A cocreational approach to nation branding: The case of Chile

Branding a nation for external purposes

As it was previously outlined, nation branding has been defined as the execution of marketing principles to brand a country, aiming to generate a pleasant image in the minds of a determined set of targeted publics with specific political, economic, or cultural reasons. Simon Anholt, an independent policy advisor to foreign governments on this matter, published in 2002 an article in which he stated, “the intelligent and judicious application of marketing and branding techniques upon countries can be a powerful force for global wealth distribution and cultural as well as economic development” (Anholt, 2002: 59). Even though Anholt has shied away from that approach in the last few years, proposing now that countries should focus on public policy actions that foster international cooperation to turn them into “good” countries (Anholt, 2020), nation branding was first conceived with a business mindset. Because of its marketing focus, several scholars have criticized nation branding due to its commercialist and capitalist nature (Aronczyk, 2013; Kaneva, 2011).

Critical-cultural scholars argue that these practices only represent what a closed circle of people within a country decide the image of their nation will be—mainly people in government positions working in nation branding projects, or committees of public and private parties deciding the content of these campaigns. Browning (2013) said that these commissions are usually dominated by business interests that often engage in attempts to “superficially democratize the brand creation process” (Browning, 2013: 205). These attempts end up being futile because national identities are multifaceted, heterogenous, and contested (Bonikowski, 2017). Nation branding campaigns have also been criticized for using stereotypes to brand the nation, misrepresenting the authentic image of a country to please an international gaze (Aronczyk, 2013; Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016; Kaneva, 2017). These scholars are less interested in advancing theories or models to inform the practice of nation branding and its applied science. Instead, they propose a critique to nation branding and attempt to formulate a counter-argument to the perspectives previously discussed. They do so by connecting constructivist ideas of nationhood and analyzing nation branding as a discourse of national identity, culture, and governance (Kaneva, 2011).

Aronczyk (2013) expanded many of Kaneva’s arguments in the book Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. The key premise in this book emphasized that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, different governments started hiring the services of a group of branding and marketing experts to aid them in the creation and execution of nation branding campaigns. Aronczyk referred to these experts as members of the “transnational-promotional class” (TPC). She criticized their efforts, arguing that they had an instrumentalist view focused on exploiting the countries’ economic profile. Aronczyk called in her research for a constructivist view of the nation, stating that the brand of a nation is not what the TPC or a specific government determines. The identity of a country is composed of the deeds and actions of all different types of actors within a nation, which is far from being a cohesive and coherent construct.

Contrary to the aforementioned argument, other scholars have proposed that even though nation branding campaigns mainly have an economic focus, they could also allow people to reflect on their national belonging and identity (Varga, 2013). These campaigns could also serve as important venues to reflect and think about who and what they are as a country. For example, Pamment and Cassinger (2018) explored the case of a campaign launched by a Swedish tourism association, called The Swedish Number. This campaign developed a smartphone app to enable international audiences to call a random Swedish telephone number and be connected to a Swedish citizen to ask questions about their country. Citizen participation was at the core of this initiative, since Swedish citizens directly answered questions about what it is like to visit and live in their country. Through this case study, the authors suggested that the engagement with campaigns like these can not only be more effective, but also more inclusive. In this case, who represented the image of what Sweden’s most noble characteristics and identity are were the citizens of the country, and not a group of elites in the government or private sector. In their own words, “[w]e suggest that participation in these kind of exercises could also act as a means to make sense of national communities, as it provides an arena (or playground) for engaging with nationalist tropes, values and identities” (p. 571).

