Blood and Treasure, a new blog to me, has some interesting thoughts on Ukrainian ‘freedom as a brand management strategy’. I’ll leap straight to his conclusion for the most interesting point, but I’d recommend you go read the whole thing.
But the major problem with the brand management approach in the Ukraine is that it has converted the ideas of freedom and democracy from a process that needs to be maintained and extended into a form of packaging around a specific government with well defined foreign backers. If people don;t like the product, they’re going to demand a recall and be rather pissed off that they were fooled by the packaging.
It’s a good point. the Yushchenko has a lot of work to do if it wants to persuade the Ukrainian people that they have brought into a good ‘brand’, especially given the heavy sacrifices they have made to invest in it. There are still other brands out there with popular support and, if they can be re-packaged, they could become much more attractive to any floating voters.
Yushchenko will, of course, have a honeymoon period, and people do know that reforms take time, but at the end of the day, he has to deliver.
Hat tip: A Fistful of Euros
Comments on this entry are closed.