but contextually irrelevant “And what’s more…”, and the guts to leave in certain bits which whilst factually unimportant (“Do we have to say it was once a bordello?” I hear the modern-day marketing director ask) are narratively or tonally vital.

People as individuals are bad enough at all that; committees and ’steering groups’ are hopeless.

First, two seconds of background…. I’m working this morning on my chapter on measuring and monitoring place brands for the upcoming third edition of Destination Branding. Doing some reading and research for it. I discovered that in the Q4 2005 edition of what was then called the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (which was less than a year old at the time), a company called Brand Finance added “a new and very exciting dimension” to the NBI: a financial valuation of the 32 country brands in the index.

Now, I’m a huge sceptic of brand valuation — or, to put it more exactly, I’m a vociferous champion of the limits of brand valuation; brand valuation can be useful, but mostly by examining its delta, its change over time (the absolute figures brand valuation comes up with, in the context of place branding at least, I don’t trust [speaking of provenance] for a New York minute).

Having said that (as Larry David would say), I love the idea behind the “royalty relief” method Brand Finance uses to perform the valuations:

This approach assumes a country does not own its own brand and calculates how much it would need to pay to license it from a third party. The present value of that stream of (hypothetical) brand contribution payments represents the value of the brand.

Even if the figure arrived at by the valuers has little more validity than a finger in the breeze, “royalty relief” is still a great way to think about your brand — whether you’re a place, a company or an individual person: if somebody else owned your brand, your good name, how much would he or she charge you to rent it?

Or, to turn it around and add action implications, if you owned your brand (as you, in point of fact, probably do), and wanted to rent it out, will what your doing right now, today, this week, this month, mean you can charge higher rent for your brand in the future?

Follow up: As if to confirm my point about the delta being the thing, Simon Anholt’s just written a piece for Foreign Policy about how Obama raised America’s brand value by $2 trillion.

Swedish Lapland's new beta site

1) This mockumentary satire ad for the ski resort of Åre should make you laugh. A representative of Visit Sweden showed it as part of her presentation to the Swedish Lapland Tourismforum, at which I spoke also. I’d seen it before, but it reminded me that humour — unforced, of course, as a natural expression of one facet of a culture — is, well, funny.

2) Lars Huring, web maven of Luleå-based creative agency Vinter, had us all in stitches gathered round his MacBook Pro watching this two-part segment — “The Stockholm Syndrome” — from America’s incomparable Daily Show. Taxes are too high here for my taste. But the fact remains, educated Swedes (the ones paying most of the tax) all speak excellent English, meaning there are two countries in the EU (Ireland and Britain) they could move to next week and get a job, plus 24 additional EU countries where they are legally entitled to wodrk and reside. If they remain here, and the country’s tax base isn’t shrinking unsustainably, then the Swedish system’s either satisfying them or, as is the premise of this comedy sketch, brainwashing them.

3) On a related point, reading Monocle in a Stockholm cafe today (a pretty damn Moncole thing to do, think of it), I was struck by this, from the PM of Bhutan:

[Gross National Happiness] is based on the theory that since happiness is the ultimate desire of every human being, it is the responsibility of the policy-makers to create conditions whereby citizens can pursue happiness. Happiness is a state that one is able to attain when equilibrium is achieved between the body’s material needs and the mind’s emotional and psychological needs.

According to the never-wrong Wikipedia, the GNH incorporates seven measures of wellness: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social and political.

I don’t know a thing about Bhutan or how happy its people really are (I’m a little sceptical; to be happy myself, for instance, I need to travel a lot, and US$1,900 a year, which is Bhutan’s 2008 GDP/capita, wouldn’t cover much airfare). Nonetheless, I like that a politician (Jigmer Yoser Thinley his name is) can articulate this thought like that. Also might be nice if brand owners/managers (of place brands and private brands) would take such a holistic view of their marketing practices and their products.

China, with a stronger economic performance than expected despite the global downturn, has moved up to 22nd from 28th last year. The host of the 2008 Beijing Olympics has improved its rankings for Exports, Culture, People and Tourism dimensions. However, inequality, human rights, clean government, and environment still being challenges, China places at the bottom on Governance with an even lower ranking in 2009 (49th in 2009 vs. 48th in 2008).

As Simon previously wrote about China:

China’s international image continues to slide quite rapidly downhill: exactly the opposite of what China’s leadership was hoping for in the buildup to the all-important Beijing Olympics. Almost all of the ground its image had gained during the highly disciplined and stage-managed Olympics, plus some international sympathy as a result of a bad earthquake, was virtually wiped out as a result of a bad poisoning episode from baby milk, and the botched attempt to cover it up. It remains to be seen whether China’s still relatively strong economic growth, as other major economies falter, will help to achieve what such ‘nation branding’ initiatives have so far failed to do, and persuade the world that China is a country to be trusted, and admired.

