Seoul sees expatriates living in Korea as its key promoters to the world.
"The best way to promote the city is foreign residents telling their friends that Seoul is worth visiting," said Kang Cheol-won, director-general of Seoul's Public Relations Planning Bureau.
Kang is reaching out to expats because Seoul is not as well-known globally as Koreans believe. Any help in increasing global awareness of the city is welcomed, as far as he is concerned. Kang is leading overseas marketing for Seoul.
According to a survey by the Korea Tourism Organization, 42 percent of foreigners said they don't know about Seoul and therefore don't make plans to visit the city.
"We think Seoul is widely known, but that is the first myth we have to dismantle to let the world know our city and Korea better," Kang said.
Seoul ranked 33rd out of 40 in the Anholt Nation Brands Index in 2007, lower than other Asian cities like Tokyo at 20th, Singapore at 23rd and Hong Kong at 26th. "Those cities put millions of dollars into promote themselves," Kang said.
As Seoul's chief of overseas marketing, Kang considers the city a product and seeks ways to "sell" it.
"First, we have to raise the name recognition of Seoul and then promote the charm of the city, where tradition and modernity coexist. We want to solicit foreign investment through Seoul's strong points of safety and convenience," he said. "Ultimately, we want to create Seoul's brand image as a city where people want to come, live and invest."
Seoul spent 21 billion won ($17.5 million) on overseas marketing last year, up 10-fold from the previous year.
For effective marketing, the city has identified Japan, China, Southeast Asia, the Americas and several countries in Europe as benchmarks and concentrated its efforts to boost tourism.
The city has made several commercials featuring local people and celebrities last and this year, with "hallyu" ― or Korean wave ― stars such as TVXQ making appearances in this year's segments.
"We have also attracted Chinese television producers to shoot variety shows in Seoul," he said. For example, actress Lin Chi-Ling visited the city for a photo shoot and television show with Korean actress Yoon Eun-hye, Sunday.
Seoul also signed sponsorship contracts with Manchester United, the English Premier League football team where Korean player Park Ji-sung plys his trade. "Manchester United games are aired worldwide and with audiences averaging 300 million."
Rain, a top Korean singer and actor, became Seoul's global goodwill ambassador in June and actively participates in promoting the city. "The singer suggests ideas for city promotion by himself. He might have a concert on the Han River this winter against the backdrop of the beautiful fountains of Banpo Bridge," Kang said.
The city will hold Big Air, an urban snowboard jump challenge, in December to showcase its downtown area including the new Gwanghwamun Plaza. "Seoul's scenery will be aired through sports channels around the world," he said.
"City marketing is not something we can see the results of right away," Kang said. "However, we are seeing an increase in tourists and a boost in city recognition, and expect to see good results in three to four years."
AC Nielson analyzed the effect of Seoul's overseas marketing through surveys on 2,000 potential visitors. After the promotional efforts, Seoul topped as the city most people want to visit among people in China, Japan and Thailand.
The number of visitors to Korea increased from 6.5 million in 2007 to 6.9 million last year. By April, 2.7 million visited and almost all passed through Seoul. This is a 24-percent increase from the same period last year, proving the marketing abroad has been fruitful so far.
Kang also recognized that Seoul still has a way to go to attract more tourists. "Accommodation in hotels and traditional food is expensive and the language barrier for tourists still exists," he added.
By: Kwon Mee-yoo
Source: www.koreatimes.co.kr
NY Times za pomocą W.Reymonta i miasta Łodzi opisuje dobrą kondycję polskiej gospodarki.. ciekawe!
In the 19th century, the Polish novelist Wladyslaw Reymont titled his masterpiece about Lodz "The Promised Land" because the city attracted people from throughout Central Europe to work in its booming textile mills.
These days, the industries have changed, but something similar is happening again, helping Poland to escape the searing global recession. With multinationals like Procter & Gamble, Dell and ABB leading a wave of foreign investment, cities like Lodz, in central Poland, are experiencing relative booms.
Poles who left the country in search of work years ago are trickling back. 
As its peers in Central and Eastern Europe face a very rough year, Poland is emerging as the one economy in the region that has the heft to withstand a vicious downturn. And it just may end up being the one economy in Europe that avoids an outright contraction in 2009. One of the most flourishing corners of Lodz is a vast former textile factory that is now a complex of stores, restaurants and even a beach volleyball court. The brisk business at the site, known as Manufaktura, illustrates how far Poland is removed from the searing experiences of Latvia or Hungary, not to mention London or New York. "Maybe without the crisis, business would be better," said Slawomir Murawski, the director of Manufaktura.
