Governance Matters: The tourism campaign “Inspired by Iceland” reached many people around the world. Can you tell us about the campaign and how it came about?

Sveinn Birkir Björnsson: The story really begins with the creation of Business Iceland in spring 2010. We were established as a public-private partnership and operate as a self-governing agency with an independent board of directors. The founding partners were the Icelandic Government, which established the agency because it wanted to do more to promote our national brand, and The Confederation of Icelandic Enterprise, a grouping of Icelandic business associations.

Business Iceland serves three main functions. We are the trade promotion organisation (TPO), the investment promotion agency (IPA), and the destination marketing office (DMO) for Iceland. In many countries these three functions are split between three separate agencies, but because we are a smaller country, it makes sense for us to combine and pool our resources to be more efficient. This structure has worked very well for us. Our emphasis is on Iceland as the main brand and we try to leverage aspects of that brand to meet our different priorities. By being closely aligned we are able to maintain an all-round focus and work efficiently with each other when necessary.

Inspired by Iceland came to be around three weeks after Business Iceland was founded in the wake of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. We have many volcanoes in Iceland, but this one became famous because it produced a vast ash cloud that halted flights across Europe and most of the western hemisphere for several days. Let us just say that did not reflect too kindly on Iceland. It was a huge challenge for tourism. Bookings to Iceland immediately ceased and we also suffered a lot of cancellations. People assumed that Iceland was just not accessible. The truth was that because of how the ash cloud spread, only a tiny part of Iceland was affected and we were still open for business.

Getting this message across was the first big project for Business Iceland. The Government asked us to create a campaign for Icelandic tourism to counteract the effects of the eruption. That was the birth of Inspired by Iceland. It started out as crisis management or a crisis campaign that was initially intended to last for three months. It proved to be quite successful and we soon decided to prolong the campaign. From there we adopted Inspired by Iceland as a brand for tourism and more recently we have been transitioning towards using it to communicate Iceland as a whole.

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How did you go about developing Iceland’s brand identity?

We never had a very formal process in terms of creating the brand. It was created extremely quickly to react to a crisis and since then we have just tried to build on what works and it has taken off from there. From the beginning we were aware that we were tiny compared to everybody else. That meant that from the outset of the campaign, we have always aimed to do and say things differently. We have been dependent on creating outsized ideas that can bring us more value in terms of PR by earning coverage rather than us having to buy advertising slots in the media.

In order to do that, we knew that the personality of the campaign had to be different. We wanted to create something quirky and a little offbeat. I think that tracks very well with the Icelandic mentality in a way – we tend not to take ourselves too seriously here.

We wanted to create something quirky and offbeat. I think that tracks very well with the Icelandic mentality.

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As the campaign has developed and grown, how have you ensured that it continues to align with the aspirations and perceptions of the citizens of Iceland?

This has always been a grassroots effort, which means that our stakeholders in the Icelandic tourism industry have always been very involved in the process through workshops, meetings, and a series of ongoing conversations. These workshops in particular have been very productive. For example, sometimes we bring in the biggest companies in Icelandic tourism to strategise with us.

We have never really had a disagreement with anybody over the tone of our various campaigns. I think over time, people have become very fond of the way that we approach it, or are at least agreeable to it. It is still important that we keep giving stakeholders a seat at the decision-making table and take their views into account. In Iceland, as a small country, it is possible for us to stay very closely aligned.

Many of our most important stakeholders are within the Government. We have formal ties with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs so we have a very close relationship with them. We also work closely with our embassies abroad. We supply them with content and material and train and guide them on how to use it. The other departments of the Icelandic Government are less focused on distributing the message of Iceland, but they are all aware of what we are doing, even if our collaboration is not on such a formal basis.

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Iceland’s campaigns have won fans from around the world. What advice do you have on how to make a campaign relatable?

