These days, every place in the world wants to market its unique identity – and an industry has sprung up to help put them on the map.

 

Lipetsk is already on the map: right there, on page 23 of the Collins World Atlas, a region of 1.2 million people, dead south from Moscow and not far from the border with Ukraine. But it’s not really on the map: it doesn’t feature in the slim mental atlas most of us carry in our heads; no one we know takes holidays there, and it doesn’t appear in our newspapers. Even in Russia, people may fail to place it. In September, when Natasha Grand was passing through Moscow on her way back from Lipetsk, she told a Russian acquaintance where she’d been. “I don’t even know where Lipetsk is”, he replied, only partly in jest. Some Russians confuse it with Vitebsk, which is in Belarus.

 

By Samanth Subramanian, the Guardian (UK)

 

Listen here to the podcast: https://www.theguardian.com/business/audio/2017/nov/24/how-to-sell-a-country-the-booming-business-of-nation-branding-podcast

 

Photo by Carlo D’Agnolo on Unsplash