Late Wally Olins, interviewed by Ashraf Oozeerally (March 2004)
Late Wally Olins is a world figure in branding. Co-founder of Wolff Olins, a global brand consultancy based in UK and Chairman of Saffron Consultants (Spain) Wally was an international authority in nation branding and has advised many of the world’s leading Nations and organizations both in the public and private sectors on identity, branding and communication. He has written a number of books and articles on the subject and was an energetic visiting lecturer to universities and academic institutions.
The process of nation branding in Mauritius started initially in the early 2000s when DCDM invited late Wally Olins to come to Mauritius. I was then the Corporate Brand Manager of the then largest audit, tax and consulting professional services firm, affiliated to Arthur Andersen – and worked closely with him. It was such a thrilling and inspiring experience and as an always brand-passionate, this ignited my interest beyond imagination. I also had the opportunity to verity the opinion various thinkers had of him: Wally was known for his strong personality, blunt frankness and is a ‘no-nonsense’ person!
We thus pioneered the concept of Nation Branding together by ‘touring’ key sector leaders for Offshore, Agriculture, BOI and Freeport to explain their leaders about the necessity to shift from fragmented sector marketing to create an overall nation branding platform under a single umbrella. In order to increase awareness of this specialized subject matter, I also wrote a number of thought-provoking articles and addressed them to the then Minister of Finance, Hon. Pravin Jugnauth, our current Prime Minister, through pre-budget papers to ensure this item gets included in the National Budget. Which was finally the case.
The ultimate outcome after some years, was Acanchi’s “Maurice, c’est un plaisir” which was not at all a relevant value proposition for our nation’s complex and composite brand. It did not reflect the reality of the essence of the brand, nor was it a powerful statement in international markets competing for FDI, exports or Tourism, Global Business, Services or Healthcare. This exercise must surely have suffered from a poor or inexistent nation branding methodology while it there were not local subject-matter experts involved in interacting with them.
Today we are at crossroads. With the onset of the global pandemic and struggle to return a yet un-defined ‘new normal’, we are facing a major recession and long years of hard times rising unemployment, threatening inflation, increased debt and decreased economic growth and national wealth.
The international Expression of Interest deployed in March 2019 to select an international consultant to formulate a proper brand strategy has been cancelled due to the current global situation.
However, I firmly believe that there are a series of quick wins, low-cost strategic solutions, high-impact/affordable international PR solutions that can be leveraged if we adopt the appropriate 360° strategy consulting methodology, backed with innovative thinking and out-of-the-box solutions.
For the time being, I am pleased to share with you the One-Question interview I did with Wally Olins, 16 years back. In 2004. Enjoy his towering vision and let’s hope we will soon tackle Brand Mauritius intelligently and smartly TOGETHER, facing Challenges that will rock Ship Mauritius in stormy seas ahead…
Ashraf Oozeerally: After some initial resistance, today more and more countries are turning to branding as an effective way to make their voices heard on the global marketplace. Wally, you have personally been pioneering Nation Branding for the last decades, and you are known for that. I have two questions. First, is Nation Branding really effective? Then, this Friday 12 of March 2004 we are celebrating our 36th year of Independence from Great Britain, what offhand advice could you share with us in this field?
Wally Olin’s: Well I think you have to look at Nation Branding over a very long period of time. All nations have always tried both to create in their own population a feeling of pride and a feeling of self-confidence and they’ve also tried for one reason or for the other to persuade other nations to either love them or to fear them. That’s been the way nations have operated since the late 18th Century. Since the French Revolution this has become a much more overt and clear form of national projection. What we have today is something slightly different in terms of the techniques used but it’s not fundamentally different in terms of what Nations were doing.
The reasons why nations need to project an idea of what they are is because they want to attract tourists, they want to export their own products and they want to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). In the years since about 1950 or so, the number of nations in the world have increased from about 80 to 250. In other words, the amount of competition that exists between nations to attract FDI, tourists and to sell their products abroad is far greater than ever. So these are for purely commercial reasons. Mauritius needs to attract tourists very badly. To attract FDI, Mauritius also needs branding and to export its products. Every nation including Mauritius needs to project that the Mauritius Brand is better than the competitive brands and is more interesting, is worth more, is better quality, is an attractive place to come to.
In addition to that, there is the fact that a nation has to project an idea of itself to its own population, to make them self-confident, proud and happy about being who they are. A nation also needs political influence. A nation has embassies and high commissions. Every nation participates in trade fairs, exhibitions and so on. Almost all nations advertise their tourism capabilities and potentials. They have national airlines, they have hotels and various kinds of such things. What Nation Branding does, is to bring those ideas together in a form so that instead of everybody advertising or projecting themselves separately within the nation there is some kind of coherence so that one thing helps another and everything the nation does on the whole is seemed to be related with everything else that it does so that if you are talking about FDI or exports, that’s kind of linked in the way Mauritius talks about itself on tourism.
That’s what Nation Branding effort means and of course nations are increasingly involved in all this because there are so many nations in the world. If you look at Central Europe now you can see nations that did not exist before like Slovenia, Croatia, and Slovakia emerging. If you look at your part of the world and the African Continent, the nations that have emerged in the last 50 years is enormous but unfortunately many of them have not made any impact because they are not sufficiently governed efficiently for them to become attractive to investors. Mauritius is in a very different situation and therefore has a tremendous opportunity which it is already exploiting in Tourism but in FDI and in branded exports, it has all these potentialities as well.
So as I see it, the opportunity that a nation as Mauritius has, is to make what it does with more coherence. It isn’t a question of doing something different. It’s a question of doing something what you already do much better and much more efficiently and Mauritius has that opportunity.
