Samenvatting

- Overall: Politicians need to be educated at least to a basic level in the range of communications options that are available for region branding, to prevent a default position of using for example television simply because that is what politicians are familiar with.

- Trade missions: widely used though still a challenge for regions, as a lack of follow-up can render trade missions significantly less effective than they potentially could be.

- Trade fairs: effective use of this instrument requires a significant investment in physical materials such as stands, banners, displays, etc. In addition: the issue of place brand architecture, that is, the use of national flags and imagery rather than just individual company branding.

- Although social media such as Facebook and Twitter are free to use, there needs to be a commitment in terms of human resources to ensuring that effective use is made of social media opportunities

- Creating and managing networks can be aided by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

- A constant challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of internationalisation instruments is the time lag between internationalisation activities such as trade missions or trade fairs and the contracts that are secured following such events.

- The gap in time between the event and the eventual contract being signed can run into years, which renders effective evaluation difficult.

- A flexible approach was taken by most regions with regard to place brand architecture. The use of Holland as an umbrella brand, for example, appeared to be implemented on an ad hoc rather than a long-term strategic basis.

- Some regions made a conscious decision to use Holland as a parent brand, to benefit from the generally positive and well known Holland brand.

- Using Holland as a parent brand was felt to be particularly useful in international markets where the individual Dutch regions were not known, but Holland as a nation brand was well known.

- Some respondents find that the focus of the Holland-level branding was too much on the Randstad region and not enough on the other regions of the country.