The Rise and Fall of Nation Branding: A Literature Review of Conceptualizing, Legitimizing, and Contesting It

• In Event: Forms of Power: Public Diplomacy and Government Relations

Abstract

Although largely used long before, the practices of country promotion start to be systematically
investigated and conceptualized only in the second half of the 20th century. Consistent lines of research have thus emerged on public diplomacy in political sciences and international relations (Melissen, 2005; Fitzpatrick, 2007; Gilboa, 2008; Cull, 2008, 2009, Snow, 2009), on nation branding in economic sciences and business studies (Olins 1999, 2004, 2005; Anholt, 2002, 2004; Dinnie, 2008), on public relations of/for nations in communication sciences (Signitzer & Coombs, 1992; Grunig, 1993; Kunczik, 1997, 2003; L’Etang, 1996; Signitzer and Wamser, 2006; Taylor and Kent, 2006; Szondi,2008, 2010). However, while an entire literature has flourished, most studies have followed parallel ways leading to “conceptual fog” (Buhmann and Ingenhoff, 2014, 2015) and a rather positivist research dominated by a focus on efficiently mastering these practices for the competition taking place
on the global neoliberal market (Dolea, 2015a). This paper focuses on economic sciences and
business studies, particularly on the marketing and branding literature, to trace the history of
conceptualizing nation branding during the last 50 years. It aims to clarify the various concepts that preceded it, to illustrate the very process of negotiating and legitimizing nation branding within and outside its discipline and to capture the essence of its critique that has been coagulating during the last decade.

Author

• Alina Alina Dolea, University of Bucharest