Best marketing for this country

“Boston Bomber brothers are thought to be from the Czech Republic” (one of thousands of people on U.S. Twitter mistook Czechs for Chechnya)

You might still remember how Mladá Fronta renamed itself DNES in order to dispel its young communist league odour, in a rebranding stint. But I know that ten years after the wordsMladá Fronta, were dwarfed by an enormous DNES in the title, people still bought a “Mladá” at news stands.

A marketing move gone awry is nothing unusual in the history of business. Rebranding is not a banal chore if the product has entered the realm of subliminal and common-day. Sometimes it is plainly impossible to change things.

Similarly the Czech Republic has been groping in the spattering of names, since the dissolution of the state with the international trademark Czechoslovakia, and none seems good enough. As though an old identity was gone and a new one was hard to establish.

A name (trademark) arises from a long effort to implant information in the gray matter of millions of brains. A trademark will not catch on within months, talk about years. The same goes for national identity. There’s a funny thing I have experienced.

In spring, I relocated to Vancouver, in Canada. As a stranger I am often asked, where do you come from? My attempts to indicate the Czech Republic and be positively identified for that were lacklustre. One in ten reactions to “Czech Republic” was educated: “Well, yes, I read about it, you were Czechoslovakia and it was an amicable divorce.” It came from a Syrian hotdog vendor on English Beach.

But it was no end to my identity plight: my youngest daughter, Anička, had a school project: she was supposed to bring a Czech cultural artifact and tell the class about it. Intense family brainstorming ensued: the rebranding of what was Czechoslovakia showed to be something like squaring the circle. First we thought about a can of Pilsner beer. You can buy it here, anyway, it’s one of the cheapest brands, so be it. Her big brother, who goes to middle school and feels fully integrated, destroyed our scheme: “You must be kidding! A third-grader brings beer to class in a country where the legal drinking age is 21?”

We admitted it was not a very bright idea and started to move in a vicious circle: Folk songs? No use if the kids don’t get the words. Janáček? Dvořák? Third grade? For a while it seemed the Little Mole could score points in a class where more than half of the kids are of Chinese stock, but my daughter said they are “not babies”. But what’s supposed to be an internationally recognized symbol, then? Should she get a Jágr photo? Would that express a cultural identity?

We finally agreed to abandon the “every Czech is a musician” tenet, because it’s obsolete (have you seen an Olivia Žižková clip?). What tells something for us, is not beer or the Beer Barrel Polka.

My daughter will bring to her class a copy of Čapek’s book, R.U.R., and tell her classmates that robot is a word coined by a world-famous Czech author, who was the first to warn against the misuse of artificial intelligence. She will bring along  her big brother’s (carefully washed) socks of antibacterial nanofibers. We lead on U.S. universities in nano-technologies. She will show contact lenses to her class. Everybody knows them but few suspect it is a Czech invention.

A small nation, which had half of its name hijacked, owes its modern-day cultural identity to incredibly creative brains. No need to pull good old “Jager” to the game.