First we created the biggest ever human flag of Bangladesh, and now we’ve created a world record by singing our national anthem. These two events have drawn quite a lot of attention from the international media. They have given Bangladesh huge mileage in the international arena.
And from a branding point of view, as I understand as a common man, these two events are examples of country-branding. These are signs of promoting the “positive” side of Bangladesh.
In fact, these are the times when we, the common people, get enthusiastic, thinking that our policymakers now would focus on branding our country in the global arena. But after a while, we see our euphoria subside on this vital matter. We get engrossed in violent politics, and violence becomes the emblem of Bangladesh to the international community. At the end of the day, we fail to be a country with an eye-catching positive image. We fail to work on eliminating the aspects from our national life that tarnish our image.
Yes, we do have a few elements that provide some happiness as far as our positive branding is concerned. Our participation in international cricket does give us good mileage. Our own team may not have given us our desired outcome that we all so passionately hoped for, but we’ve benefited a lot by becoming an international cricket tournament venue.
The ongoing T20 television promo on all sports channels has brightened Bangladesh’s face. All cricket-loving eyes are now on Bangladesh. What’s now needed is to improve our team’s performance in order to be appreciated more in this field.
Despite some serious setbacks, the “made in Bangladesh” apparel tags have given us the opportunity to become a leader in the global garment-exporting sector. We could successfully create an environment – with our quality, price, and diligence – in which almost all international buyers are now quite dependent on Bangladesh. This could be achieved due to our private sector entrepreneurs who, despite all odds, worked relentlessly to turn this into a success story for us.
Apart from the apparel industry, many more “made in Bangladesh” brands are now making great inroads abroad. Quality products such as pharmaceuticals, handicrafts, leather products, and cement etc are being exported to many countries.
However, our desired march to prosperity is being hampered due to several elements that transmit negativity about us. Most of the time, we fail to realise what’s actually harming us, and sometimes our own lack of enthusiasm, or will, keeps us far behind what other countries are doing.
Take tourism as a possible sector. Tourism in Bangladesh has been neglected in the last 43 years. We failed to brand our tourism in 43 years where as many other countries in the region have done it in a decade. The prime reason for this was, perhaps, our unwillingness to market our tourism wealth. Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal have shown wonderful advancement in branding themselves as tourist destinations.
It’s not true that we don’t have sites to attract foreign tourists. There are hundreds of spots that are waiting to be developed as tourist attractions. The infrastructure of the existing sites may not be up to the desired mark, but we don’t provide any information to the international travelers about our attractive destinations.
There’s hardly any proper office that would provide such information to them. Does it cost a lot? We don’t even utilise our media to promote Bangladesh tourism abroad. Our missions also don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
Having said that, we must also mention that we may not require any branding for ourselves if we could just eliminate a few elements that impart our negative image. Our politics and corruption are two major aspects that give us a bad name. Most of the foreign investors and buyers shy away when they watch the festival of violence in our political arena. Security is one of the expectations for them when they want to invest in any country. From a distance, Bangladesh, politically, is a very violent country, and they get scared by that fact.
Then again, the writing on the global wall, as far as our corruption is concerned, doesn’t give a picture to be happy about. No matter how vigourously we deny, we have a proven track record of setting world records several times when it came to corruption. This also vastly contributed to our negative image.
So, when we talk about branding our country, we first certainly need to eliminate the factors that are bugging our image.
