Through my work in Copenhagen Capacity, I was for many years involved in the regional place branding and the building of the Greater Copenhagen brand. But as our efforts and campaigns proved very successful, we were moved on the take the initiatives to the national level, creating the State of Denmark place brand, with a complete digital strategy and matching marketing automation setup to attract international talents to Denmark.
For this effort, we very shortlisted for both “Best Communication Strategy” and “Best Place Brand Overall” at the City Nation Place Awards in London 2019.
This is a brief description of why we did it, how we did and the initial results we achieved.
The Challenge
Denmark, like many other countries, is struggling to attract international talent to vacant positions in industries where the local talent pool is insufficient. In Denmark, this challenge is particularly felt in the IT/tech and life science industries.
Globally, countries are competing to catch the attention of the brightest minds and to win them over with the most compelling offer. Ironically, Denmark is however not only taking part in the global competition for this coveted talent; among Denmark’s five business regions fierce competition is also taking place. Most of Denmark’s business regions have developed independent branding strategies to attract (the same) group of international companies and talent – and in the end, this is a zero-sum game with more losers than winners.
Facing this challenge, we wanted to explore how we could end this multi-voiced, unfruitful cannibalising, which did not only interfere with companies’ ability to attract international talent here and now, but also potentially muddled the long-term image and branding of Denmark internationally.
The idea of creating something bigger nation-wide dawned on us, when Business Region Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, based in Jutland, and the national cluster organisation Food Nation, both reached out to us to become part of our campaigns promoting Greater Copenhagen – and so we embarked on a new strategic branding adventure for all of Denmark able to attract international talent and companies.
The Strategy
Based on our experience from creating an award-winning and ground-breaking strategic digital communication platform for the Greater Copenhagen region, we decided to scale this innovative city branding to compelling nation branding, showing what a great place Denmark and its five regions is for international talent and business.
From previous analysis of our city branding, we knew that the soft values – happiness, freedom, creativity, co-creation and quality of life – which characterise the Danish society and way of life have a strong appeal among international talent and companies. And processing 50 million impressions from our Greater Copenhagen campaigns, we had gained valuable insights about our target groups. For example, men (to our surprise) interacted strongly with messages about work life balance, whereas women aged +45 showed very little interest in this topic.
So we decide to create a national branding platform using soft values such as happiness, freedom, creativity, co-creation and quality of life as universal triggers (emotional selling points) to create interest in the Danish way of life. Once our target groups engage with those messages, we would present them with content at regional level such as local industry clusters and specific job opportunities matching the user’s professional background as well as local neighbourhoods with opportunities for living the good life (rational/unique selling points). All communication would be wrapped in the same tone-of-voice and visual skin to ensure an ideal customer journey.
Denmark is used as the anchor of communication because Denmark has much stronger brand value and recognition internationally as compared to any Danish region – except for Greater Copenhagen, which is a very strong destination brand. This umbrella strategy mimics the Greater Copenhagen strategy in which we also used the strongest common denominator, i.e. Copenhagen, to create brand awareness for all 79 municipalities in Greater Copenhagen.
Again, our insights and learnings from the Greater Copenhagen campaigns supported this approach: The talent attraction campaigns, based on the concept ‘There is more to our happiness …’, created massive awareness and interest from people who wanted to know more about living and working in Greater Copenhagen. Many even submitted their CV to be on the waiting list for similar jobs if they did not get one in the first instance. And the majority would happily accept a job outside the City of Copenhagen.
Digitally, we had to scale the online branding platform developed for the Greater Copenhagen campaigns to handle a more complex setup. Originally the platform was designed to show companies and open jobs in one region. Now, we had to add a third parameter to the segmentation grid: business regions, in order to show local content based on online user behaviour. This data driven approach allows us to develop and refine relevant and inspiring campaign communication to reach the right audiences and to make sure they are exposed to personalised and compelling content.
Now, with the strategy in place, how should we coin the creative take on this nation-wide branding platform? And how would we achieve regional buy-in to implement it?
The Implementation
To begin with the latter; regional buy-in, we arranged meetings with important stakeholders and decision-makers to discuss the benefits of joining forces across the country. These stakeholders included town mayors, chairmen of the Regional Councils, head of companies, industry associations and industry clusters.
And to get companies to join the international talent attraction campaigns with their open positions, we created a digital domestic company recruitment campaign for each international talent campaign to go live.
As for first matter; the creative communication, we developed the branding concept “The State of Denmark”, which launched in spring 2019. The State of Denmark plays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”, however, our take is quite the opposite “There is something brilliant in the state of Denmark”. More importantly, the concept also has a clever ambiguous twist: State can mean “nation state” but also “a state of mind”. For example, A State of Happiness and A State of Digital Excellence. Moreover, “a state of mind” captures what Denmark and Danish mentality is all about … it is a trusting, innovative, curious and playful approach to life and work, which is difficult to describe, but must be experienced – and we wanted to arouse curiosity and convert this into further investigation of Denmark’s many opportunities.
Although we succeeded in getting all stakeholders on board the idea of a national branding project, the process of implementing the strategic and visual communication did not happen without regional bias. Most of the stakeholders are local politicians, who are used to fight for the interests of their municipality/region and with very little experience of e-commerce solutions and digital customer journeys. For example, some regional stakeholders wanted their city logos on all online material to increase visibility. And to complicate matters further, they were less willing to “take orders” from Copenhagen and the capital region, Greater Copenhagen, which Copenhagen Capacity represented. However, in the end, through plenty of dialogue everyone understood the need for and fully supported the clear, user-oriented, one-tone-of-voice communication provided by The State of Denmark concept.
So far, we have created three digital talent attraction campaigns to launch this autumn. The first campaign is made in partnership with Odense Robotics, one of the world’s top robotics clusters located in the city of Odense in the Southern Region of Denmark, as well as Business Region Midtvest og Aarhus Business Region, Denmark’s second-largest city. Odense Robotics is home to 129 companies and 3,600 employees, innovating within robotics and automation.
The campaign will target specialists such as experienced industrial technicians, process operators and robotics and automation engineers and software developers – and it will benefit both companies who are looking to recruit employees, and the robotics cluster organisation who is looking to attract startups to strengthen the local eco-system further.
So, did we succeed in creating a strategic branding strategy for all of Denmark able to attract international talent and companies?
The Results
Yes, we succeeded. We successfully scaled our award-winning city branding into compelling nation branding, showing that Denmark and its five regions is a great place for international talent and business.
And we managed to get all stakeholders on board, and we found common ground around a clear message about the unique Danish DNA and way of life, using a shared digital platform, a common tone-of-voice and an aligned visual identity.
The first State of Denmark campaign has launched with impressive indicative results and will run this autumn. Based on previous similar Greater Copenhagen campaigns we are able estimate the results and impact of the nation-wide campaigns.
The most recent Greater Copenhagen tech talent campaign generated 32 hires and EUR 8.58 million in GDP contribution. In 2020, we plan to run 5 nation-wide campaigns, 5 regional Greater Copenhagen campaigns and 5 other regional campaigns – this will create EUR 128.7 million in GDP contribution.
Once the campaigns take off, they will not only attract talent short term, but also create a snowball effect, building a strong place brand for Denmark long term. So we believe this is only the beginning …