How harissa, turban-shaped salt cellar and a matka can evoke a whole culture
Three airline meal trays, three cultures, instant messaging.
Destination marketing and country marketing are about promoting a specific place and its people by highlighting its USP.
And desirable aspects.
These must be recognisable. No good putting up an image of a glass full of brown-coloured liquid and expecting people to recognise it as aam ka panna, a distinctive Indian hot weather drink made of green mangoes and cumin. The glass won’t evoke India.
A slop of beans and meat doesn’t necessarily signify American chili.
But these coca cola bottle salt and pepper cellars do.
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The Taj Mahal instantly evokes India.
And so on and so forth.
A 1998 academic paper titled ‘Country Image in Marketing Strategies’ quotes scholars as follows:“A country image is defined by Martin and Eroglu (1993, p. 193) ‘as the total of all descriptive, inferential and informational beliefs one has about a particular country’. Kotler, Haider, & Rein, (1993) define an image of a place as ‘the sum of all those emotional, and aesthetic qualities such as experience, beliefs, ideas, recollections and impressions, that a person has of a place’.”
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