Place Branding Research Proposal Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Place Branding - Research Proposal Example As a consumer, one gets to come across several brand names as part of our daily lives. Names such as Microsoft, Coca-cola, Mercedes, and Harvard have all become ingrained in our minds as popular entities in their respective domains. Much of the effort driven towards popularizing these brand names have been successful largely through strategically conceived efforts, which also symbolizes the leadership positions that these brand names occupy at a global level. In the modern day, governments across the world have begun to look at branding and its associated marketing techniques as a means to market and sell their geographical regions to the rest of the world whereby the emphasis is concentrated on enhancing the international profile with an intent to attract more investment from foreign players and make such regions popular as economic powerhouses for commerce, trade, and tourism (Malcolm Allan, 2005). In a similar way, the government of the Republic of Nigeria is in the process of initiating several campaigns that aim to popularize the country and its image to people and companies across the world. part of this effort has been due to the rising awareness amongst a few African nations such as South Africa and Uganda to market themselves across the world (Eugene Jaffe, 2006). In accordance with this policy, the Nigerian government, through its ministry of Information and National Orientation has launched programmes such as the ‘The Heart of Africa’ project, which is based on the concept of Place Branding. The proposed research study will attempt to study the various initiatives undertaken by the Nigerian government along the lines of ‘Place Branding’ and will work towards studying them in the form of a case study. The above discussion clearly divides branding into two classes namely product branding and place branding.  In comparison to the former, the latter is still a burgeoning discipline and most of the literature that describes place branding is still in a loosely embedded format.