Nation Branding for Laughs

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 01.29.08 | 11:11 AM ET

The winning entry in the Times of London’s contest to find a motto for Britain—“No motto please, we’re British”—is equally as funny as the winning slogan in the Washington Post’s Style Invitational competition to create mottoes for countries around the world—“England: Lie Back and Think of Us.” If you’re not an Englishwoman from the Victorian Era, you may be wondering why that’s funny. Try this.

As a whole, though, the Post’s readers hit the international funny bone with more consistency. I guess that’s what happens when one of the prizes is a “can of quite possibly genuine Possum Ding Dongs.”

My top five country mottoes from the Post’s competition:

“Austria: No Kangaroos”

“China: Come Visit Your Money”

“England: We Couldn’t Beat the Patriots Either”

“Germany: It Is Not Necessary to Have a Humorous Slogan”

“Myanmar: We Liked ‘Burma’ Better Too, but These Guys Have Guns”

Then again, none of them proves quite as funny as some of the boneheaded real-life nation branding campaigns we’ve chronicled over the years.