Selling brand Ireland

That one of this country’s most successful brands in recent years has been Brand Ireland itself is clearly demonstrated by the fact that IDA Ireland has managed to convince over 1,000 leading global companies, including the likes of Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft, to establish  European hubs on these shores.

The importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Ireland’s economy can’t be overestimated: IDA, which employs 270 people around the world, currently brings in €2bn to €2.5bn of investment each year through its client companies, which between them are responsible for €92bn or 60pc of total exports, 73pc of business expenditure on R&D and circa 50pc of the annual corporate tax take.

“FDI is critical to the Irish economy,” says Trevor Holmes, head of corporate communications at the agency. “Our exports held up during this downturn better than any other developed economy. That is primarily from foreign multinationals exporting out of Ireland.”

In its 40 years of existence, IDA has excelled at marketing Ireland’s natural assets, such as they have been, and at repositioning the country when necessary to be ready for the next potential wave of investment. “When IDA started it was part of the whole roll-through from Lemass thinkers of opening up Ireland to the world,” explains Holmes. “There was no industrial base. It was sold as a beautiful green island that had space and the population. That was it.”

Key factors that changed that included Ireland’s joining the EEC in 1973 and IDA’s decision to build advanced factory units around the country, before actively selling the space as ready for kit-out. The selling points then, according to Holmes, were the favourable tax rate, a talented population, and employment and capital incentives.

This brought in manufacturing and the opportunity for the country to build up its own engineering and management skills. In the Eighties, as the ICT revolution gathered pace in the US, companies like Gateway, AST, Digital and Apple established their bases here. Landing Intel and its £1bn investment in 1989 sent out a huge message to the rest of the world and was followed by inward investment by a wave of service providers and software companies, including Microsoft.

“In terms of the model, we played to what we had,” explains Holmes. “We had very little and we played it as strongly as we could – developing relationships with people, being prepared to go and cold call.

“IDA has had relationships with client companies for five or seven years with no investment, and then investment has come. It’s a strength of the Irish to just broker a relationship, a one-to-one friendship that may lead to something or may not.”

Another strength has been the ability to look at the next wave and adapt accordingly, something that has been helped by the size of the country. “We treat Ireland like any other business,” says Holmes. “We keep repositioning Ireland. We keep looking out there. Now it’s digital media, it’s the convergence of new technologies and it’s green technology.”

IDA has also focused on four ‘Ts’ when trying to attract investment: tax, talent, track record and technology. “We don’t go out talking about the four Ts, but we try to project that all the time,” Holmes says. “We suck people in, they can see what’s going on down in the Digital Hub, they can feel the developer base that Facebook has found, they see that some of the multinationals have been here for 25 years and are obviously getting something here. We’re just projecting that the whole time.”

Innovative Ireland

The agency’s latest promotional drive – which was launched in September and is being pitched at the North American market initially – represents a shift in focus from previous campaigns in that it seeks to brand Ireland as an innovation hub rather than purely on the basis of the people, which has tended to be the case in the past, with campaigns like ‘The Young Europeans: Hire them before they hire you’ in the Seventies and Eighties, and the more recent ‘Irish Minds’.

The new campaign was developed following extensive brand research with Jump in Dublin, which investigated what it is that makes the Irish brand exciting and makes people want to engage with it. “The research showed that at the core of the brand was this idea that we are very vibrant people and we are exception-ally progressive and ambitious, and people recognise this. They recognise that we box above our weight, we achieve things and, because of this vibrancy and warmth, they’re willing to go with us and work with us.”

The key focus of the campaign is Ireland’s ability to deliver the fresh thinking and creativity necessary for innovation. Its tagline is ‘Ireland. Innovation comes naturally’. The campaign is designed to be fresh, innovative and impactful, delivering its message quickly, simply and unambiguously, in order to catch the attention of its target audience.

The ads, which were created by McConnells in Dublin, use a blackboard as the platform from which to make key points about Ireland and innovation, and a chalk-drawn map of Ireland to reinforce these messages. The Google, Facebook and Thinkpad brand names, meanwhile, have been included in elements of the campaign.

“We were looking for an iconic image of Ireland,” says Holmes. “The map tested quite well with our target audience, which is mid-40s to early 50s, C-suite executives.” The scribbled image, used primarily in the TV ad, was inspired by Einstein standing at the board working through the theory of relativity. “If you’re innovating, you start scribbling on pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, beer mats or whatever it is,” explains Holmes. “That was the whole concept of using this blackboard effect.”

