New Zealand is renowned within the place branding world for their successful approach to building and managing their nation brand. But the work of a nation brand team is never done, and New Zealand Story Group continue to deliver a thoughtful and considered approach to defining and framing their nation brand values. After being named 2024 Place Brand of the Year at the City Nation Place Awards, we caught up with CEO David Downs to discover how they’re embedding Māori values in their work and increasing stakeholder adoption of the nation brand values and narrative.

Congratulations on New Zealand being named 2024 Place Brand of the Year! Can you give us an overview of the work that you undertook to identify your national values, ngā mātāpono?

The one-word version is consultation. The longer version? It’s ambitious – if not arrogant, to think that one entity can define the brand values of a nation. From the beginning, we realised that while we’re tasked with being the nation branding entity, that doesn’t make it completely our remit.

So, we knew from the outset that it had to be a broad consultation process – we went into that with our eyes open. One, for authenticity. Two, for buy-in; it would be terrible if we’d walked into a room saying, “Here’s our nation brand story” and everyone else responded with “Oh, that’s not what we thought.”

For us, it was an iterative process over a couple of years. We started very, very broad, by holding workshops with different stakeholder groups and using open questions to understand what people thought about New Zealand, what words they used to tell their story to the world. Then over successive workshops, we refined that to a core set of common messages, and by the end of it, hopefully you’ve distilled a thousand voices into a few core values.

Māori is an integral part of the New Zealand culture and your story to the world, but am I right in thinking that you had to work with Māori leaders to create a new word for one of your values?

Yes! The other three words we use jumped to mind immediately. Māori language doesn’t translate directly, there’s a lot of subtlety to the language. But we landed on Manaaki, which is all around care, reciprocity, building the mana of others, and being welcoming. Then there’s Tiaki which is about intergenerational care of land and people. And Pono is about trustworthiness.

We identified those three very easily, but there was something missing – an element of individualism, challenge, and innovation.

We struck upon the idea of New Zealand being the youngest country, in terms of being the last to be settled. This spirit of youth also brings with it the idea of being more challenging and bucking trends. The word we settled on is ‘Pōtikitanga’. The first part, ‘Pōtiki’, literally means the youngest child in a family, with ‘tanga’ meaning the act of doing something. So, we found a word that encapsulated everything we wanted to express, but then we had to work through a process of getting the permission to use that word from Māori language speakers to make sure we were legitimate in our use. But the end result is that we have a word for ‘innovation’ that is in itself innovative!

You adopted a people-first approach to ensure the cultural integrity of your strategy. Following your experience, do you have any helpful advice for other places looking to engage with their community to identify their values?

You have to go into it with a pure heart. Not to be too soppy, but it can’t just be an exercise. You have to be genuine in your engagement, and you have to have good advisors and connectors around you. At the end of the day, it’s about building a relationship – perhaps that’s the advantage of being a smaller country that we can talk to the people we need to. But you have to build the relationship before you can ask for something.

Finally, you’ve got to be prepared for iteration. It’s not a steady process, and I think it can be very frustrating for anyone with a marketing-first way of thinking. You go backwards sometimes, you revisit things, you wrestle with things that people get quite emotional about like a particular word. You’ve got to be prepared for that. But the process is just as important as the outcome in terms of buy-in. So, I’d recommend allocating yourself a good amount of time, and to encourage you not to be frustrated by the process, because the journey is important.

The work doesn’t finish because you’ve written down your values, either. Embedding your narrative takes just as much effort. We’ve spent the last two years teaching our partners how to understand and how to use the values, but in many ways, the values have actually grown in their meaning in a really beautiful way because of that. The more you engage people with your place narratives, the more layers of meaning your story develops.

How do you make those values work when communicating with different audiences, such as talent, exports, or tourism – while still remaining true to your overarching nation brand?