A similar campaign ran in Peru in 2011. Lossio Chá vez (2014) reported the efforts of PromPerú, the government institution tasked with disseminating the country’s reputation abroad, to promote its nation brand to internal audiences. In 2011, the organization recorded a video in the little town of Peru, Nebraska, in the United States. In the ad, Peruvians showed “Peruvian-Americans” (Nebraskans) how to “be Peruvian” by teaching them about Peruvian dances, music, and food. The campaign’s endgoal was to inspire feelings of pride among Peruvians, arguing that they also had “something to teach” to Americans—and that they should also be proud of their cultural heritage. Lossio Chá vez (2014) was critical with the campaign, contending that the ad was a simple simulacrum that portrayed an image of something that did not truly exist in contemporary Peru—meaning that the video was a simple fantasy that showed an unrealistic image of the country. However, he also stated that “fantasies are the support of our reality, and therefore, necessary” (p. 35). In that sense, the author argued that this campaign still served to pose a reflection on what was the national identity of Peru, and how different sectors within a country contributed to that branded identity. In this paper, we argue that this cocreation process can be fostered through the establishment of relationships and dialogue among different publics within a nation. Through these relationships, a more diverse idea of the nation can be elevated, shifting the focus from a marketing standpoint to a public relations perspective.

Public relations and national identity’s role in nation branding

The aforementioned campaigns bring in many elements that can be traced back to the public relations literature. Relationships are at the core of public relations research (Ferguson, 2018) and several studies have explored the connections between nation branding and public relations research (Szondi, 2010; Fitzpatrick et al., 2013). Both in the Swedish and Peruvian cases, the organizations tasked with developing nation branding campaigns established relationships with different stakeholders to cocreate meaning around the branded identities of their countries. In that sense, the public relations literature can become of special significance to the implementation of more inclusive nation branding efforts. An interpretative and constructivist perspective in public relations sees relationships as a “state of flux that defies measurement and is idiosyncratic to the situation at hand” (Curtin, 2012: 40). Public relations is conceived as a practice that is fluid and complex (Gower, 2006). For the specific case of nation branding, we argue that a constructivist perspective on public relations becomes more valuable. Within this setting, relationships are not necessarily “measured” with the goal to attract foreigners to a country, but serve as venues in which different stakeholders engage in the cocreation process from their specific political, economic and cultural standpoints.

Given the context, scholars have advocated for cocreational (Botan and Taylor, 2004) as well as rhetorical perspectives (Heath and Frandsen, 2008) when analyzing relationships within a public relations context. Botan and Taylor (2004) discussed that, as a discipline, the excellence theory has led public relations to be traditionally understood as a technical area. A cocreational perspective to public relations views publics as cocreators of meaning. Communication and relationships are what make it possible for different publics to agree on these shared meanings, interpretations, and goals about specific subjects. In a similar manner, Heath and Frandsen (2008) called for a rhetorical perspective, focused on the relationships between different actors with regards to specific contexts. Those relationships enable varying partners to find and define shared meaning. They heavily relied on rhetorical theory to stress the fact that societies negotiate meaning through cocreated messages. Taylor and Kent (2006) suggested that as a discipline, public relations can serve as a means for establishing relationships between the government and citizens to cocreate meaning about their national identity. These authors argued that communication can serve as a tool for nation building, which creates and maintains relationships. National building, national identity, and national unity are all maintained through strategic communication efforts.

Taylor (2009) emphasized the concept of “civil society” in public relations research, which creates the necessary conditions that allow individuals and groups of people to advocate on behalf of their own goals. In that cocreation process, public relations provides the “language and other symbolic forms to inform, persuade, and to build identification and coalitions” (p. 83). Although the cocreation approach emphasizes the role of dialogue among members of civil society, scholars have questioned how power gets distributed among publics within that society (Dozier and Lauzen, 2000; Edwards, 2006). Dutta-Bergman (2005) argued that as a concept, civil society lacks to address who embodies a society, particularly when Western approaches to public relations are applied in what he classified as “Third World” countries. He called scholars to take a “subaltern” approach to public relations research, which views “subaltern participants” (or publics) as those who have been traditionally left outside of civil society by those in power. Through a cocreation approach to public relations, engagement efforts with subaltern publics should take into consideration who takes power over others in society.

