In my sixth and last post as an Academic Observer on Place Brand Observer, I talked about the future of place branding research. I combined what ‘might’ happen given the existing body of literature and what ‘should’ happen if we want to have a larger impact on the society.
You can read the full post on Place Brand Observer.
For the last couple of months, I have been working on the latest project of Turkayfe.org – our online coffeehouse project. The website, which started out as an online “social diplomacy” / place branding project is going offline, and meeting people on the street with “Mobile Turkish Coffee House” project.
Mobile Turkish Coffee House in front of the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC
Turkayfe.orgstarted out as an idea in May 2009, and the website went live in May 2010. From our very early days, we did our best to learn from our mistakes, and to improve our project. As a doctoral candidate studying public diplomacy, and a dilettante practitioner; I tried to use my practical experience in my academic studies and vice-versa.
Today, I went to the press conference organized by the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index (NBI) to unveil their latest survey, NBI 2011. With the United States being at the top of the list third year in a row, NBI listed a total of 50 countries’ brands. In the table below, you can see the top 10 countries from 2008 to 2011.
As I have mentioned earlier, I have several doubts about NBI as a robust measurement scale. Below, I’ll try to organize my ideas under three headings:
– What is NBI good for? When should NBI be used?
– Why doesn’t NBI measure ‘nation brands’?
– Why is NBI’s understanding of nation brands incomplete (if not entirely wrong)?
Reaching the Public 