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.

(Not a real festival, by the way.)

The work that I did with Saffron on the national image of Lithuania featured an extended rationale, a robust strategy and a set of clever tactics for cajoling, fostering and earning a new-and-improved reputation for the not-so-small northeastern European country of 3.5 million whose big city of Vilnius was/is European Capital of Culture this year.

The 176-page four-colour printed edition also featured our ideas for a possible design style that the country could adopt. But the Lithuanian Development Agency (our client) did not include that graphical, fold-out appendix in the hi-res PDF Selling Lithuania Smartly: A guide to the creative-strategic development of an economic image for the country which they made available online earlier this year.

To download the complete, final, unexpurgated volume of recommendations, including the appendix of notional designs, click here.

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. You might think to yourself, “Those poor kids [the ones barely visible at the lower right] grow up playing in such ugly, rundown parks.”

True enough. But I knew, only because I happened to discover it two days ago, that that ugly cement mound is a plinth, upon which used to be this monument to Soviet partisans who terrorized the country with Stalin’s sponsorship:

When Lithuania got its independence in 1991, this statue and dozens like it were dismantled — immediately and with fervour — and a large number wound up in Gruto Parkas in southern Lithuania, where they are now a tourist attraction (and where the above photograph was taken, not by me).

So, yes, this local park is a bit on the ugly side. But those kids are growing up in a free country, as EU citizens.

Typing this now, I remember walking through the Killing Fields in 2002 and seeing Cambodian children splashing happily in the rainwater that had half-filled a pit which used to be a mass open grave. It was a scene of awful poverty — yet so much better than the historical alternative.

I guess my point is that without knowing the fuller context of things, sometimes your eyes play tricks on you, and you don’t really see what you’re looking at. If you’re an innocent kid, that’s so much the better. But if you’re a consultant like me, or an interested traveller, it’s worth bearing in mind.

Ignalina's reactor building

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 other.

Still, I think if you want to be trusted to run a large nuclear facility, you should clearly be seen to be able to run that small fishtank in your lobby.

Ignalina's visitors' centre fish tank

In other news, America’s National Mall in Washington, D.C. is falling into disrepair.

One version of our Visit London logo.

“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 reasonable.

After getting my passport stamped – and being given a pair of 3D glasses – by bubbly girls in jumpsuits at a makeshift border crossing, I spent a very, very good part of late afternoon at the Uzupio Kavine, which, the republic’s treasury secretary explained to me on the veranda, is the café, the bar and the parliament house.

The republic was founded in 1997 and has its own [fake] money – one unit of which is always good for a glass of beer at the bar here, making it “the world’s most stable currency” according to the secretary – and its owned famed constitution, which guarantees (amongst a laundry list of other curious, charming and sometimes rather enlightened tenets) that:

• Everybody has the right to live by the River Vilnele, and the River Vilnele has the right to flow by everybody.
• Everybody has the right to appreciate their unimportance.
• Everyone may share what they possess.
• No one can share what they do not possess.
• Everyone is responsible for their freedom.
• Everyone has the right to cry.
• A dog has the right to be a dog.

Hildreth with Olins in Vilnius

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 conference in Vilnius yesterday. I nicked the photograph from Verslo Zinios (‘business news’), whose article (in Lithuanian) is here.

Our full report, as a hi-res PDF no less, may be downloaded from the client’s site.