Despite these critiques, we argue that a constructivist view of public relations provides useful theoretical foundations to interpret nation branding campaigns that aim to generate dialogue between different citizens of a country. Traditionally, nation branding has studied the societal effects associated with a nation feeling compelled to promote a pleasant image of itself to international audiences. However, critics of nation branding have said that these campaigns do not portray the true face of a nation because they are usually run to please an international gaze (Kaneva, 2017). These campaigns are also run by nation branding committees that unilaterally decide what are the main messages that define a country to those global audiences (Widler, 2007). Their messages mainly have an economic or transactional appeal. However, we argue that a cocreational approach to nation branding defies these critics. Instead of having nation branding offices designing campaigns that do not represent a completely accurate picture of what a country has to offer to the world, we propose that these offices should act as facilitators of dialogue for people to discuss what are the elements and icons that constitute their national identity. Building upon the work of Botan and Taylor (2004), we propose that a cocreational approach to nation branding could enable different actors from society to discuss the elements that should be featured in these campaigns.

Internal nation branding: A focus on Chile

So far, this literature review analyzed nation branding’s main ideals, and some of the critics of this practice. However, instead of focusing on how these promotional efforts impact foreign publics, this study will explore how concepts related to national identity are formed and adopted internally, and the role of public relations in this process. To do so, we present the specific case of Chile with the campaign “Chile Que te Quiero” (Chile, I Really Love You). The campaign was developed by the Marca Chile, a public-private institution that works in the execution of international communication campaigns for Chile’s nation brand. This is the only campaign that they have implemented in their existence since 2008 to directly appeal to Chileans.

As it was mentioned in the introduction, “Chile Que te Quiero” ran between 2016 and 2018. In 2016, Marca Chile toured 14 regions of the country to execute what they called “cocreation focus groups” to foster dialogue among different regional stakeholders, and discuss with them what were the elements that best defined their regional and overall Chilean identity. These workshops physically gathered a total of 1401 people, ranging from local entrepreneurs, representatives of civil society groups that were relevant to each region, private companies and trade associations, among other actors. In 2017, Marca Chile created a website (www.chilequetequiero.cl) to launch a campaign and validate with the Chilean population the top five icons of pride per region in the country. The campaign was launched and executed in September 2017––the month in which the country celebrates its national holiday. The campaign, which was advertised using Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads, gathered a total of 66,596 votes. Finally, in 2018, Marca Chile organized in different regions of the country an artistic exhibition with drawn maps depicting the most voted elements per region of the 16 regions of the country. These exhibitions brought together people to learn more about their region and learn about other parts of the country as well.

This campaign presents a unique opportunity to evaluate how concepts such as dialogue and cocreation of meaning, which come from the public relations literature, can be applied to the nation branding field. Given this situation, we propose a cocreational approach to nation branding, posing the following research questions based on the “Chile Que te Quiero” campaign:

RQ1: What were the communication strategies employed by Marca Chile to foster dialogue among different Chilean key actors and organizations aiming to cocreate meaning around their national identity?

In-depth interviews’ data

After describing the goal of the study and requesting consent, eight informants involved in different stages of the “Chile Que te Quiero” campaign were interviewed between August and October of 2019. The interviews averaged 36 min and 11 s, with the longest lasting one hour and 19 min, and the shortest lasting 19 min and 26 s. Interviewees were selected based on their involvement with the campaign. We first interviewed two officers from Marca Chile, who later provided us with the contact information of different stakeholders that were key in the development of the campaign between 2015 and 2018. We present in Table 1 a list of the eight informants affiliated with this campaign, who granted permission to include their names and positions in this study.

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Table 1.

Informants.

Name	Title	Role in the campaign
Francisca Galleguillos	Marketing Manager, Marca Chile	Directed the campaign; established relationships with other public and private organizations to execute the campaign
Bautista Martínez	Audiovisual Manager, Marca Chile	Aided the marketing team in the campaign, proposed the idea of the drawn maps by illustrators of different Chilean regions, and established the connection with Mappin
Rafael Céspedes	CEO, Provokers Chile	Advised Marca Chile in the 2016 phase of the campaign with market research projects
Mauricio Ubeda	Director, Boveda Marketing BTL	Served as the event producer for the 2016 events that gathered Chileans in different regions to participate in focus groups to cocreate meaning about the Chilean identity
Ricardo Arriagada	Director, ProChile (Los Lagos region)	Aided Marca Chile to implement the 2016 phase of the campaign in the Los Lagos region, bringing exporters and other entrepreneurs to the cocreation workshop
Guillermo Navarrete	General Productor, GRUPOAWA	Served as the event producer for the 2018 exhibition of the 16 drawn maps of the different Chilean regions in three cities of the country
José Flores	Illustrator and Graphic Designer	Drew the map of the Coquimbo Region in Chile with his colleague, Camila Olivares
Felipe Bengoa	Director, Mappin	Owner of Mappin, a company that sells themed maps of different regions of Chile, served as connector between illustrators of different regions of the country and Marca Chile

