Competitive identity: The new brand management for
nations, cities and regions
Simon Anholt
Palgrave Macmillan, UK; 2007; 134pp; £25; hardback; ISBN: 0 230 50028 5
Journal of Brand Management (2007) 14, 474–475. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550086;
published online 11 May 2007
Anyone who has taken an interest in nation
branding over the past few years will be
familiar with the work of Simon Anholt,
whose latest book concisely summarises his
thinking on the application of brand
management techniques to the develop-
ment of place brands. In a departure from
some of his previous writings on the topic,
Anholt now declares that he prefers the
term ‘competitive identity (CI)’ to ‘nation
branding’ because his approach ‘has more to
do with national identity and the politics
and economics of competitiveness than with
branding as it is usually understood’. Having
thus clarified his stance, Anholt proceeds to
describe his theory of CI through chapters
focused on topics such as understanding
national image; planning for CI; imple-
menting CI and CI and development.
Drawing upon his extensive experience
of advising countries around the world on
how they may go about enhancing their
national reputations, the author provides
numerous useful insights into the challenges
and pitfalls that lie in wait. One of the key
deficiencies that Anholt identifies in many
nations’ approach to promoting their coun-
try’s reputation is the fragmented, uncoor-
dinated nature of the communications
activity that countries often undertake. He
notes that any one country will have a
plethora of organisations all emitting
communications about their country, and
these communications are very often
conflicting—for example, organisations
sending out national messages include the
country’s tourism board, investment promo-
tion agency, cultural institute, exporters’
474 © 2007 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD 1350-23IX $30.00 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 14, NO. 6, 474–475 JULY 2007
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associations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs as
well as many non-governmental organisa-
tions and special interest groups. Such
potentially conflicting messages will do little
to help advance the reputation of the
country.
In order to confront this challenge,
Anholt advocates building a CI team
comprising a coalition of the three major
forces within any country—government,
business and civil society. He goes on to
identify four main qualities required for
those individuals charged with managing
the CI of a country. The first quality is
wisdom, expressed through the ability to
make the right choices between short-term
promotion and long-term image manage-
ment. The second quality is patience, as the
changing of a country’s reputation can take
several years to occur. The third quality is
imagination, which is needed because the
CI team will need to demonstrate creativity
and innovation if they are to enhance
existing perceptions of the nation. The
fourth and final quality is care, because only
those people who have the country’s best
interests at heart are in a position to make
decisions, which may make a dramatic
impact upon the country’s reputation and
subsequent economic well being.
With the right CI team in place, Anholt
proposes a set of criteria to guide the
formulation of a good CI strategy. Profes-
sionals involved in nation branding/CI
will find such guidance insightful and
helpful, as Anholt’s writing style is clear
and vivid and devoid of baffling jargon.
Among the criteria put forward to guide

CI strategy is the need to be creative in
order to be noticed in an increasingly
crowded global marketplace, although
Anholt issues an important caveat in this
respect—the creativity deployed in the CI
strategy must be rooted in the reality of
the nation rather than being an invention
that may have little relation to the coun-
try’s reality. Further CI strategy aspects
include ownability, that is, the ability to
make a claim that is ‘uniquely and unargu-
ably about the place and not anywhere
else’; related to this is the requirement for
the strategy to be ‘sharp’, highly focused
rather than generic, ‘telling a very specific
and definite story about the place, rather
than a bland catch-all strategy’. With the
content of the CI strategy clearly defined,
the next task that Anholt turns to is the
communication of the said strategy.
The primary consideration in CI strategy
communication, according to the author,
lies in the need to recruit a small team of
champions who will enthuse others
through face-to-face interaction rather
than through less effective methods of
communication such as glossy brand books,
expensive multimedia presentations and so
on. This team of champions needs to
communicate the reasons behind the CI
strategy in order to gain the support of all
the many different stakeholder groups with
an interest in the strategy. Members of the
team need to generate a contagious passion
for the strategy so that it takes root and
flourishes, rather than being ignored.
Towards the end of the book, the author
provides some examples of countries that
have enjoyed some successes in their CI
strategy and also some cases where coun-
tries have failed to employ an effective
strategy.A comparison is drawn, for instance,
between Slovenia and Romania where the
© 2007 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD 1350-23IX $30.00 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 14, NO. 6, 474–475 JULY 2007
BOOK REVIEW
former country is deemed by Anholt to
have made far greater advances in enhancing
its reputation than the latter. Slovenia has,
according to the author, managed to shake
off the negative perceptions of being
‘Balkan’, successfully promoted its branded
exports such as Gorenje appliances, Elan
skis and Lasko Pivo beer, and boosted its
tourism through several well-funded
campaigns. Romania, by contrast, ‘despite
a greatly improved investment climate and
notable progress across a range of economic,
social, cultural and industrial fronts since
the time of Ceausescu, has achieved little
in the way of improving its reputation and
still finds foreign investment, tourism and
exports developing rather slowly’.
Anholt also shows how individual coun-
tries can suffer not just from their own
poorly defined images, but from the poten-
tially negative image of the continent
within which they find themselves. This
problem particularly afflicts many African
countries. As the author points out in a
section titled, ‘Africa and the continent
branding effect’, the brand image of Africa
tends—unfairly—to be dominated by
generalised perceptions of famine and
disaster rather than differentiated images of
Africa’s 53 countries each with their own
identities and stages of development.
This book will undoubtedly already have
found its way into the hands of many indi-
viduals all over the world who are involved
with the branding of nations, cities and
regions. Its compact size, readability and
exceptionally high level of experience-
based insight make Anholt’s book essential
reading for anyone working in, or studying,
the field that the author now terms ‘CI’.
Keith Dinnie
E-mail: keithdinnie@brandhorizons.com
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