Rebranding a Country

Emily Page (00:00):

A name can be a gift, a declaration, or sometimes a quiet correction the world needs to hear.

Doug Downs (00:13):

She was born Marguarite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. But it wasn't long before the world would know her by a different name, though not without a few wrong turns. Along the way, her older brother Bailey called her Maya, his nickname for my and sister. And it stuck. It was soft, lyrical, and close to home. But as Marguerite grew into Maya, the world stumbled Maya, Mia, even Mayra sometimes they got the name wrong again and again. She never raised her voice about it. She just kept speaking and writing. When I know why the caged bird sings hit shelves in 1969, Maya Angelou didn't need to correct anyone. She just needed to be heard. And when she was, the mispronunciations all fell away because some names you repeat others. You remember Maya Angelou had a name that carried poems, protests, pain and power. It carried the cadence of truth. And once the world learned to say it right, it set it with reverence. Not because she demanded it, but because she'd earned it. Today on stories and strategies, we explore what it takes to speak your truth, to own your identity, and how sometimes the most powerful act is simply saying your name.

(01:56):

My name is Doug Downs,

Farzana Baduel (01:58):

And my name is Farzana Baduel. Our guest this week is Gokhan Yucel, joining today from the heavenly city of Istanbul. Hi, Gokhan. So how are things around the Bosphorus?

Gökhan Yücel (02:14):

I'm very lucky. I'm sitting in one of the most beautiful offices in the world and everything is fine, hard work every day. Although we might slow down a bit for the next month and a half

Farzana Baduel (02:27):

Right now, I'm going to tell our audience a little bit about you. Gokhan. You are a global leader in public sector communications, known for helping reposition Illa on the world stage through campaigns like Hello, Illa and Nexus of the world. You've advised ministers led crisis communication strategies and championed digital diplomacy, all while mentoring the next generation. Through your teaching and your TEDx Talks background from Oxford, Harvard, Marara, and a passion for AI and nation branding, you bring deep insight into how governments speak with clarity and be heard.

Doug Downs (03:06):

And you added one more thing to the CV fairly recently, Goan, you renamed a country, that's a pretty good line item to have fun on the old resume. So tell me about what does it take to rename a country on the world stage and what was that all about?

Gökhan Yücel (03:23):

Renaming a country is tough. It's not easy. There are so many habits and people are used to use to Turkiye, sorry, Turkey. Turkiye.

Doug Downs (03:37):

That's how I know it. Turkey,

(03:39):

Yeah. Everyone is so used to call this country Turkey for ages, and one day we decide that, oh, let's change it. Let's change this because we want to be called with our authentic name. And also to avoid further jokes maybe, and confusions and et cetera. And there are so many other cultural and historical and maybe strategic as well reasons behind why we really wanted to change the name. And Mr. President Peran signed a decree a few years ago, and that decree said that the new name of the country is, and we really want everyone to use this new name rather than the old one, which is Turkiye. So it's a big challenge to go and spread the word. It's basically, it's no different than any other communication procedure. So start building up your own strategy to convince people to start using the new name. And you have a message, you have certain media, you have a target audience, and then you start optimizing your words, and then you start media planning and you also start thinking about face-to-face communication, not only digital or many other conventional tools, but diplomacy, public diplomacy.

(05:24):

They're also part of this first start at the UN so that everyone can start seeing all these badges in front of our diplomats, our commission members, et cetera. So I think the priority was to start from these international organizations like the UN and others in the UN ecosystem like unesco, unicef, et cetera. And then OECD, nato. And we were fortunate to be welcomed really warmly. And of course this is part of also the diplomatic code of conduct. So once that diplomatic part was done, it was somehow easier to reach all these people to start using the name. Of course, we're talking about publishing houses, we're talking about the newspapers, the media outlets, universities application forms. There are all these templates. And we had to deal with that, all these big tech companies where the country name is not only a brand, but it's also an algorithm as part of an algorithm. So you have to re-engineer that algorithm.

Farzana Baduel (06:53):

Goan, it was quite interesting because you mentioned that in the last 15 years there has been a shift where countries are positioning themselves as brands. What do you think sparked this completely different way embracing branding, but from a country, region, city level, because it's relatively new in terms of even the words that we're using about nation branding, place branding, et cetera.

Gökhan Yücel (07:25):

I think country branding has always been there, but if you ask one thing, thing really played a huge role. Digital.

(07:39):

Digital has transformed everything. It's not a myth. I mean, 15 and 20 years ago, there was a more homogenous world order, the international relations politics still, it was more uniform in a way. The way in which we speak about it, the way in which it was researched, the way in which it was spoken, it was discussed, it was filmed, it was documented, it was more uniform. And from that perspective, I think countries or nations or regions or cities or even neighborhoods nowadays didn't see necessity to make extra effort to brand themselves or at least to delve into that mentality. And I think since the world has become a more diverse place, the world has become a complicated place. I think communicators also started thinking about new avenues to deal with that challenge.

