Simon Anholt and GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media collaborate to offer a unique barometer of global opinion that measures the power and appeal of each country’s ‘brand image’ by examining six fundamentals of national competence.

Any significant change in media introduces a material change in how brands are built, managed and experienced. Read about how new media is influencing branding in this article by Tom Sitati

Tom Sitati focuses on the actuarial profession and gives tips on how it can be better branded.

Tom Sitati tackles the question of the relevance of branding to MFI's and how they should handle the transformation process that is facing many of these institutions.

Interbrand’s annual ranking of the best global brands is here! Check out the 2009 results and read about the changes, the winners and the losers.

See East Africa's top 361 brands as nominated by a panel of experts and voted for by the public in a survey done by Superbrands.

In this resource which is a chapter from The Economist series "Brands and Branding", Simon Anholt explains what branding places and nations is all about and demolishes the superficial interpretation that it is nothing more than standard product promotion, public relations and corporate identity, where the product just happens to be a country, a city or a region rather than a bank or a running shoe.

Those brands that can rethink and re-imagine thier core strategies will live longer, healthier and more prosperous lives. This resource from North Venture Partners points out that businesses that fail to embrace change and take intelligent risks will likely become another sad statistic.

This interesting resource by Simon Anholt focuses on the brand that is Africa, offering insights on the current state of the brand and how brand management of national brands should be carried out in order to be effective.

This article points out the pitfalls to avoid in order to make a brand revitalizing process successful. Enjoy this interesting paper by David Lemley.

This paper from ID Branding presents a new model of branding, one which draws upon the anthropological model of culture. It replaces the old image of a separate and controllable external brand image – an image created to speak to consumers on behalf of a company. In the new model, a company’s true values replace the external brand image. We call this new model Brand Culture.

If her early ambition to be more famous than Persil Automatic seemed to you surprising – or even laughable – it shouldn’t have done. It was very astute of the young Posh Spice to choose not Robbie Williams nor Sir Cliff Richard nor Madonna as her benchmark of fame but the country’s best-known washing powder.Read more of Jeremy Bullmore’s impressive 2001 speech.

While many professionals may have their personal brands working for them in the real world, many may have neglected the online aspect of it. William Aruda gives pointers on how to use online mediums for personal branding.

What makes a slogan effective? John Nasaye explores the attributes of a good slogan and explains why it is important to have one.

While brand internalization has been embraced by a number of organizations, the operationalization of the brand ensures that it is driven to all functional areas of the company. Learn more from The Brand Consultancy Knowledge Board.

The long tail is derived from the common knowledge that when you plot all the products on the x-axis and corresponding revenues on the y-axis, you get what is called a Pareto distribution curve, more commonly recognizable as the 80/20 principle. Mohammed Iqbal applies long tail economics in brand building.

Successfully branding Africa means focussing on a collection of  characteristics, both positive and negative. To establish an honest brand for such a large and diverse continent, branding efforts must resist the temptation to "advertise themsleves away from the truth", and instead address the positive as well as the negative issues with objectivism. Only by addressing the truth will Africa change its complicated image in the world's perception. Doug de Villiers tells us more on branding Africa.

Its easy to mistake one of the most disparate and compelling continents as an impoverished, war-riddled charity case that is best to avoid. Perhaps its because the noisiest and most widespread branding of Africa is currently coming from outside the continent. Melissa Davis examines the brand that is Africa.

Master brands and brand architecture are two of the many inward-focused notions that have come to define the world of branding. While these concepts heralded an important milestone, continued adherence to their principles may lead to branding’s downfall. Inflexible models and exclusive language inherent to these concepts are alienating branding’s most critical potential proponents, giving the impression that as branding practitioners, we have built artificial processes to justify higher fees for what otherwise would be considered “expensive marketing.

A dictionary of branding terms presented by Landor Lexicon.