One of my earliest memories of place branding comes from growing up in the northern town of Stockport and coming into possession of an official Stockport Town Council tea towel. It was emblazoned with a collage of images of the brick railway viaduct, the bus station and the Merseyway shopping centre – but the thing that caught my eye was the cheerful slogan: ‘Stockport – It’s a great place!’

It’s not the most subtle copy line, but it’s the same essential message shared by countless big-budget tourism campaigns around the world: come here, it’s great. The challenge is how you do that in a way that sticks – and not only sticks, but changes the long-term behaviour of tourists and investors.

That’s a big challenge. Any town, city or country has multiple layers of associations that accumulate over centuries, whether based on truth, prejudice or a caricature of the truth. However well it’s done, can a single line or ad campaign really cut through those associations?

Historically, most nations have favoured symbols and colours over words. Every country has a flag, but only a handful have a slogan. ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ is the Beanz Meanz Heinz of the nation branding world, introduced at the time of the French Revolution and lodging itself in the national psyche to the point where it’s hard to imagine it ever changing (although the fraternité part began creaking long ago).

But as national slogans go, it’s the only great example. The USA’s ‘In God we trust’ is the best-known of the others and (with apologies to Trumpian readers of Creative Review) it’s not wearing well.

The most successful examples of  place branding are the ones  that take a sideways step. Our perceptions of places are  formed less by overt marketing and more by the incidental tonality of the everyday.

Maybe national mottos don’t work because they need translating. If they have any use, it’s more as an internal motivator. In 2015, North Korea boldly attempted to introduce 310 national slogans at the same time – a series including ‘Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms!’, ‘Grow vegetables extensively in greenhouses!’ and ‘Make fruits cascade down and their sweet aroma fill the air on the sea of apple trees at the foot of Chol Pass!’ But I’m not sure to what extent any of those have changed behaviour.

If state-level language fails to catch on, then it’s usually left to culture departments, regional and local governments to spend money on branding and advertising. Some towns have gone as far as to change their name – the British town of Staines renamed itself Staines-upon-Thames a few years ago, which is easy to mock but probably effective on a subliminal level.

Other towns stubbornly hold onto a branding disadvantage – residents of Swastika, Ontario hark back to an age when the word referred to a Sanskrit symbol of good luck. Good luck with that.

THE NAME PUN

More common than the name change is the name pun. The first resort of any city branding campaign is to find a play on the city name – LondON and IAMsterdam are among the more successful examples. Incredinburgh and DerbYes are two instances of the genre stretched beyond breaking point. Incredinburgh led to questions in Parliament and was eventually axed, although spin-off lines like Goaheadinburgh somehow survived.

Other ad campaigns have undoubtedly worked. Australia’s blunt ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ was pitched at just the right level to generate an ‘is it problematic?’ PR stir without being that problematic. Embracing a negative national stereotype can be a disarmingly good way to get noticed. More recently, a conference in Helsinki displayed a banner reading ‘Nobody in their right mind would come to Helsinki in November. Except you, you badass. Welcome.’ The image went viral (do we still say ‘went viral’?) and the line is now another layer of sediment on top of whatever impressions the world has formed of Helsinki over centuries.

Some of my favourite place branding campaigns are for places that don’t exist. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I wasn’t in the target audience for either beer or cigarettes, but I still thought wistfully about Marlboro Country, which seemed to be peopled exclusively by cowboys and sunsets. (I later learned the brand originates in Great Marlborough Street in London – advertisers are bastards.) Even more evocative was the thought of living in Greenall Whitley Land. Any readers too young to remember it should look up the song ‘I wish I was in Greenall Whitley Land, where beer is cool and hearts are warm’ – I felt that yearning even as a ten-year-old.

But when it comes to real places, the most successful examples of place branding are the ones that take a sideways step. Our perceptions of places are generally formed less by overt marketing campaigns and more by the incidental tonality of the everyday. How much of our idea of Britishness is wrapped up in the language of the shipping forecast or ‘Mind the gap’? How much of the American spirit lives in the brisk command of ‘Walk / Don’t walk’?

POSTERS IN AIRPORTS

Clever place branding campaigns find a way to insert themselves into the vernacular by not looking like branding campaigns. Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet is a tourist attraction, but it’s also a rebranding campaign – conjuring up the spirit of Blackpool through the words of the people who have performed there.

More recently, there’s the Palau Pledge, a mini-pledge to protect the environment that is stamped onto the passports of every visitor to the Pacific island country of Palau. While the cause is incontrovertibly good, I find the element of enforced virtuousness slightly creepy and wonder where the same idea might lead in the hands of other countries. But it’s a smart sideways step to use the passport, rather than to assume a poster in an airport is always the answer.

That’s the problem with so many tourism campaigns – they usually start with a systemic bias towards slogans, TV ads and airport posters. Sweden has successfully sidestepped this approach in recent years, firstly with the @sweden Twitter account, which for seven years was run by a different Swedish citizen every day. And similarly with the Swedish Number campaign, where one telephone number connected you to a random Swede who would chat to you about their country.

Both generated more PR than most advertising campaigns manage to achieve, and they reinforce the widely-held perception that Swedes are quite cool. If I was working on a big, all-expenses-paid branding campaign for a nice country (I am available), I think I’d start with ideas like that – finding a way around advertising conventions and trying to embed yourself in the culture in a more subtle and enduring way. I may start by writing to Stockport Town Council.

Nick Asbury is a writer at Asbury & Asbury, author of the Perpetual Disappointments Diary, and scribbler of realtime poetry on Instagram @nickasbury