Brand Australia: marketing a nation
In a boardroom in Sydney, an Italian, a Hungarian, an Englishman and an Indian are workshopping a brand. The four men are Australians. The boardroom belongs to M&C Saatchi. They are working on the biggest advertising brief to come out of this country: Brand Australia.
Brand Australia launched in April under the ‘Australia Unlimited’ tagline. The advertising is a visual assault of landscape and landmarks: bush, beaches and bridges. Famous faces give way to a flickering slide show of ordinary people, conspicuous in their cultural diversity.
It is a reflection of what Tom Dery, CEO of M&C Saatchi, saw in his own boardroom. “We looked around and realised that you can come to this country, you can start with nothing, whatever your background, and you can achieve whatever you want to achieve.”
Dery explains that whatever the brief is for a national brand, a country will end up with the image it deserves. “The fact is, anything is possible in Australia,” he says with absolute sincerity. M&C Saatchi was chosen from 60 contenders and four finalists to build Brand Australia—a formidable brief.
“The task was to find a symbol and a line and a positioning that could be used on all Australian activity to do with promoting itself overseas,” Dery says. It needed to be a big, evocative and attractive concept.
Freya Campbell, the project’s group manager at Austrade, describes the new Brand Australia as an overarching strategic approach, an umbrella brand used to promote Australia’s capabilities across a number of sectors. “Its main aim is to position Australia in the global marketplace, and to ensure that Australia is highly regarded as global citizen and business partner and as a holiday destination.”
Dery is more specific. “We wanted to talk to potential migrants. We wanted to talk to people who want an education in Australia. We wanted to talk to scientists, to come and work in Australia. We wanted to talk to people wanting to invest in Australia. We wanted to talk to tourists wanting to come to visit Australia.”
The advertising speaks to all of these groups. “We looked at all the activities that we do in terms of getting export income and felt there was an idea here that talked about unlimited potential,” Dery says.
Between the rolling oceans and golden desert, M&C Saatchi’s take on Australia Unlimited boils down to a few words. ‘Infinite horizons, endless coastline, iconic cities. But our greatest asset? Our people.’ The emphasis is deliberate. Austrade conducted a great deal of research before embarking on Brand Australia. One of their commissioned surveys was by Simon Anholt, whose research team ranks countries on a ‘brand index’ after measuring dimensions including exports, governance, culture, people, tourism, innovation and investment. Australia ranked most highly in the people category, and least in exports and culture. Australia Unlimited hopes to trade on the positive rankings to enhance the sectors that are less well regarded internationally.
Strengthening the brand
Ian Harrison, chief executive of Australian Made, has been trying to promote Australian business overseas for over two decades and understands the challenge of promoting Australian product internationally.
“The real need for Australia Unlimited is to strengthen, broaden and deepen the message about what Australia is about. We are a space for sophisticated manufacturing. We are a producer of high quality produce because of our clean green environment. We are a provider of world quality education, world quality health services and engineering services,” Harrison says.
While Australian Made welcomes the initiative of Brand Australia, the organisation is disappointed with the symbol that has been chosen. “The use of a couple of boomerangs to depict the east and west shorelines of Australia is a symbol that has no connection to Australia at all to people who don’t know what our island continent looks like—and of course that’s the great majority of the world.”
Got something to say? Join the export forum here at DynamicExport.com.au.