The launch of the campaign was postponed from its planned rollout at the beginning of this year. “There was just so much negative press out there that we would have been washed away in the tsunami of bad news,” explains Holmes. “We let that flow its course and now we’re trying to get out there and tell our story on our terms and stop others telling our story on theirs.”

It’s an integrated campaign encompassing television, online, print and outdoor, with a €2m investment for the development and the first six months of media spend. “Traditionally, IDA would have used a print campaign backed up with a little broadcast and, more recently, some online,” says Holmes. “We’ve turned that totally inside out. It’s a heavy broadcast campaign focused on CNBC and Bloomberg. We’re doing around 1,500 30-second slots between now and the end of February. We’re not buying generic time – we’ve deliberately clustered this around the business programmes. The campaign recognises that our target audience are time poor and get their information on CNBC and Bloomberg and online.”

IDA has also changed the way it’s targeting the media with this campaign. “As opposed to going out and pitching our stuff to the media, we’ve taken on a small mid-town New York PR house to get us top-flight coverage,” says Holmes. “We can get the tier two and tier three coverage ourselves in the US, but trying to get The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or onto CNBC for interview was proving difficult.” Slots secured in the last few weeks have included IDA Ireland CEO Barry O’Leary appearing on CNBC’s ‘Power Lunch’ and doing a seven-minute interview on the station’s leading business programme, ‘Squawk Box’. O’Leary has also done an interview with the The Wall Street Journal, while The New York Times online ran an article on the current campaign in the middle of October.

The limited print and online advertising campaign is confined to leading business publications. “We’re using the print campaign to reinforce the story and give the substance behind the story,” says Holmes. The whole campaign launched with a generic print ad in The Wall Street Journal in September. All the banner ads in the business section of The New York Times website were bought up by the IDA on the same day.

Online shopfront

IDA Ireland has also invested €150,000 on upgrading its website over the last 18 months. “Before, we would have just had a series of PDFs and text files on the website, whereas that’s not the way people interact with information any more. We now have podcasts, animatics, videos, and a TV channel.”

The website also addresses the fact that word of mouth is hugely influential when it comes to making the FDI decision. “Advertising works so far but when you get peers talking, that’s when it takes the decision, in terms of making a key investment, over the line,” says Holmes. As a result, the website now includes videos with senior executives from multinationals explaining what Ireland has to offer, including Sheryl Sandberg and Colm Long of Facebook, and Microsoft’s Paul Rellis.

“That has much more resonance with someone who’s going to come here than IDA out there telling them,” says Holmes. “We’re probably the only investment promotion agency in the world that could get players of that level to step up and endorse our campaign and use their brands in our campaign.”

The idea of Ireland as an innovation hub is reinforced online. “On the website, where we land people, we don’t just focus on our companies – we deliberately have case studies from Irish indigenous companies, the young innovators,” says Holmes. “The message we’re trying to sell to the outside world is that of the Irish innovation ecosystem. We see the website as being a shopfront onto Ireland and not just for FDI companies – we have FDI companies, indigenous Irish companies, and young talented folks coming through universities. The idea is to show the vibrancy.”

The campaign also includes posters in and around the VIP and business lounges in several US airports, and this will shortly be expanded to Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports. “This is a simplified message that’s a reminder of the rest of the campaign,” says Holmes. “It’s also very targeted – we know the eyeballs we need!”

According to Holmes, the campaign has already shown signs of success. “In the first three weeks, we almost doubled North American traffic to our website,” he says. “This was always designed to drive people onto the website to get more information and we’ve certainly felt the impact there. All we need to do is turn up one new project and this campaign has paid for itself.”

Building the national brand

While the campaign will focus on the North American market for the first six months, it’s expected to be rolled out in Europe in the New Year and, after that, to be tweaked for the Asian market. Going forward, Holmes says, more investment has to come from Asia. “We’ve got to be aligned to looking at who the emerging Indian and Chinese companies are.”

One disappointment, according to Holmes, is the fact that the campaign is not being shown in Ireland. “People in Ireland should feel a sense of pride in who we are, what we’ve achieved as a small nation. We need to find some mechanism to have that conversation for a very simple reason – this is part of national branding. And the brand of Ireland has got tarnished and a little bit fatigued in the last while.”

He stresses the strength of the various elements that make up the brand of Ireland: food, green, tourism, crafts, arts, indigenous industry, foreign direct investment, music, history and culture. “We just haven’t managed to take it and weave it together – we’ve all the threads there. We’re at that point now where we don’t have a choice. We have ridden the high of the Celtic tiger, we’ve dropped down and we now need to project positive things about ourselves. The FDI space is one element of it, but we do need a huge cohesive focus on the national brand.”

This article first appeared in Marketing Age magazine