Farzana Baduel (08:59):

Yeah, it's fascinating because 15 years when you had the emergence of social media, you then obviously had the emergence of digital diplomacy. And previously ministry of trades culture tourism would be reliant upon their embassies and their high commissions because they would often have their trade attache, their media attache. And it's really interesting because now actually centralized government is less reliant upon the embassies and the high commissions for the branding and the promotion because actually they've got digital tools in place. So it's really fascinating how that's shifted the role of diplomatic missions as well.

Gökhan Yücel (09:42):

I have this new motto, I think I'm going to create a posture and put it on my wall. Hype is the new narrative. So if you are looking for a narrative, don't look for it anywhere else. The hype is the new narrative. When I first started reading and writing and practicing digital diplomacy 10, 15 years ago, digital diplomacy was like setting up social media channels by foreign ministries or ministries or government agencies or think tanks or international organizations. But it's no longer Today we talk about tech diplomacy. So again, if you can just, I'm sure the audience would probably recall the military industrial complex. There's this old story about the military, the defense industry being also in industrial complexes, and they can't be conceived separately that easily. So I think in today's world, everything is now merging or combining with ai. So we have the ai, something complex, ai, industrial complex ai, military complex, ai, tech, complex ai, agriculture, life sciences, con education. What is learning now? What is skills? How will we assess people's new generations, young people's kids or children's skills, exams? Are they enough learning? How do we learn? Do we need to learn?

Farzana Baduel (11:18):

Okay,

(11:19):

It's a totally different, is a totally different world that we're entering into Gohan. I wanted to just pull on a thread. I've been visiting Istanbul, Tokyo for many years, and people would always talk about it as, oh, it's a bridge. It's a bridge between the east and the west. And everyone always talks about it's one place in the world that the east and the west, you feel both cultures and they both sit side by side. And when we were talking, when I was fortunate enough to be looking over the Bosphorus from your gorgeous office, you were telling me about actually you want to move away from the positioning as a bridge and actually frame it as a nexus of the world.

Gökhan Yücel (12:04):

I have to promote Turkiye as somewhere not to cross over only, which is a good thing, which is positive. I'm not saying anything about it, but it is a place where people can come and stay and reside and live and invest and learn and to be educated, attend schools, start up new companies, knees. So I think there is this nuance, this only tiny difference between being a bridge from which you cross over, but nexus of the world, which has this, I like the sand of the word nexus. Also the connotation that it is not only a hub, not only a gateway, not only a bridge, but it has this metaphysical, communicative and emotive like emotional connotation that people can come and meet and live and have so many other experiences here. It's like in French...

Doug Downs (13:16):

Gokhan, I'm over here in the west and sometimes I get a little jealous of Europeans in the neighborhood, right? Farzana has been to Istanbul several times. We don't do that. I know Mexico, I know lots of the US states, throughout Canada. That's my travel neighborhood. How are you branding differently? For me in the west, branding is about, it's not the name of a country. Branding is about what I think and what I feel about tok. How are you branding for me differently? What do you want me to think differently as a tourist or maybe as an investor? Doug, there is no real difference really, because it's not my hood, it's not my neighborhood.

Gökhan Yücel (13:57):

But you only think so because you weren't given enough information about this part of the world. Maybe you didn't choose to do so over the years. I think this part of the world shouldn't only be on news with conflict and wars and human rights issues or political kind of tensions, et cetera. I think this happens everywhere to a certain degree. So North America has also political issues. Just a few. Just a few. Yeah. So I think it's also about, and we're doing our best to perform, telling the story everywhere in the world, face-to-face, digital, conventional, whatever that this part of the world has. Yes, natural bts, beaches, sun. Well, history was born here. Script was born only maybe 300 or 400 kilometer away from where I sitting.

Doug Downs (15:10):

How are you getting all that to me though? Are you running digital social media campaigns? Are you're running TV ads? How are you getting that? To me,

Emily Page (15:17):

By all means. I mean we are a bit technical as everyone when it comes to convey the message. So I think we first analyze our target audience. Well, we have a country specific strategy set. So for Canada, we don't have a representative there, but we have reps in US and for North America we have a particularly engineered media strategy, but also communication strategy, branding strategy and marketing strategy. We use everything. We use digital more for reaching out young people. And digital I think is becoming more mainstream. And now I think we have to think about how we will deal with its own breakdowns and how we will be dealing with all these, like the TikTok, the X, all these, the new world of ai. Because you know what? We are used to hear the words in the market in marketing, SEO, search engine optimization. Do you think people are still using Google to search? No chat, massively dropping.

Farzana Baduel (16:33):

Yeah, it's perplexity. It's chat. GBT,

Gökhan Yücel (16:36):

I mean SEO. No, it's a EO. It's answer for engine optimization. We

Doug Downs (16:41):

Just talked about that. Yeah.

Gökhan Yücel (16:45):

One has to any government, any brand or any marketer.

(16:50):

Yes, we all read Philip Kotler's book. We all read ler, we all read race, we all read all these big names and we teach through these books, but we also need to listen. My new motto, which is hype is the new narrative. Trends are not only trends today. In today's world, trends are also so much definitive and they have this definitive power. That's why I choose using the my new motto, hype is the new narrative. I'm going to write a piece about it. Actually, I've just sketched out a few sentences, but I'll complete it. So that's I think the new mentality. And I can see this, I can see this flourishing everywhere. Whenever I talked to Farzana when she was in Istanbul, when we had all these fruitful discussions and so many other colleagues around world, I can hear the same story. So we have to be used to it, and we also need to recruit and train people accordingly. Doc, that's I think, the key.

