Comments on: Branding Romania

By: vlad gidea

vlad gidea — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:29:47 +0000

Congratulations. The site looks really nice. Let’s jope it remains this way :)

Lots of foreign visitors have a very bad idea about the life and lifestyle in Romania. That’s not quite true…

By: Robert M

Robert M — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:22:48 +0000

That website is purely awesome!
It reminds me of my first website I made when I was 14, in junior high, doing html in notepad.

They should have spent $5 on an SBUX latte for some enthusiast kid, and get a great job done.

By: Mihai Dragan

Mihai Dragan — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:58:05 +0000

UnseenRomania is not competing with anyone. It’s just a place to show the beauty of this land.

I would be glad to help UnseenRomania team up with anyone having the same purpose.

By: Ciprian

Ciprian — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:52:26 +0000

Thanks for mentioning our launch, Lee.
I sense some compliments there, we’re chuffed and thank you for this.

Speaking on behalf of the team, let me clarify for the benefit of the blogosphere, that we launched as a solely independent initiative, thinking about the net effect we could achieve in the end, which is to promote Romania. To us, this project is “un proiect de suflet” (enjoy translating :- ) ) and we are only interested in partnerships, ideas, destinations, hotels, offers, photos, videos – everything that is special and promotes Romania in a positive light. Talks about competition, banter etc, are not on our agenda at the moment.

The blog is only a taster of what we’ve been working on this year. We have over 7 years of proven experience in the travel sector at a global level, an amazing team of people and are incredibly excited about putting all that knowledge into this project. So watch this space! :)

On a separate note, branding Romania is a delicate matter because it needs substance and strategy. Substance goes beyond just some travel ideas – for example – the talented people who represent us at olympic competitions are far greater country ambassadors than a website or a leaflet. The strategy needs to be a system of beliefs that needs to be invested in a group by us, looking at a medium to long term opportunity.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:33:34 +0000

I think people are very cynical and sceptical about ‘new’ attempts to brand/re-brand Romania because they can’t say for sure who actually achieved anything with a website or a campaign. With no data to measure efficiency, success, awareness or who knows what, people might get the feeling that another ‘branding Romania’ approach is a bit like crying wolf if you know what I mean.

While various websites and points of view are embraced and praised as parts of a whole (”Him, him, and him did a lot towards branding the country”), their individual value might not be what the creators had in mind when approaching the collective (obviously not quality-wise, they’re all excellent creations) because the ‘why did we need three websites to say the same thing’ / ‘why can’t we agree on just one website that says the same thing’ mentality is stronger than the idea of working slowly but surely to achieve some kind of overall success or image. Deferred gratification is a hard thing to do with Romanians from what I’ve noticed at least.

I wouldn’t see it as competition, if it’s competition of any kind though it would have to be the healthy type – more websites, more content, more integration with Romanian communities perhaps (Flickr is huge as you may have noticed) and yes, I would very much like to see them compete in terms of who comes up with more ideas (and better ideas!).