"But who knows?" Poland has the advantage of being preoccupied with itself these days. Because it sells far less to the rest of the world than its neighbors, Poland is shielded from the vicissitudes of the global economy, while reaping its benefits, reflecting a wave of foreign investment. That, in turn, has helped keep its labor market strong at a time when many Europeans fear for their jobs.
The government reported Friday that Poland's economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the second quarter, bolstered by exports, construction and services. Growth in gross domestic product was well above the 0.5 percent expected by analysts, as well as the first quarter's 0.8 percent annual rate of growth. "We're the only country in the whole European Union that has such good growth, and we've come here to brag," Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a news conference in Warsaw, Bloomberg News reported. "Poland is the E.U.'s undisputed growth leader." At the beginning of the year, Poland suffered along with other emerging markets as investors pulled their money out en masse. To the immense frustration of Polish business, however, the picture of the region for outsiders has been dominated by countries like Hungary, Latvia, Serbia and Ukraine, whose crushing debt loads drove them into the arms of the International Monetary Fund.
For Poland, a relatively light borrower, the crisis created a riptide in the form of a fast-depreciating currency, the zloty. That hurt some companies, namely those that had carefully hedged themselves against a rising currency, which was the previous year's problem. But Polish banks, keen to avoid driving their clients into bankruptcy, refinanced the hedges to reflect the new reality. "In retrospect, the crisis proved manageable in Poland," said Ryszard Petru, chief economist at BRE Bank in Warsaw. "But it was hard to know at the time." The zloty plunged 27 percent against the euro in the six months ended in March. It has since risen more than 13 percent.
Poland has landed more softly than its neighbors because its economy is far less dependent on exports than other Central European countries, where exports can approach 90 percent of the gross domestic product. Poland, a nation of 38 million people, lives far more from domestic demand, and that depends on a stable labor market. Mr. Petru predicts that unemployment will rise to 9.9 percent by the end of 2009, from 7.1 percent, but that is about even with the European Union average. And it masks some pockets of strong growth; the jobless rate is 2 percent in Warsaw, and about 8 percent in Lodz, or less than half what it was five years ago.
One reason for the surprise in Lodz is clearly the influx of foreign investment. Procter & Gamble has one factory in Lodz and is opening another this fall. Fujitsu, the Japanese computer company, opened a service center in the city this year. Others include Infosys Technologies, the Indian information technology firm; ABB, the Swiss manufacturer of infrastructure equipment; and TNT, a Dutch logistics firm. Even after the shock of last September, when the bankruptcy of the investment house Lehman Brothers sent global business into free fall, "companies in Lodz kept searching for labor," said Piotr Broncher, the Lodz regional director for Manpower, a provider of temporary employees. "I was surprised. Everybody was surprised."
Manpower will probably find jobs for 1,200 people in the Lodz area this year, down slightly from 1,500 in 2008. Dell, the computer maker, made the investment that truly electrified Lodz. In January, Michael S. Dell, the company's founder and chief executive, officially opened a 400,000-square-foot plant that will handle logistics and assemble computers, particularly for customers from Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Over the next three years, it will employ up to 3,000 people. In a symbolic shift, Dell moved operations to Lodz from Limerick, Ireland. Ireland has protested the 52.7 million euros in subsidies that Dell got from the Polish government, but Dell cited the skilled work force in Lodz and proximity to growing markets as the reasons for its move.
The Irish boom, now possibly the worst bust in Europe, attracted many Poles, who worked with Dell there and are now finding their way home. "We even have some workers in Lodz who have come from our Limerick, Ireland, factory and who are very happy to have come back to help set up this one," Mr. Dell said at the opening in January. Tomasz Rybinski, 30, was among those Poles who left the country after it joined the European Union in 2004. He found work in Britain, which was booming and where he spent three years mixing salads, moving boxes in a warehouse and then, finally, working in a factory that made industrial refrigerators.
Rumors this year that layoffs were in the works were enough to convince Mr. Rybinski that the possibilities in his native Lodz trumped what had by then become a shattered British economy. After taking some time off, he found a job quickly. He recently started work in a factory that produces monitor and computer parts as an operator of a machine that molds plastic into specific shapes. Financially, Mr. Rybinski said he would earn about the same monthly pay, the equivalent of about $500, that he earned in Britain.