One of our key elements is that we have always been very determined not to be boastful. Our humour is put forth in a positive manner. It is often self-deprecating and poking fun at ourselves a little bit. We are very careful not to put anyone else down. We never speak in absolute terms or the highest terms. We never want to say we are “the best athletes” or if you come to Iceland you will have “the best experience in the world”. We have tried to stay humble and playful.

This reflects our national character to some extent. Whether it is sport or politics or what have you, we are usually battling larger countries so we have developed a healthy sense of where we are, how we fit into the bigger picture, and how we can assert our influence. In Iceland, per capita measurements are very popular. We might never be the biggest, but we can be the biggest per capita. I think that sort of humour comes through in our campaigns where we can put ourselves out there and talk about what makes us special without having to be the greatest.

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In the early days, Iceland’s branding was clearly focused on the natural environment. Over time, that shifted to include more people, culture, and events. Are there any lessons you can share from how the campaign evolved?

We knew fairly early on that most people who visit Iceland come for the nature, but our research found that lots of visitors came for many other reasons. They liked the culture, the food, and one of the things that was mentioned a lot in our surveys was Icelandic society. They found the people were really welcoming and that was something that they had not necessarily expected and that they really enjoyed. That finding surprised us a little bit at the time.

We started to look into this, examining our own research and external studies such as the Nation Brands Index. We could clearly see that people were thinking of Iceland in terms of nature, but not in all these other aspects of the country that actual visitors really liked. We realised we were missing out on sharing these elements that could definitely help us to attract tourists as well as encouraging foreign talent to live and work here. It became part of the mission to showcase more than just nature and to fill in those gaps.

We have to be able to leverage the Iceland brand across different sectors, particularly our export industries, whether that is seafood or green energy or anything else. That consideration meant that we could never just be a nature brand; we had to communicate a more holistic view of Iceland.

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What are the biggest challenges that you have faced and how have you overcome them?

We have had a lot of challenges along the way. The biggest has been funding. As a small country we have never had a very big budget for our work and that has forced us to be very selective in the markets we enter and how much we can do with each of our campaigns. We tend to run quite short campaigns and then it is a challenge to keep the level of awareness of Iceland high. It has forced us to adopt different methods as well, depending on ideas that are more personal and that can create more talk among people and more opportunities for the media to pick up our campaigns and amplify them with their reporting. We are trying to create things that earn a conversation. I know we are far from alone in wishing we had a bigger budget, but we try to see that in every challenge is an opportunity.

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Your team has been very quick to pick up on international trends. How have you achieved that?

One of the skills that helps is being good at reading a situation and understanding how society is reacting to things. If you can observe society you can develop the foresight to understand where events might be going and what trends are coming around the corner. It also helps to develop a creative way of sharing what is special about a country. Great campaigns sometimes capture something about a society that really resonates with people.

One of the advantages of having a small team is that you can move quickly. We do not have the layers of approval to go through that another, larger country would. Once the decision is made, we have very good partners in creative agencies and everybody is able to work very closely together. One of the reasons we can do this so quickly is that we have a lot of trust within our team, with our creative partners, and with the other parts of the Government. When we recommend an idea or a decision, they trust us to make those calls and we are able to work together constructively.

The best example of this is the “Icelandverse” campaign, which was an Iceland-themed spoof of Mark Zuckerberg’s video announcement of the Metaverse. We were able to put it all together and launch it within two weeks of his original announcement. Normally that would take us two or three months as we would spend a lot of time reviewing and checking. In this case we knew we had to be fast to capture the moment and to get it out while the media was still interested in the story of the Metaverse.

It is the most viral campaign we have done so far. Zuckerberg commented on the video at the time which got a lot of traction and then a few months later he actually visited Iceland on vacation. I like to joke that that was the most expensive one-to-one marketing that we have ever done. When he left, he put his holiday photos on Facebook and Instagram with the caption “Photo dump from the Icelandverse”. It was hard work turning that video around so quickly, but it delivered great results for the campaign.