Success and failure: The brand stories of two countries

Abstract

The two case histories cited concern New Zealand and Ontario. While the former is clearly a sovereign state or nation, the latter is technically a province. The word ‘country’ is used in the title and the text as applying to both. Both the ‘New Shorter OED’ and ‘Collins’ first define the word as a territory or region with distinctive characteristics; quite distinct from ‘nation’. Thus it is as legitimate for a Catalan to refer to Catalonia as ‘my country’ as it is for a Spaniard so to refer to Spain, even though the former is not a sovereign state but a province.