eBusiness Weekly
Dr Musekiwa Clinton Tapera
Nation branding in a mega project that requires huge resources, effective coordination and efficient execution coupled with good cooperation based on a common sense of purpose and a unified core idea, vision, planning, strategic analysis, strategic implementation and monitoring and evaluation.
A stakeholder driven organisational structure coordinated centrally by government needs to be put into place but must be inclusive of private sector players, non-profit making organisations, academia researchers, pressure groups, provincial leaders, and representatives of community groups.
The central National Branding Board or Working group should not be too big to adversely cause too much divergence of ideas and approaches. It must be practical, action-oriented and results focused. Ultimately the outcomes and outputs of its work should be presented to the Office of the President and Cabinet before implementation.
It may be of utmost necessity to analyse global case studies such as New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, Kenya and others in order to avoid pitfalls and misallocation of resources and effort.
Ultimately a pro-active approach to nation branding does not entail falsifying or white washing the true picture about it and expect it to sell and influence a new image.
A SWOT approach to nation branding
An analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is pivotal to the success of any strategy. It is, therefore, important for a country to conduct a SWOT analysis before embarking on any strategy. There is need to conduct an analysis if a country’s resource strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats to establish its resources endowment and its structural weaknesses to determine its true position.
Nation branding is about facing the truth and confront it head on. It’s about reality check and confronting it. In the same vein, it needs to establish and identify its opportunities in order to exploit them. Equally important, it should identify its external threats which have mainly to do with competitor analysis. Because of globalisation, the environment has become highly competitive.
Strickland summaries all the above by postulating that a SWOT analysis is grounded in the basic principle that strategy making effort must aim at producing a good fit between a company’s resource capability as reflected by industry and competitive conditions, the company’s own market opportunities and specific external threats to the company’s profitability and market standing.
Zimbabwe must make efforts to take an audit of its tourist potential, mineral resource endowment, its hospitable people, crime rate, weather patterns and all unique endowments and then make an assessment of its competitive environment. In this case, a competitor analysis of the SADC environment is crucial for effective positioning and planning.
Competitor analysis also assists in unravelling external opportunities that can be exploited in view of gaps that competitors have failed to cover. A strength, according to Strickland, is something a company is capable of doing extremely well which can take the form of physical assets, valuable human assets, skills or expertise and valuable intangible assets. Weaknesses refers to some things that a company performs poorly, thus a company at a disadvantage. The SWOT analysis is important to guide planning, execute strategy carefully and methodically.
The essence of strategy: What is strategy?
Mugobo, a Zimbabwean and nation branding researcher in Cape Town, defines strategy as the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term which achieves advantage in a charging environment through its configuration of resources and competences with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations. The essence of strategy is long term planning, deployment of resources and competences with the ultimate objective being to meet stakeholder expectations. Companies and of late nations, have to make decisions on the long term direction and scope. For nations particularly, this entails strategic decisions regarding the configuration and reconfiguration of resources and core competences to achieve long goals in area such as tourism, FDI, exports, skills and talent attraction, global funding and global attention. Basic principles of nation branding strategy zero down on three main simple aspects which are:
On strategic analysis for developing a nation branding strategy, it is important for Zimbabwe to carry this process to comprehensively establish the current situation for the brand.
It involves an analysis of a nation’s internal and external situation. To assess the nation’s current competitive position it is necessary to conduct both internal and external analysis. Internal analysis has to do with the evaluation of nation’s capabilities on sector specific indicators. External analysis is concerned with a nation’s competitors and the wider environmental forces that have an impact on a nation brand. It is of paramount importance to do a SWOT analysis periodically on the basis of government leadership, factor endowments, industrial organisation, social cohesion, culture, attitudes and values.
The essence of a nation branding strategy is a practice of applying a brand strategy to the economic, social, political and cultural development of a country, resulting in a positive international reputation for Zimbabwe.
Nation branding is also meant to create and manage a nation brand in its entirety. It should integrate economic, social, political and cultural disciplines for overall nation strategy planning. Nation branding is a pathway of integrating all messages that a nation wishes to project to the world. Without an effective branding strategy, target markets are likely to continue inferring a country’s image from inappropriate or irrelevant associations often carried from childhood onwards thus weakening its internal position.
It is, therefore, imperative that after the strategic analysis, nation branding development process involves strategic planning whose aim is to establish long term direction in terms of where it wants to go, goals and objectives which ought to be achieved.
Strategic implementation key to nation branding success
This entails converting strategy into action. From research, it is perhaps in the era of implementation that nation branding faces its biggest challenge, given that the nation brand stakeholders may not be easily structured and managed as the various units of an commercial organisation. Great strategies are worth nothing if they cannot to be implemented. The main implementation areas concern the organisation structure, strategies, planning system, policies, control systems and environmental conditions. Successful strategy implementation requires the Nation branding organisation to address the following;
Clear responsibility for the successful outcome of planned strategic change should be made.
The ability and the capacity of the necessary resources to cope with the changes should be taken as a critical key determinant of strategy that should not be forgotten.
Necessary and appropriate action plans to implement strategies should be identified and planned and responsibility should be allocated.
Strategy evaluation and performance measurement criteria should be determined and appropriate monitoring and control methods should be put in place.
Monitoring and evaluation a critical component of Nation branding.
This involves a holistic appraisal of the nation branding programme to assess its effectiveness in achieving set goals and objectives. The effectiveness of a branding strategy should be examined on a continuous basis. The MPE approach or strategic evaluation is meant to identify and consolidate successes and correct weaknesses and failures. Strategic evaluation should broadly aim to address the following;
Are the objectives of the nation branding initiative appropriate
Were previous strategies currently being implemented to achieve these objective still appropriate
Do the obtaining results confirm or refute previous assumptions about the feasibility of achieving the objectives and ability of the chosen strategies to achieve desired results.
Dr Musekiwa Cliton Tapera writes in his personal capacity. He has a PhD in marketing. His research work and thesis focused on the destination branding of Zimbabwe. Dr. Tapera areas of interest include general destination marketing of cities and towns, tourism destinations, corporate reputation and communications projects, public relations and investment attraction programs. He can be contacted on email: [email protected]. Mobile 0772 920 617
