Tag Archives: Lithuania
Taking the waters: special places and the power of suggestion
There *is* something about old spa towns. Maybe it’s just the exaggerated power of suggestion induced by knowing that generations and legions of people have been drawn from far and wide to a particular place to have a particular experience. Druskininkai is in southeastern Lithuania, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, and people get [...]
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
The complete brand book for Lithuania
Download the complete, final volume of our recommendations to Lithuania, including the appendix of notional designs.
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. [...]
Why to bother keeping up appearances
I know Ignalina nuclear power plant is scheduled to close at the end of this year. And rationally I know that managing two atomic reactors — even if they are almost identical to the vintage Soviet RBMK-1000s at the heart of the Chernobyl hiccup — and keeping an aquarium have nothing to do with each [...]
“If a place is trying to fake it, then it will be exposed.”
“I never said most of the things I said” said Yogi Berra. I felt just like Yogi when I read over this article in the new issue of Business Traveller magazine which quotes me heavily, discussing my/Saffron’s work in Northern Ireland, London and Lithuania. Luckily, most of what I said (or didn’t say) sounds half-way [...]
The loveable quirkiness of northeastern Europe
Yesterday was the national day of the Republic of Uzupis, the SoHo (NYC, as opposed to Soho, London) of Vilnius, Lithuania. I didn’t make it to Christiania – I’ve still never been to Copenhagen! – before they dismantled it, but I imagine this as a gentrified and more philosophically grounded version of the Danish self-declared [...]
Selling Lithuania smartly
My six months working with Saffron and Wally Olins for the Lithuanian Development Agency on a strategy and action plan for developing what the client called ‘the economic image of Lithuania’ (and what Wally and I thought of as ‘the image of Lithuania, particularly with respect to commercial considerations’) has wrapped. We had a press [...]
Jeremy Hildreth



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