The turnaround in Lodz has been startling for a municipality whose population was still declining as recently as three years ago. Mr. Murawski, the director of Manufaktura, said his business benefited from that growth. But one multinational on the horizon might be less welcome for his operation, which combines shopping, eating and entertainment for children. This autumn, the Swedish retailer Ikea will open its own complex in Lodz, employing much the same strategy: bring them in to shop, but amuse them as well.
"That is likely to affect us much more than the crisis," Mr. Murawski said. "It is something concrete." By: Carter Dougherty Source: The new York Times
Ever since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared in the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio, the world has been fascinated with Rio de Janeiro. Popular perception of the city is infused with images of starry-eyed youngsters dancing into the dusk, backed by imposing mountains and dark sea. That view has propelled Rio to the top of our list of the world's happiest cities. Famous for its annual Carnaval festival (starting Feb. 13 next year), the second-largest metropolis in South America finished first among 50 cities in a recent survey conducted by policy advisor Simon Anholt and market researcher GfK Custom Research North America. "Brazil is associated with all these qualities of good humor and good living and Carnaval," says Anholt. "Carnaval is very important-it's the classic image that people have of Rio, and it's an image of happiness."
Next on the list is the top city from Down Under: Sydney, Australia. Known for balmy weather, friendly locals and an iconic opera house, Sydney fared well in Anholt's survey because of its association with a popular brand--Australia. "It's where everybody would like to go," he says. "Everybody thinks they know Australia because they've seen Crocodile Dundee. There's this image of this nation of people who basically sit around having barbecues." Rounding out the top five are third-ranked Barcelona, Spain, which Anholt calls "the classic Mediterranean city"; fourth-ranked Amsterdam, Netherlands, because Anholt's young respondents "know you can smoke dope in the bars"; and Melbourne, Australia, which makes the list simply because it's in Australia. "People know it's in Australia, and that it's full of Australians," says Anholt. "Therefore
, it must be fun." Behind the Numbers The data Anholt provided for our list is part of the 2009 Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, released in June. The research was compiled through online interviews with 10,000 respondents in 20 countries. Happiness is difficult to quantify, and Anholt acknowledges that his data is less an indicator of where local populations are happiest than a reflection of respondents' thinking about where they could imagine themselves happy. "This is a survey of perception, not a survey of reality," he says. "People write me all the time and say 'that's not true.' It probably isn't true, but it's what people think. The gap between perception and reality is what interests city governments." The French historian Fernand Braudel wrote that " Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history." (More quotes on happiness.) But a perception of happiness leaves a strong trace on the balance sheets of cities that depend on conventions, tourism and an influx of talent. The Pursuit of Happiness Anholt notes that the results of his survey reflect the longstanding reputation of Mediterranean and Latin American cities as non-stop party locales. "It's pretty much the expected bunch," says Anholt. "Though I'm a little surprised about Spain outdoing Italy. It's interesting that the Spanish are perceived as being happier than the Italians--I find the Spanish rather gloomy." Still, Barcelona--Spain's highest-ranked city--has plenty of supporters. "The beauty of the city and its environs, along with affordable housing and business opportunities, is the fantastic lifestyle," says Michelle Finkelstein, a vice president at travel agency Our Personal Guest. "There's not the stress of getting a child into the best preschool--the public ones are good and close by. And they have the top soccer team and some of the best weather in Europe." Othe
r places in the world that lack the metropolitan flair of the cities on this list are often identified with the notion of happiness. "Anyone lucky enough to visit the magical Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan would know that there is no competition: There can be no happier place," says Patricia Schultz, author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. "This small Buddhist nation of incredibly stunning beauty follows a unique guiding philosophy of GNH--Gross National Happiness. You can see it in their open faces--they smile from the heart. Barcelona has nothing on them." Global rivalries notwithstanding, Anholt notes that his findings more or less support historical trends, with one notable exception. "The cities on this list would probably be the same if I'd been running this survey in 1890, aside from Sydney and Melbourne," he says. "Australia is kind of a branding miracle." Not bad for a former penal colony.
BY Zack O'Malley Greenburg
Source: www.forbes.com
Seoul sees expatriates living in Korea as its key promoters to the world.
Posty