There is some nuance. Everyone has adopted the country values for their international work, which is exactly what we wanted, but they’re still guided by their agency values as well. We use this analogy of a mixing desk; as a DJ, sometimes you put up the bass, and other times it’s the treble, and that’s exactly how we want out partners to be able to use the nation values, by leaning into what makes most sense to them. And that’s a feature of our model, not a bug. It means that everyone can adapt the values to what is most relevant – so Environment might lead with Tiaki which is about stewardship, while Tourism leads with Manaaki which is about being welcoming, but the other values will always be there in support.

Did you face any difficulties in encouraging adoption of these values by your partners? How did you break down barriers to overcome these?

Definitely! It’s going to sound terrible, but people like inventing stuff themselves. The challenge is getting people to stick with your nation brand values, and to stop reinventing or creating new things. You can definitely have individual campaigns to market specific offers, but they should always be based on the same brand. I think that’s probably the same tension with the brand part of any organisation value.

That’s our biggest challenge. It’s not massive, but it takes constant ongoing effort. And I don’t think we’ve got it perfectly right, by the way. From a visual identity perspective, it’s very hard to keep it consistent. I’ve learned a lot from other countries – like in Costa Rica, it’s mandatory to use the essential Costa Rica brand look and feel for everything. We don’t quite have full adoption like that, and it goes back to that perspective that people love inventing something. And there’s some tension between the country brand and specific sectors who have their own ambitions, but as soon as you get outside of New Zealand, no one really see those nuances. You need to have a single coherent brand narrative. We’ve got elements of that, but it takes constant work to make sure that everyone buys in.

As part of your strategy, you’ve launched a digital brand toolkit for partners to use in their own communications. Do you have any guidelines for use – and how do you enforce these?

Yes, but it’s not as fixed as we’d like to be. If you use the FernMark, for example, there are very strict guidelines around that in terms of the fonts you can use around it, the lockups, etcetera. But that’s a small element of it.

We have a project looking at how we can be more consistent collectively around our visual identity, and if anything, it’s harder work than the values piece was. As soon as you’re messing with colours, it can get very personal to people. We see it as a multi-year project to bring people into this consistent brand narrative, and the visual identity is still a work in progress as part of that.

Your values were put in the spotlight in 2023 when you hosted the FIFA Women’s World Cup. What is the secret to using the platform of an international event such as this to successfully strengthen your nation brand values?

When I think about the nation brand, I mainly think about the channels we can use that brand in – otherwise it’s a very esoteric thing that just sits on our website. My working principle is that any time we have international eyes on us, we should be on brand, because it doesn’t happen all that often. That could be one of our leaders travelling internationally, or hosting a major event, or where we win a big sports tournament, or anything. On those occasions, we’d better be on brand, because otherwise we’ve missed one of the few opportunities we have to change perceptions.

I think we’ve seen a benefit over the last few years of having that approach, and FIFA was one of them. But there’s also smaller things like hosting the America’s Cup, or even making sure that the New Zealand part of the Olympic village is on brand. Subtle things that people probably don’t notice but mean that the brand is always consistent. On my team, I have an expert in leveraging legacy and events, and he sits on committees across government looking at what international events we should be involved in, and what are our legacy plans for them.

Typically, we don’t have a lot of budget to spend on those sorts of things, but that’s the power of a nation brand. If you’ve got the brand right already, and you’ve got the visual elements, you should be able to activate them in different ways and sweat the assets as much as you can.

It’s like I said earlier - you can’t just say “We did this beautiful thing, but now we’re done.” You have to work the hell out of it, because brands should be consistently out there.

If you could point the finger to one campaign or piece of work that you’re particularly proud of, what would it be and why?

For me, it’s the fact that we’ve incorporated our Māori culture in a way that’s authentic to us as a country. We didn’t want it to feel forced or to alienate people with it. Or on the flip side, it would have been easy to only touch lightly on our Māori culture, but our authenticity comes from our bicultural country.

I think there can be tendency for country brands to be inauthentic because they become a PR campaign rather than a brand. But for us, we found our authentic voice through our Māori culture.

Thank you for sharing that with us, David.

Want to learn more? You can find New Zealand Story's winning entry from 2024 along with other best practice case studies from around the world on the Place Brand Portfolio...

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