Newsgroup: it.lavoro.informatica
Titolo: italia.it

August 26, 2008
Branding Italy may be harder than you think.
This fall, the Italian government will revive plans to create a Web
portal aimed at attracting tourists to the nation. Though plenty of
visitors flock to Italyās cities, beaches and countryside all year
round, over the past three decades the country has lost its primacy as
a tourist destination to France, Spain, the U.S. and ā more recently ā
China.
Through the official Web site, Italy plans to showcase its cultural,
natural and gastronomical treasures, while also helping tourists with
hotel and travel bookings. The portal is scheduled to go live next
spring.
The plan has critics, however. Five years have already been spent ā and
more than ā¬45 million ($66 million) set aside ā on creating the portal,
and thereās nothing yet to show for it.
In 2003, the conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi first thought up the āChoose Italyā project, which would be
based around the Web site 
www.italia.it
.
The plan was to emulate successful national-tourism portals such as
www.spain.info
, which cost ā¬9 million to set up in 2002 and drew 65
million page views in 2007. The Spanish Web site, along with a logo
featuring Joan MirĆ³ās sunny āEspaĆ±aā emblem, has helped Spain become
the worldās second-most-popular tourist destination after France.
For Italy, humbled by political and corporate scandals, the Web site
also was supposed to project Italyās bella figura, or attractive side,
to the world.
But things quickly went wrong.
There was āno single guide telling us where to go with this,ā says Luca
Palamara, former managing editor of 
www.italia.it
.
Simple disputes over whether to handle hotel bookings through the Web
site went unresolved after a year and a half of discussion, Mr.
Palamara says. Technological issues also arose: The homepage was not
customizable, and its two main databases were not compatible.
When the Web site went live it was riddled with embarrassing blunders.
The first name of the famous Italian movie director Federico Fellini
became āGioacchino,ā while Corsica-born Napoleon Bonaparte was made a
native of the island of Elba, recalls Mr. Palamara, who says the
mistakes were subsequently corrected.
Scandalo Italiano, a popular blog authored by Italian multimedia
professionals, chronicled more of the slip-ups. Among them: Typical
seafood dishes from the coastal region of Marche came to include āpork
roast with prunes,ā which is popular in Poland.
āThis kind of content was a very serious accident,ā says Roberto
Falavolti, chief executive of Sviluppo Italia, one of the government
agencies involved in creating the portal.
Plans for an Italy logo didnāt do much better. WPP Groupās
brand-consultancy unit Landor Associates won a ā¬100,000 government
tender to design the logo. But Landorās symbol ā a classically-typed
red and black letter āiā and an oversized, green letter āTā ā fell
flat.
AIAP, Italyās association of graphic designers, drew up a petition
against the symbol, saying the logo was āinadequateā and āwithout
history.ā The government eventually abandoned the logo, and last
January the portal was shut down.
But the Web siteās misadventures are particularly striking, considering
that tourism is one of the countryās most successful industries.
Even Francesco Rutelli, the former deputy prime minister who took over
the project when Italyās center-left government came to power in
mid-2006, acknowledges the problems. āThe project was born already
obsolete in technological, organizational and conceptual terms,ā Mr.
Rutelli stated in an email.
Advertisers and those involved with the project say the current
government ā run, again, by Mr. Berlusconi ā should learn from its
mistakes.
Marco Ottolini, who was a consultant for one of the companies
responsible for āChoose Italy,ā says that perhaps too much money was
thrown at it. A ā¬1 million budget given to one agency would have been
enough, he says. Indeed, Spainās portal was handled by a single public
company, Segittur SA, working directly for the countryās ministry of
tourism.
āSpain created a brand. Italy tried creating ā without much success ā a
Web site,ā says Manfredi Ricca, business director at the Italian unit
of Interbrand, a global branding consulting firm that is part of ad
holding company Omnicom Group and was briefly a consultant for the
āChoose Italyā project in its early planning stages.
Mr. Ricca says the governmentās renewed efforts should focus on clarity
of vision and that an āorchestra conductorā should be hired to
coordinate the ideas of all of Italyās government entities and regions.
āWith geographical brands it is particularly important to tell the same
message with the same voice,ā he says.
--------------------------------
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 Branding Italy may be harder than you think.
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