Managing country image to long-term advantage: The case of Taiwan and Acer

This paper illustrates how country image has been actively managed by the government of Taiwan, by means of a national advertising campaign since 1990. Using theories from marketing, advertising and consumer behaviour, it postulates that individual companies, such as Taiwan's Acer, may also benefit from the national ad campaign, leading to enhanced country-of-origin effects and global marketing success. While it is difficult to answer satisfactorily the larger theoretical questions of proximate cause and effect between a national image campaign and any presumed spillover effects that may benefit an individual company, the paper tries to provide some persuasive empirical and theoretical evidence to support this proposition. Future hypothesis testing is needed to explore interactions between the conceptually related activities of international advertising, place branding, company reputation management, brand-name marketing and cross-cultural consumer attitude change.