My View: Ireland’s lesson for Rebranding

In the October 30th publication of “Marketing Magazine (Toronto)”, there was a brief concise article titled “How Ireland does place-branding” (by Judy Waytiuk), where she comments on how Ireland turned around it’s brand image towards tourists in a matter of 10 to 20 years. The best part of it (and the reason of this post) is the way they did it, not really relying in expensive advertising campaigns or nice visual identity, but by investing to improve their status quo, to have a better Ireland to market afterwards.

This brings me to why i wrote this post:

This is a great example for many companies that are desperately trying to re-brand and shake up their image. By re-branding solely through advertising you end up failing your consumers on the long run by not offering a true differentiated attractive factor; instead, by becoming the best version you can be, you can offer a better brand promise which will speak for itself and attract consumers on its own.

In an even shorter version than the article, what Ireland did was they invested in education, started new industries, increased employment and hence improved their quality of life. After achieving excellent results with these changed, they then started spending heavily in tourism marketing. (Great move, since now they really had something to market and talk about) The results? They increased tourism in around 70% (from 5million to 8.6million) in a course of ten years. Not bad at all…

Published in: Marketing Magazine (Toronto) by Judy Waytiuk; Oct23/30 ed.