The Analytical Model of Country Resources, Country Image, and Foreign Direct Investment: The Country Branding Implications

With the potential economic, political, and strategic values inherent in developing a favorable country image, country branding has received increasing scrutiny from both practitioners and researchers in the last decade (Anholt 1998; Dinnie 2008; Olins 2002; Popadopoulos and Heslop 2002; Sun and Paswan 2011, 2012). The country as a brand represents the intangible assets of the country, encompassing various dimensions such as politics, economics, culture, history, social psychology, and technology. Although extant studies focus on various factors relevant to country brand and country branding (Fan 2006; Florek and Conejo 2006; Loo and Davies 2006; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2000), there is a lack of an organizing mechanism to connect the factors identified in the literature. This study focuses on the outcome factor of country branding foreign direct investment (FDI) and intends to clarify the associations between different antecedent factors of country branding and FDI.