Two days ago,I heard on the news that Austria now wants to start with nation branding. At the end of a long process, a kind of trademark Austria should be found. I take this opportunity to recycle an article about Austrias image, which I wrote in 2010.
I know it already for a longer time: All of my guests from oversea, no matter whether they come from America, Asia or Australia (only from Africa I had no couchsurfing guests until now) -have a very similar image of Austria. Sound of Music, Mozart and music in general. Most suspect that these stereotypes can not be true . But sometimes I come across guests who take it all a bit more serious.
I once had a Chinese host, who was not only totally surprised that it is a mountainous country (that’s Switzerland!), but she almost did not want me to believe that not everyone plays an instrument and is very musical. Mozart, on the other hand, was an important motive for her travels. However, not his music, but his tragic fate, was relevant to her. She did not really believe my notice that Mozart was not so poor , and some Internet searches later, she was visibly shaken, that was not a poor devil.
I took this as an opportunity to do some research on Austria’s image. There is obviously a long tradition of image studies where the respondents are exposed to images and so-called word stimuli from a specific country , and they must correlate them either to Austria, Germany or Switzerland. An example of such a study (in this case Indonesia) can be found here. All these studies have a similar result in the end, that Austria is a land of culture, music and customs – Switzerland stands for the mountains and skiing and Germany stands for progress and intelligence.