Country’s green brand: the main gaps in the scientific treatises

Abstract

Forming a strong brand is essential for national development. The country’s brand gives the direction for its long-term economic growth, contributes to increment in assets value and the competitive advantages, attracts more investments, tourists, etc. In the view of growing concern on climate change, environmental protection issues boost its influence on worldwide decision-making processes. In turn, the scientific community has more decisive in their statement to create a unique and robust country’s brand considering the green perspectives. However, the literature review results showed that the scholars investigate the green branding, mainly on the product or corporate level. Therefore, this study aims to assess how well the existing literature on country branding is explored from the perspective of green development. The research questions are as follows: 1) What are the main research directions in the scientific literature concerning the country’s green branding? 2) How far has the country’s green brand been investigated? 3) What research gap should be covered in the future? This study operated with the scientific documents published in the highly ranked scientific journals indexed in the Scopus database to answer the research questions. The study period covered 2000-2022 (until April 2022). The search for relevant publications was run by the keyword combinations “green brand”, “country brand”, and “nation brand” in the documents’ titles, keywords, and abstracts. The boolean operator' OR' was used to include the papers specified at least with one keyword. The obtained results revealed 545 papers on the investigated topic (225 publications on green branding and 320 publications on country/nation branding). In the frame of investigation, the authors applied Scopus analytical tools to detect the publication dynamic of a designed sample of documents, identify the most engaged authors, and assess the contributions of the affiliations and countries. To build the networks of scientific collaboration worldwide and detect the main research streams in studies on country/nation green brands, the authors used the method of the low-dimensional visualization. This study selected the keywords with the greatest total link strengths based on the calculation of the total link strengths of the co-occurrence’s links with other keywords. The counting method was full counting. The findings of bibliometric analysis confirmed that the studies on green branding mainly address the corporate level. The green brand concept is investigated mostly regarding green brand attachment, green brand attitude, green brand image, green brand love, green brand trust, green loyalty, green satisfaction, green perceived risks, value, and environmental sustainability. Therefore, it indicates the necessity to expand research on the national level. The main limitation of this study is operating with publications retrieved only from the Scopus database. However, the findings could be value-added for scholars investigating the country's green brand issues. The authors consider the obtained results to be a starting point for designing the country's green brand model and its assessment in the future.