Monday, April 22, 2013

Kenya's Re-branding Challenge

Kenya, a country placed in the international spotlight recently due to its elections last month, has a branding problem.  According to an opinion piece in Kenyan newspaper The Star, “for 50 years, Kenya’s branding challenge has remained remarkably the same: how to diminish - to insignificance - the ugly in the beautiful.  Or, to use a more graphic, if somewhat revolting metaphor, how to avoid the ‘fly in the soup’ curse.”

To go along with the metaphor, the “flies” in Kenya’s history include corruption, detentions and torture, and ethnic division.  The “soup” has alternated between a reasonably professional Cabinet and civil service that laid the foundation for a capitalist economy, expanded education, emphasis on infrastructure, and the call for a new constitution.

Still, the image of the fly is more striking than that of the soup, making it so that the tag of Kenya as “a poorly and corruptly-led beautiful country of dynamic and friendly people” sticks.

The article in The Star compares Kenya’s predicament with that of internationally renowned Switzerland, which has “strong public associations with the attributes of stability, efficiency, and quality.”  Such an image dominates, because “Switzerland has successfully diminished to insignificance the brand of a country where illegally acquired wealth (inluding Nazi loot) is secretly kept.”

While I do not believe that international scrutiny of Kenya’s political, economic, and social ills should cease (neither should scrutiny of Switzerland’s holdings of illegal wealth for that matter…), I do believe Kenya is justified in wanting to remove the “fly in the soup” and rebrand the country to promote the positive aspects within it. 

2 comments:

  1. Hi Heather,

    Thanks for your post! I saw this article a few days ago as well. I find it interesting your juxtaposition of Kenya's predicament and Switzerland's success. And I think it speaks a lot to the power of branding and the lasting effect of these images. Most people don't really bother to keep up-to-date with international news, so once a certain brand of a country is set it's very hard to change, for good, in Switzerland's case, or bad, in Kenya's. That's why it's so hard to "shake" them; knocking down stereotypes is always a challenge.

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  2. Heather and Livia, you two bring up the importance of the media in nation-branding and how it plays such a significant role in shaping a nation’s image, and yet remains difficult for a nation to control. As the article states, “clearly, it is a matter of which image and message gets repeated[ly] imprinted in people’s minds.” In the case of Kenya, the focus of most international news is on the negatives aspects, or the fly in the soup. This speaks to the unbalanced reporting in the media ,with a heavy slant towards the negative while overlooking the positive aspects, and the challenge it presents to nations concerned about their brand.

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