a flag represents more than a country

Do countries “position” themselves? Well they’re countries after all, so of course they have to take a stance in many global issues, but do they position themselves in the marketplace?

They certainly do. Take German sport/luxury automobiles: BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi; for years these brands have all been grouped together as “German cars”. “German” in this sense conveyed a certain quality of cars not found anywhere else. In fact, anything that’s made in Germany has a positive connotation to it (I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “it must be good, it’s made in Germany”). Canada, too, has been used as a branding mechanism. Walking down grocery-store aisles it’s not uncommon to see “Real Canadian Maple Syrup”, or (as mentioned in class) “Alberta Beef”. When I was in Québec City over the summer, I saw firsthand that there was a huge emphasis on “made in Canada”; any good that was locally manufactured had a little Canadian flag attached somewhere, and many locals wouldn’t buy products that didn’t.

I got the idea for this post from Steven Brewer. In Steven’s last post, he was talking about, among other things, Latvian women. He grouped all the women of Latvia together, and gave them a positive association with the country, much like cars with Germany.

Excellence in engineering is something Germans are widely known for, and I think that if a country has a perceived quality like this associated with it, it can be a great advantage. Firms from within the country can use these perceptions, and the attitudes they create to position themselves in the market place and positively differentiate themselves in key ways.