Doug Downs (18:04):

This went by really fast. There's so much more we could unpack here. I appreciate your time today, Goan. I

Gökhan Yücel (18:10):

Appreciate

Doug Downs (18:11):

Your time. Thank you. Thanks for

Gökhan Yücel (18:12):

Asking me.

Farzana Baduel (18:13):

Now, before we let you leave, we have a question that's been given by our previous guest.

Bill Welser IV (18:18):

A question that I'm very interested in with respect to just day-to-day life is what steps do you take in making sure you bring your most authentic self to an interaction with another human?

Gökhan Yücel (18:39):

Wow, I can write an essay. I'd like to write an essay on that. But I think what I do, and that's my own methodology, I start building up myself day to day, minute to minute. So I continue to build myself up. I never stop this. I think that's my most authentic self, and this most authentic self never stops learning. So when I learn new things, I think the only way I can react or I can reflect it's scholarly intellectually, but also by shaking hands or attending a podcast or video cast is just reinventing my own self and never stop learning and building myself up every day, minute to minute, moment to moment, and then reflect it when needed. I think that's a very right question. That's a very nice question. Everyone must, I shouldn't say must, but should have their own definition kind of methodology. So there is this strongly link to conclude between my own methodology on pedagogy, maybe my methodology to learn in order to do my own business.

Bill Welser IV (20:12):

And

Gökhan Yücel (20:13):

There is this strong link between that and my authentic self.

Doug Downs (20:17):

Nice. I know I'm being real when I'm listening and learning. That's good. I like that.

Gökhan Yücel (20:22):

That's good. Yeah,

Doug Downs (20:23):

Your turn go can. And that precedent has been sent these questions, we expect them to be deep philosophical stuff, Mensa level, your turn with question you want to leave behind for the next guest. Will you be ready for yesterday? Unpack that.

Gökhan Yücel (20:39):

Well, I think, what do

Doug Downs (20:40):

You mean?

Gökhan Yücel (20:43):

There is this chap, the French Romanian script writer, play writer, Eugene unesco. Have you ever? No,

(20:51):

He has a play. I did a bit of theatrical work in the university. He has this play short two parts, the lesson, the class, and he is the champion of absurdity in theatrical performance. I think being absurd somehow has its own definitive and has certain degree of value. I wrote a piece in response to Michel Fuko. I dunno if you know about Michel. He has this famous concept, archeology of knowledge. I said archeology cannot no longer be applied for the discovery of knowledge. I think we should start talking about the autopsy of knowledge. And I wrote a huge piece. I think I sent it to Farzana, actually.

Farzana Baduel (21:52):

I'll share it with you, Doug.

Gökhan Yücel (21:53):

And I think that's also similar. Are we really, meaning when we talk, when we do podcasts, when we do campaigns, do we really mean what we say or do we really say what we mean? I think we should also pick some absurd, funny, whatever weird words or set of words to really mean to really and honestly mean what we want to say. And I really mean by asking, will you be ready for yesterday?

Farzana Baduel (22:33):

Yeah. Love that. Absolutely love that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Goan.

Doug Downs (22:38):

Thanks, Goan. Here are the top three things we got today from Goan gel. Number one, authentic name matters. Turk Kia shifted from Turkiye to Turk to assert its authentic identity and eliminate some of those old stereotypes. Number two, from bridge to Nexus, they're reframing from being just a bridge between east and west to a global meeting point, a nexus where people live, invest, and innovate. And number three, digital hype drives narrative. Boy, he was big on that. Turk's rebranding taps into digital platforms and global media recognizing that in today's world, hype is the narrative. I love that. And it shapes perception, hype, hype, hype.

Farzana Baduel (23:25):

Too dark. I mean, that's one hell of a KPI rename a country.

Doug Downs (23:29):

Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. And rebrand. Make people think and feel differently about tok. And yeah, it's moving. For me, I knew next to nothing before

Farzana Baduel (23:38):

And I just love the humility that you know what it's like rebranding a product at the end of the day. Was it Prince the artist, formerly known as Prince?

Doug Downs (23:48):

Oh yeah.

Farzana Baduel (23:48):

He's done it a few times. I think P Diddy done it a few times, and

Doug Downs (23:53):

Yet here we are still saying Prince and P Diddy.

Farzana Baduel (23:56):

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You are absolutely right. But yeah, what an iconic job.

Doug Downs (24:04):

Amazing guy.

Farzana Baduel (24:05):

If you'd like to send a message to our guest, Goan gel. We've got his contact information in the show notes, stories and strategies is a co-production of Zen Public Relations, JGR Communications, and Stories and Strategies, podcasts. If you'd liked this episode, please, please leave a rating and possibly a review. That's a little beg for me. Thank you to our producers, Emily Page and David Olad. And lastly, do us a favor for this episode to one friend. And thank you so much for listening.