Brand Management

CRITICAL STUDY TOWARDS BRANDING SWITZERLAND
INTRODUCTION This is a critical study about evaluating the strategies of branding Switzerland. Firstly, the paper provides a comprehensive literature review around nation branding area. In the second part, a case study about branding Switzerland will be presented. Within the case study part: positioning the image of Switzerland along with main aspects and practical strategies in branding Switzerland will be covered. In the third part, Dordevic’s six dimensions of a nation brand will be explained and the overall strategies will be criticised by integrating Dordevic’s six dimensions into Switzerland. The paper will conclude with propounding suggestions towards the weakest dimension of branding Switzerland that is; culture and heritage.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW Fan (2010) defines the nation branding as an integrated mixture of export, place, political and cultural branding. All those components gather around and generate a nation brand. According to him, approaching a nation brand as visual symbol, strapline is the easiest on the contrary deriving a soft power and national identity is the hardest components as they are aimed to be branded. Widler (2007) argues that the preaching of nation branding has to entirely review the construct of the nation. Therefore, the extent of nation branding strategies should be determined by the nation branders. Widler (2007) also claims citizens have to be promoted to participate within the nation branding process. Thus, the practical focused and innovative ideas of citizens have to be taken into consideration in order to promote an effective strategy.
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Szondi (2010) argues that the importance of public relations (PR) is neglected by scholars. He suggests that PR could be adapted to nation branding in various ways. PR could provide a decent context for nation branding attempts. In addition to traditional PR, Szondi (2010) further propose that online nation brand community means in

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