Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity

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Melissa Aronczyk

Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, English

Nonfiction, Branding Design

6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, paperback, 256 pages

ISBN: 9780199752171

Suggested Retail Price: $24.95

From the Publisher. The first book-length, critical account of the nation-branding industry. National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers and strategic communications experts to help them “brand” their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate more coherent and cohesive identities, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete.

This book is about how nation branding became a worldwide phenomenon and a professional transnational practice. It is also about how nation branding has become a solution to perceived contemporary problems affecting the space of the nation state: problems of economic development, democratic communication, and especially national visibility and legitimacy amid the multiple global flows of late modernity. In this book, Melissa Aronczyk charts the political, cultural and economic rationales by which the nation has been made to matter in a twenty-first-century context of global integration.

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