We also corresponded via email with other informants. To complement the interview data, we analyzed reports submitted by the different subsidiaries with which Marca Chile worked throughout the campaign—GRUPOAWA (event production agency in 2018) and Provokers (market research agency in 2016).

We systematically analyzed transcripts through Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña’s (2020) data analysis procedures: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification. Interview transcripts were coded, line-by-line, during the data reduction phase. Then, we merged related codes into common themes and clustered the data into several themes to enable systematic collection and comparison.

Facebook data

To address RQ2, we qualitatively coded comments posted by people on 19 Facebook posts by Marca Chile between September 8 and 29 September 2017. These posts were used to draw people to the “Chile Que te Quiero” website and vote for the most representative icons to them per region. The 19 posts represented a wide variety of regions in Chile. They all had a picture of a place or element of pride in the region (identified in the 2016 cocreation workshops) and a description of the icon, outlining its ties to Chilean identity. Although the final 2017 campaign gathered more than 60,000 votes, we decided to take this qualitative approach to gain finer insights on the reactions and comments of common citizens and non-elites about the elements that were recognized as identitarian to the region and overall country. To analyze the data, we used the techniques of close reading and interpretation to illuminate these posts that represent socially constructed realities (Kuckartz, 2014; Brummett, 2019). The findings of this analysis are outlined in the following section.

Dialogue/Cocreation of meaning around a nation brand

As it was previously noted, in 2016, Marca Chile organized cocreation focus groups in 14 regions of the country to foster dialogue among different sectors of society to make sense of what were the elements that best defined their regional and overall Chilean identity. These workshops gathered more than 1400 people. Rafael Cespedes, CEO of Provokers, reflected on the success of these initial focus groups:

The original objective was to look for elements of pride to boost them communicationally [abroad]… But they [Marca Chile] never imagined how relevant it was going to be for the locals who participated [in the cocreation focus groups]… that they could also opt to appropriate the [nation] brand locally. (R Céspedes 2019, personal communication, 16 September).

This quote emphasizes that Marca Chile did not decide what was representative per region, but it was the feedback of the people. Marca Chile only facilitated a space for dialogue between people. This dialogue is what made the campaign more successful because Chileans felt integrated into the cocreation process and were able to adopt the nation brand as theirs. Francisca Galleguillos from Marca Chile reinforced this idea, looking back to the 2017 phase of the campaign—the social media campaign:

…people had the option to qualify for a prize... we had 12 prizes in total for this contest. But we realized that after we launched the contest and everything, that people were not interested in the prizes... what they wanted was to enhance what they liked about where they lived. And the campaign effectively evoked pride (F Galleguillos 2019, personal communication, 2 August).

In that sense, this quote supports the idea that even though there was a prize to be won, the prize was not the primary motivator for participation; rather, people engaged with the campaign to have a say on whether an icon was representative to their region or not. In her interview, Galleguillos recalled a specific example that supported this insight. She talked about the Roca Kiosk, which is a local store in the city of Punta Arenas in southern Chile that sells banana milk and local sandwiches made of local produce. Galleguillos is from Santiago, the capital of Chile. Based on her own experiences traveling to the Magallanes Region, she thought beforehand that the most voted icons would merely be touristic spots. But for people in the Magallanes region, the Roca Kiosk was as important as other international attractions, such as Torres del Paine, to represent their local identity. This fact surprised her. She said:

In Punta Arenas, well, in the Magallanes Region, the first icon [that was mentioned as most representative] was always Torres del Paine. But people on social media started asking why the Roca kiosk was not there. (…) I knew the Roca kiosk, but not to put it as an icon, because for me it was just a local store... but, people requested it so much that we had to include it as one of the options for people to vote. We put it in the contest, and can you believe me that it took second place after Torres del Paine? And then, I think that the icons represent well what local identity is, and not what we might believe is their identity. That is the difference with other projects. (F Galleguillos 2019, personal communication, 2 August).

