The concept of branding of a place just like a product has created quite a debate. Marketing stalwarts like Philip Kotler, Professor David Gertner & Wally Olins are clearly against the idea of branding a place alike a product. For them it is almost absurd.
“the idea of a nation as a brand – as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes is a brand – is a very big mistake,”
Magne Supphellen, professor at Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, says that, “In principle, [product] and place branding is the same. It's all about identifying, developing and communicating the parts of the identity that are favorable to some specified target groups.…” But brand building activities for places are far more complex than for products. “It is far more difficult to obtain a fully integrated communication mix in place branding,”
Though these questions are valid and we aim to find a reasonable logical answer to this debate later in some other post, I will be mainly dishing out my personal idea about something very much related to this concept.
The Idea is - coming up with organizing a public or user driven portal working as a "Content Supplier" to the place branding agencies and different government authorities.
A user driven portal like Wikipedia, where the membership is free. The portal is connected with Picasa or Flickr. Now as and when any of the members visit any new place or country, he/she tend to click many pictures of the place. Even people tend to capture the beauty or essence of their native place as well. after clicking so many pictures, some of them must be of excellent quality.
If they do not have any issue to share those pics with the portal via Picasa or Flickr, then there will a considerable amount of pictures and videos accumulated over time. After every six month the members will arrange for a peer rated online voting process. Like the way it is done in Kodak or Canon Online photo competition. Where the best pictures of a particular place or country will be selected by the members themselves.
Now those best pictures and videos will be compiled and proposed to that particular places government authority or any branding agency. If they buy the offer then a part of the profit margin will be shared among the members of the online portal and the rest will be used to take care of the online marketing or advertisements of the portal (website) in Google etc.
Since there is no expense for the pictures to get, because normal people are clicking those pictures for their personal purpose, while traveling. Now they are putting up those pictures online like the way they put up in FB or Twitter or Orkut. So the input cost is almost nil. As a result there will be full profit out of the deal.
Again, since the pictures are being clicked by normal people, so the charges will be very less and the quality and authenticity of the pictures or content will be very real and effective. No artificial posed models in front of The Alps, or so.
This is the idea. Now I want you to think, critique and share your takes on this. Let us share our own ideas on this. Waiting to hear your voice friends!
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