Države kao turistički brendovi: kreiranje, upravljanje i vrednovanje

The paper deals with the phenomenon of nation branding and analyses the purpose, methods and effects of branding on the one hand, and evaluating nations as brands on the other. In doing so, the emphasis is laid on nations as tourist brands, especially the interdependence of the branding process and tourism development, that is, the role of tourist offer and promotion in the creation of a nation brand. In this context, the authors analyse four leading indices, that is, institutions that deal with evaluating and ranking nation brands – Simon Anholt’s Nation Brand Index, Country Brand Index from Future Brand, Brand Finance and Bloom Consulting in order to discover how certain nations become brands, and how this impacts their rating, that is, popularity. The authors conclude that tourist offer is only one of the segments that contribute to brand strength and that the nation brand is unsustainable in the long term if it is based only on the tourist industry without other positive economic indicators. Following current trends in tourism and tourism promotion, the authors particularly analyse the experiences from Asia, which in recent years has created the largest number of new brands in tourism and recorded continuous growth in the number of visits as well as continuous revenue growth. Croatia is considered a developing tourism brand, recognised at the European level, but still insufficiently on the global scale, whose key asset is for the most part its natural beauty.