People in Magallanes, the furthest region to the south in Chile, organically engaged with the campaign and were active cocreators of meaning about their regional and national identity.

With the feedback from the people gathered in the 2016 focus groups and the 2017 social media campaign, Marca Chile commissioned in 2018 the design of regional maps of Chile to Mappin, a graphic design agency. Mappin was charged to reach out to illustrators throughout the country to draw the maps of the 16 regions of Chile. Felipe Bengoa, director and owner of Mappin, described that in the illustrated maps business it is really important to take into consideration the feedback of the people, and make them active members of the creative process. In his own words:

That has been the Mappin experiment (…) how to communicate that the map is a form of belonging, that you belong to a territory, and that you like it, and that you are proud of that territory... regardless of whether it is a city, Latin America, or the planet. There are different perspectives here. But it is entertaining what happens, that people feel part of the map because the map says something about them, so to speak. (F Bengoa 2019, personal communication, 1 November).

This quote supports the idea that just as the focus groups and the social media campaign had done, Marca Chile used these maps to make people part of the cocreation process of the Chilean identity and its nation brand. In the campaign, the maps functioned as a venue for Chileans to reflect on their identity as a country. One of the designers of one of the maps used in the campaign accentuated this point:

What we do [with the maps] is to emphasize the things that people do not observe in their day to day. So this causes people to value what is around them. Because people don't take it into account [in their daily lives]. For example, they say, La Recova [a touristic attraction in the Coquimbo region in Chile]... and they don't take it seriously, or they don't see the value that a foreigner could give to it when visiting Chile. (J Flores 2019; personal communication, 1 November).

The value of national identity for nation branding campaigns

All of the aforementioned quotes are supported by one big idea: for this specific campaign, national identity is what informed the nation brand of Chile. Chileans felt a close connection to the campaign because it strongly appealed to one level of their identities—their national identity. In the next quote, Rafael Cespedes, CEO of Provokers, reflected on how important were the 2016 cocreation focus groups to the people of Atacama, a region in Northern Chile. These workshops allowed them to reflect on regional elements that had been traditionally neglected in tourism guidebooks of the region. In his own words:

The Giant of Atacama was not in any of the Iquique tourism guidebooks. It was not something that was communicated outward to visit. In fact, it is still hard to find that they [tourism guidebooks] promote it so much. But for locals, it was important. People considered that there was an entire touristic route of the Atacama Giant that had never been enhanced. So, for them there was a whole mystique, a story, there was a lot of work to do around this icon that was identified and valued [by local people]. (R Céspedes 2019, personal communication, 16 September).

This quote is supported by the initial goals of the campaign, which were to let people from different regions to speak about what best represented them. Reflecting on the 2017 phase of the campaign (the national social media contest), Francisca Galleguillos from Marca Chile said:

That is what this social media contest highlighted, since citizens had the power to say what it represents their region, and not just what is touristy, or what is attractive. Then, objective number one was fulfilled, which was to raise the identity icons of each of the regions in the voice of the same [people of these] regions. That was the main objective. Now, the criticism was always like, ‘all these messages come from Santiago, it is very centralist’... there is always the criticism that ‘you impose things on us that we don’t consider’ [to be identitarian]. So, this campaign did not take that approach. That is the difference. (F Galleguillos, 2019, personal communication, 2 August).

In the final part of the quote, Galleguillos recognized that one of the most common critics of the locals (or citizens) is that these campaigns many times leave behind the true opinions of the people. Marca Chile’s headquarters are in Santiago, the capital of the country. In an effort to engage with all the regions of the nation, Marca Chile did well in getting out of their offices by truly seeking to engage with people of the country.