The importance of nation branding during crises and in day-to-day basis

In the 21st century, countries have started to realize the importance of nation-branding and the importance it has in the globalized world. Well branded nations can have various benefits starting from simply attracting tourism and strenghten economic relations to even protect against serious attacks. So far, countries have taken different approaches on branding nations and some have been more successful than others.

For the Icelandic tourist industry, year 2010 was as a nightmare. The Eyafjallajökulli volcane started to erupt, which in turn led to the greatest financial crisis in Iceland’s history. These events attracted media from all over the world and put Iceland to the centre of world news. Unfortunately, that was not a positive spotlight on Iceland. People who were planning to visit Iceland in the , thought that the entire island has been buried under ash and therefore, to avoid interrups, cancelled their already planned holidays. As a result of that, the Icelandic tourism industry was facing a serious challenge – how to prove these people that the situation was not that bad at all and holidays should not be cancelled. Icelandic toruism industry and banking sector were facing a very difficult time and this is when the government realised the threats and put their marketing skills into a good use.

The Icelandic Tourist Board called on its citizens to actively participate in social media. Their goal was to get their nationals to upload provocatives videos about Iceland into Youtube, and post attractive pictures to Twitter and Facebook. This campaign was an outstanding success as in total of more than half of Iceland’s population took part of this action. During the period of less than 12 months, fans of Iceland provided over 2 million units of content including videos, posts and tweets. In addition to ordinary citizens, even the president took part of this campaign. This campaign was more than successful. The number of tourists increased by 30% and the year 2011 hit the record numbers of tourists visiting Iceland.

The Icelandic Tourist Board won a prestigious Euro Effie award for the successful management of the volcano crisis thanks to social media. Also after the crises, Icelandic tourist office has been mainly focusing on nation-inclusive social-media centered campaigns which have been working very successfully.

Similar approach to a nation-branding has been adopted by the Swedish tourism development bureau Visit Sweden. Namely, some of the citizens (who are refferred as curators) can post to twitter under the formal twitter account of Sweden. That approach have attracted many followers as the tweets are from locals perspective and surely large amounts of tourists.