Nation branding as an emerging field:an institutionalist perspective

Nation branding is a remarkable phenomenon. In less than two decades, it has established itself as the preferred framework for interstate strategic communication and as an emerging academic field. The paper describes how this extraordinary expansion was possible by showing how nation branding presents itself as a theoretical possibility and a practical necessity. We propose that what made a travel possible from product branding via corporate branding to nation branding was the semantic flexibility of the brand concept. We argue that the brand concept is almost void of meaning and that this feature has been an indispensable requisite for establishing nation branding as a field of practice and as an academic field. Despite the indisputable academic productivity that is a result of the vagueness of the brand concept, we suggest that to reach a normal science-like situation in the field of nation branding a clarification and systematization of central concepts is needed

Utilising Corpus Linguistic Tools for Analysing Social Change in Risk

This chapter illustrates the utility of linguistic tools for the analysis of the changing meaning and practices of risk in society through examples of historical social changes in news coverage of The Times (London).1 With the increasing digitisation of print media and the proliferation of social media, a rapidly growing body of digitised text is available to social sciences for analysis. These mass data are an invaluable resource for risk studies. However, they do not only provide new opportunities but challenges for research methods. Detailed qualitative analyses quickly meet limits when facing the enormous amount of data. New automated strategies are required to support the exploration of patterns that are embedded, but not easily recognisable to humans, in relatively unstructured collections of text

The risks of nation branding as crisis response:A case study of how the Danish government turned the Cartoon Crisis into a struggle with Globalization

In this article, we investigate the limitations of organization-centric models for crisis communication in handling place crises. Two distinct types of place crisis are identified as what we respectively term the ‘sudden’ and the ‘ongoing’ type. We point out that place branding traditionally has been used to handle the latter type. We then demonstrate how the inspiration from corporate communication in place branding has led to a fixation on reputation, which becomes salient when place branding is used as crisis communication in sudden crisis. Here the corporate inspiration tends to rule out alternative strategies for handling crises based on ‘societal models’. Through a case study of Denmark’s so-called Cartoon Crisis we demonstrate how crisis communication falls short of coping aptly with the complexity of the crisis due to the branding-inspired translation from ‘sudden’ to ‘ongoing’ crisis. We thus argue that the Danish government’s solution in nation branding aimed at the reputational implications failed to address the immediate consequences of the crisis vis-à-vis national security and exports. And that this solution in turn created the reputation as additional risk. We conclude that a broader societal perspective on crises therefore is needed in the emerging academic literature on place crisis communication