BANGLADESH, by all measurement of controversial wisdom, is unlikely to have the insight, infrastructure and human capacity to develop by herself. It was considered a 'basket case' for development some 40 years ago when it was established, but then again - it is a country of 'impossible attainments'. Bangladesh today is the 48th largest economy in the world with a GDP size of US$ 225 billion on the basis of purchasing power parity. Bangladesh has already started moving from the low-income to an upper middle-income economy, and we want to continue advancing to become a middle-income nation by 2021. And this commitment of the people will be our key strength when we think of branding Bangladesh.
Bangladesh needs to take all the opportunities immediately to turn around the negative perception through brushing up its image and improve its visibility in the view of rest of the world. We should create a shiny BANGLADESH MASTER BRAND with universal applicability. We need to reshape our appearance and national branding strategies to influence foreign affairs and international interactions, which can be focused on developing an appealing, positive image in order to support our confident presence and influence in the international arena. We should also develop our national image in virtual world in terms of dot-com-presence, content development and availability. Bangladesh may develop its virtual accessibility by performing national level Search Engine Optimization (soe) activities in favor of the country image.
Branding as a set of policies suggests a nation to actively "sell" its image and reputation in a persuasive message campaign. Some have argued, if international relation is increasingly a "market" for identification, then branding strategies are the logical evolution for a country's foreign policy. As a representational metaphor - Branding in this context describes what functions as public diplomacy - both in policy and in the flow of cultural communication. Branding captures how the nation is communicated with outside world - both in its cultural exports and in the de-facto rhetoric of its foreign policies. Public diplomacy as branding assigns roles to communicators and audiences, while providing policy objectives. Here "brand" identity creation and its maintenance along with value creation is the basic task for Bangladesh which primarily involves the policy players to reshape the options.
Nation branding is by nature a highly qualitative subject, dealing with matters of image and reputation, measuring the strength of a nation's brand can be very difficult and highly contentious. The Nation Brands Index, managed by Mr Simon Anholt and the international polling firm Global Market Insite (GMI), is currently the only major source of comprehensive, numerical data on the relative strengths of national brands. But it is a matter of regret that the existing indexes in practice didn't consider countries like Bangladesh and as of yet, there is very poor availability of data on Bangladesh as a brand element. We need to arrange data gathering to scan and perceive the current image of Bangladesh (from non-Bangladeshis' view) and measure the reputation of Bangladesh (in terms of its brand strength). Generally, looking from the outside in 'BRAND BANGLADESH' is a bit weak and anaemic.
Recognizing the importance of our international image and reputation, we need to mobilize all our resources into developing and implementing a positive national brand. Depending on our primary goal, to unlearn other's negative image and increase our business prospect like: outsourcing job flow, manpower export, foreign trade or attracting foreign investment, we need to highlight our appealing assets and communicate our most attractive features to the world. While a well-designed branding campaign can prove highly favourable for Bangladesh; to begin, an effective campaign requires high amount of cooperation among a wide range of government and private actors. There is a great opportunity for cooperative interaction among the government agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations, development partners and other actors for accommodating the common agendas of fostering the national image. However, diversity of actors can also prove counterproductive, so we have to underscore common interests of all sectors involved, so that multiple branding campaigns can work on cross-cutting purpose.
An attractive logo or catchy slogan is not enough to create a strong, positive, and believable national brand for a country like ours. As the image of a nation is primarily built upon a long history of its government's policies, international attitudes and the products or service qualities it offers the rest of the world, and as Simon Anholt says, if a country wants to change that image "there is no magical shortcut through marketing or advertising, logos or slogans." So we have to maintain the required quality with our products and governance related attitude. According to Mr Simon Anholt, "generally, countries get the reputations they deserve, and the surest way to fix that reputation is to address the policies (or lack of policies) that cause the reputation in the first place. So we need to identify our area of development and act accordingly to address the gaps (as we still have malpractices and deep-rooted corruption in our national political/governance culture, lack of long-term development vision at policy level, bureaucratic red-tapeism kind of sluggishness etc). Bangladesh needs to emphasize capacitating further its organizations involved in exploration of market at demand end provide solid support at supply end of product or service flow to ensure goodwill in global market place.
Once we map our country requirements, we have to focus on the needs blended with our nation's sentiments and set our plans for the nation's branding. It was thought that country, place or region constitutes a brand, and now a few countries are currently working on strategies to spruce up their brand images. In the case of exports, if - once a country has become known as an exporter of quality branded goods - (we can assume: readymade garments for Bangladesh), the country's product brands and its place brand will work together to raise expectations overseas with a synergic effect. Country branding should then become part of a self-perpetuating cycle: as the BANGLADESH country logo promotes its consumer brands, and those brands will promote the country Bangladesh vice-versa. But the relationship between product and place brands is by no means always simple. We should think in light of that - in the case of our country we may prefer a product-place mix approach, which will be well-fit in export potential sectors like: RMG, IT outsourcing, leather goods, frozen food and ship building.
We have a lot of things to learn from our neighbours and the world's leading nations. There are many ways to achieve a unique national identity. As examples, we can observe that recently Spain has made tremendous strides in branding itself as a modern and developed country, while Denmark has successfully branded all of its government ministries and departments. Croatia for its part has been working to reform its image in sports and tourism, and Poland has also begun asserting itself in foreign policy reshape. Thus, Bangladesh primarily needs is a 'brand' in much the same way that when one thinks of Paris one thinks of the Eiffel Tower or when one thinks of Singapore he/she thinks of 'Singapore Girls' or Malaysia with its tagline of 'Malaysian truly Asian', "Tulips" for Holland or "Number 1 for Voice" as the tagline of Philipines outsourcing service sector. According to Saffron's Olins, some nations develop a national brand in a kind of controlled or formalized way, but with others it happens almost spontaneously. "If you look at what is happening in India today, and the perceptions around India, none of these are controlled. India has emerged in the last five years in terms of perceptions in a quite different way from the way it was perceived ten or fifteen years ago. It was spirituality and poverty, and now it's software; it's highly educated people, world class film industry. And in some countries, Indian clothing - textiles and fabrics, are fashionable.… None of this is managed. It's all spontaneous. So, when we can be able to approach in a right direction all the factors will help each other and create a good synergy to develop and sustain with a respectable country image value.
