Try playing the word association game with countries. Italy: Pasta. Taiwan: Electronics. Somalia: Hunger.
With Chile, you always hear the same two: Wine and skiing (occasionally sea bass). This is somewhat intentional — the tourism officials don “land of wine and snow” paraphernalia. Chile has successfully branded itself and is seeing a surge in wine (and other luxury goods) exports and tourism as a result
But until very recently I had never thought about country-branding as a development tool.
When playing the word association game with Uruguay, most people draw a blank. Maybe for good reason — the country only has about 3 million residents.
A Urugruyan enterpreneur attended Endeavor’s recent selection panel with the hope of making Caviar the symbol of Uruguay. Caviar has forever been dominated by the Iranian and Russian brands, but apparently Uruguay is a perfect place to farm it. So this entrepreneur going to try to build the Uruguayan caviar industry from scratch, creating jobs and export revenue in the process. But even more, he’s going to build a brand for his country.
Soon when you think Uruguay, you’ll think caviar.
Tags: development, Endeavor, latin america
July 14, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Is this going to work? Uruguay has just 3.4 million people and is relatively far from developed markets (where they presumably want to build a brand). Not many countries with those characteristics have international brand. Can you think of any?
July 15, 2008 at 8:40 pm
you know that when i think chile i think of diesel.