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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.
Introduction
In an era of increasing globalization, countries around the world face an unprecedented level of competition for both outbound (e.g. exports and outward direct investment) and inbound (e.g. inward foreign direct investment, tourism, students and skilled labor) factors of development. As a result, nation branding is fast becoming an important strategic instrument as countries engage in systematic campaigns to enhance their international competitiveness. Examples of countries that have recently used branding agencies to develop campaigns to position or re-position themselves abroad include, to mention just a few (agency in parentheses): Bulgaria (British Council), Croatia (Simon Anholt), Chile and Estonia (Interbrand), Kosovo (BBR Saatchi & Saatchi), Germany (Wally Olins), Poland, Portugal, Vietnam (Saffron/Wally Olins) and Latvia (Said Business School, Simon Anholt).
However, while nation branding is discussed more and more frequently in international marketing studies, there is a dearth of empirical research and the few studies that are available tend to be quite rudimentary, focusing more on describing national images than in examining their antecedent factors.
A promising approach for research and practice in this field is personality-based branding, which has attracted significant research attention in marketing generally and has emerged as an important tool in brand differentiation following the landmark study on brand personality (BP) by Aaker (1997). Aaker (1997) posited that consumers attribute human traits to brands, which affects their relationship with the brand and ultimately influences their buying decisions. Nations are, of course, much more complex entities than product brands, and thus they may be conceptualized as being akin to umbrella corporate brands (Anholt, 2002) that may represent a "family" of products within a relatively narrow range (e.g. Apple's "i-" products include the iMac, iTouch, iPhone, iPad, and so on), or, perhaps more appropriately, a wide variety of very diverse product lines (e.g. General Electric's "GE"-branded products include everything from light bulbs to aircraft engines).
The overall goal of the present study is to advance research by drawing from this body of work and applying the BP construct, which has so far been considered mostly in connection with commercial product brands, in the context of nation branding. More specifically, and also more importantly, the study...