As per the current findings first in the place Bangladesh needs efforts to remove existing negative image in rest of the world's view. At the same time, we need success-case presentation and discussion on our developments. We can use the recent taxi driver's honesty case in Dubai to tell a true story about Bangladeshis' honesty and social behaviour. As Bangladesh is the 2nd largest garment manufacturer of the world after China, we can underscore our garment sector's success case and internationally promote MADE IN BANGLADESH brand with rightly using the tagline 'WE CLOTHE THE WORLD', so that the string MADE IN BANGLADESH will itself be a master brand alongside the RMG sector. It was well-proposed by Dr Mohammad Yunus that, in every Made in Bangladesh product there may be a tag like: 'Made by the Happy People from Bangladesh' which will create brand equity for the Bangladeshi country brand. With regards to that we should take adequate efforts to keep the workers really happy by ensuring their basic rights, so that our buyers will feel by their hearts that their buying means our happiness and eventually buyers will stay attached with us psychologically. This may also be a good response to recent garment sector's tragedy.
We can capitalize on our positive information in every scope of telling about us; we should highlight: we have more than 160 million who are quick learners, most of whom are young and employable. Our soil is highly fertile; we have abundance of natural resources like: natural gas, water, our boys have successfully decoded the jute plant genome sequence etc. We gained 6.2% growth in GDP despite the world's economic downturn in FY 2012-13. We can let the foreigners know the huge amount of remittance the economy is receiving in recent years and we have steadily growing local market potentials. To remove the negative image and change the concerning world-view we can effectively use the Bangladeshi diaspora and non-resident Bangladeshis. On behalf of the young generation of the nation the students studying overseas and researchers at different levels and academic fields can come forward to represent the nation at their level. Celebrities and selected brand ambassadors can be used to uphold the national master brand. National cricket team / any other good performing sport teams and celebrities from entertainment world or academic super-stars can be used in national image building by the flow of cultural communication particularly in terms of upholding the national flag or nation's banners.
Ambassadors, foreign ministry officials, and commercial counsellors posted in other countries should be like sales persons of the nation and here comes the public diplomacy handy to sell the country, to communicate with outside world and finally contribute to the national master brand. We may recruit local agency /local marketing (non-Bangladeshi) people for potential sectors in targeted countries to create sales/export drive. We have to ensure common messages during politicians' foreign tours and press meets. All the national leaders' speeches should be in the same line.
We can use the national Airlines carrier to let the world know about our traditional hospitality and long heritage of Bengali food. In terms of cultural communication traditional Bengali foods (particularly based on super tasty hilsa fish) can be menued at renowned restaurants and hotels of the world. It can be mentioned that we have some remarkable successes in cultural communication, like: our Ekusey February (21st of February) has been declared and is being observed worldwide as the International Mother Language Day. As part of the national master brand we may think of individual city/region based branding for promotion of tourism - like: Cox's Bazar for the longest sea beach and natural beauty, the Sundarbans the biggest mangrove forest which is the safe home of Royal Bengal Tigers, Sylhet for tea gardens, Dhaka for archaeological significance.
We may organise single/joint country fairs home and abroad and send best of the Bangladesh delegation in targeted international gatherings like: fairs, expos, convention ceremonies, cultural shows, sport events etc. And we should release an international news letter / bulletin / periodical (quarterly / half yearly) with right-point circulation highlighting our country brand's position and its dynamics, where-in we can put all our regular updates to keep our buyers close.
Despite all the challenges, we can foresee a bright future for Bangladesh. In earlier days 'Bengal' was a just - spontaneous brand in others' eyes, no formal framework was needed to gain that reputation. Its rich history says - Bangladesh was famous for its resources, cheap price of food stuff, aristocratic fine cloth called MUSLIN, producer of natural fibre called jute, prevailing good business environment etc. And so, the British followed by other nations came in the name of business - subsequently established their colony and eventually ruled Bangladesh for more than 19 decades (1757-1947). Still Bangladesh is superior in clothing, good at ship-building, exporting world class jute goods - then why can't this country be branded as a symbol of mutual-trust, confidence and commitment to serve the world. Image of Bangladesh will no more be about 'sufferings from cyclones, floods or droughts', rather she will be a notable example of a good disaster management practice with a population who knows how to live with uncertainty related to natural calamities. There will always be room in the global marketplace for receiving a country brand like BANGLADESH which may include a very-own-niche that compete and sustain on a price-quality-blend and cultural excellence. What we need is just a: home-grown long-term National Strategy for branding and international market communication. Maybe due to cultural proximity sometimes our non-resident Bangladeshi people are wrongly identified as Indians, we should work on our core identity issues to create and blink on our distinct angles. At last I would like to express my sincere apology - for any of my emotional expectation that subconsciously may have touched this piece of writing. I would love to see an influential 'BANGLADESH brand' shining high in the global horizon soon.
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The writer is Executive Officer, Business Promotion Council, Bangladesh.
Email: mir_nasim@yahoo.com
A few thoughts over branding Bangladesh
Mir Shariful Bashar | Published: January 11, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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