China, trusted and admired? I’m not convinced.

A year ago in a short piece for Moncole magazine, I forecasted a Rio win: “One question the IOC will consider,” I wrote in my submitted draft, “is what will the Olympics brand do for the host city and what will the host city’s brand do for the Olympics?…Rio holds the DNA of Brazil; and Brazil is the great hope of Latin America. And can you imagine a more endearingly colourful games after the explosive regimentation of Beijing and the jaunty high-mindedness of London? Boy,” I gushed, “does this one make sense.”

For its part, Chicago seemed to take itself definitively out of the running only during the final IOC deliberations when its champions, including President Obama and his wife, played too much to type. Here’s Monocle’s Tryler Brule (“All down to the Rio brand?“) on how Chicago’s team showed its Yanks-will-be-Yanks daft side:

From the moment Air Force One touched down at Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup, the Chicago bid team was doomed, [not by] the swagger that comes with a 747 thundering into a tiny Nordic capital…but [by the] over-rehearsed, stiff, slightly smug and overly corporate presentations…. Chicago’s bid might have been technically up to scratch but [when] Mayor Daley got up and pitched his town like he was wooing another Boeing to move its HQ there, he lost Europe. When Doug Arnot butchered the French language, he lost the Francophone bloc. And whoever allowed the Obamas to serve up such helpings of cheese so early in the day should be sacked. Michelle Obama’s overly personal story was disjointed and her husband just looked annoyed that he had to address such a small audience.

(“Helpings of cheese.” Ouch.)

Yes, it’s official: Barack Obama, however conciliatory and charistmatic he is as a world leader, is still capable of being humstrung by, and making his own contributions to, the dark elements of Brand America: earnestness, unctuousness, entitlement, etc. I might even take comfort in this realization, if it weren’t so damned disappointing. (Really, he never should have gone to Copenhagen. The New Republic was right about this.)

So, congrats to the cariocas. My friend Flavio Azevedo, who was a consultant to the Rio 2016 project, emailed me two days before the announcement: “If we win, I will pay you a bucket of caipirinha in Ipanema beach.” Flavio, you’re on!

I want to emphasize the word “evoke”.

Whenever you’re creating a tourist attraction, the key word, it seems to me, is evoke. You want to be evoking. A lot. The more evoking the better. Can you evoke too much, can you go overboard with a surfeit of evocativeness? I frankly doubt it, but let me know if you disagree, or if you can think of an example of a place that’s too evocative for its own good.

It’s easier to evoke if you’ve got ‘the place where it actually happened’. I wrote about this, in the case of Memphis and the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was murdered, in an earlier post. And I wrote about the Cabinet War Rooms in London for The Wall Street Journal back a few years ago when they opened up the new, adjacent Churchill Museum:

On display here are numerous bits of classic Churchilliana: among them, the well-chomped, half-consumed cigars (the image-conscious Churchill, understand, would never smoke a stogie to an unflattering nub) and the polka-dot bowtie famous from the 1941 portrait by photographer Yosuf Karsh (which, somehow disappointingly, turns out to have been a clip-on).

The full article continues here.

Bran Castle in Romania: a moderate disappointment in a country of delights.

Sometimes a more ‘objectively’ attractive place can provide an inferior experience. This is often down to expectations, and whether they are met or exceeded.

Case in point: my friend Barry Verbeek, who lectures in communications at The Hague University, travelled this past summer to Romania and later to Iceland. “My two trips,” he wrote me in an email, “formed an interesting case on how expectations work.”

First I went to Romania and my expectations were low; all I had in mind was the Dracula stories and gypsies. This trip turned out to be great, because it is a beautiful, authentic, historical country with very nice people. My expectations were exceeded and the thing that disappointed me the most — the only thing I had higher expectations of — was the Dracula castle in Bran. Nice, but nothing really special.

My expectations on my trip to Iceland, however, were really high, and they were not met, even though it was a beautiful country. One friend, who had visited some years ago, said it was the most beautiful country he had ever seen. I’d heard other enthusiastic stories also, so I was really excited. It was beautiful, but not what I had expected.

The marketers behind a place don’t control or influence visitors’ expectations to the extent they’d like to. At least, though, they can try to know what those expectations are — and how high. Best of all, if you’re a great place which people have low expectations of, you can really turn this to your advantage.