Online/Offline Nation Branding in Quebec and Scotland

Developed from marketing studies, nation branding has been acknowledged to be driven partially by economic reasons. As a new development, nation branding has predominantly dealt with states’ images, the research on subnational entities being relatively sparse so far. The focus on Quebec and Scotland is a comparative one geographically but also internally, on how nation branding has been adopted both before the most recent online revolution (the web 2.0 social media wave), but also how that has impacted the efforts of these two stateless nations, in their perpetual search for sovereignty. As such, I will apply nation branding theories to the efforts of these case studies in their offline (trade/cultural missions) as well as online presence (on social networks). An initial assumption is that nation branding has not been severely altered by the web 2.0 revolution, and such that a new “theory” of nation branding is not necessary or useful.