How to brand a country like “Eesti Vabarik”

She was selling glazed almonds, the country’s traditional snack in a corner inside Tallinn’s old town.

I approached her. She was blond and beautiful, dressed in old village rags. She was a peasant girl.

After I relished some of the tasty snacks she started a conversation.

- Where are you from?

- Macedonia.

- Oh, that is very far away.

- Well, yeah, a little bit, I said. But not that far.

- You must have come by horse, she said.

- Horse? Hell no, I came by flight, I said. It is some 2 hours away.

- You don’t have a horse, she asked?

- No.

- Whoooooaaa. In that case, you must have come with a dragon. Is your dragon here? Can you show your dragon to me?

This time, my element of surprise got evident.

- Dragon!? I don’t have a dragon. What are you talking about? Are you asking me such questions on purpose?

- Well look at me, she said. I come from the 15th century. Dragons and horses are all we have for travel.

At last, I got the catch and I busted out laughing. She joined me seconds later. It took me over a minute to get a grip on myself. She made my day. The blond peasant time traveler from medieval Estonia.

Unfortunately, dragons are no more today or at least not in sufficient quantity to become the hallmark of an entire country. Estonia, a small remote country in the very corner of North-east Europe had to look for something else.

And it did.

Over a month ago I had my first visit to Tallinn to pick up my E-residency kit. If you are still not aware of Estonia’s Digital nation initiative, you should. Plenty has been said about it. It already counts over 20,000 E-residents. After Brexit, digital Estonia jumpstarted even more aggressively at promoting its digital residency even more aggressively to UK citizens inviting them to use Estonia as a gateway to the single EU market.

I had the option to pick the E-residency kit from a local embassy but I decided to do so straight from the heart of Estonia and see whether the rumors were true.

They call Estonia, the Silicon Valley of Europe.

My firsthand experience confirmed that. Tallinn is just the place to be for a startup founder with focus. It is small, very green, lying on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. It features long and dark winters during which you barely have anything to do, any distractions. Just the time to focus. Helsinki is just 2 hours by ferry.

If that was not enough, you have an ancient town right in the heart of this capital with time travelers inside it. Most important of all, the city, nay the entire country hosts some of the most tech-savvy citizens on the planet. Even the dense misty forests around Parnu are engulfed with the blessed wifi waves.

Most people speak some English and to sound even more unbelievable, they seem to dislike Russian tourists speaking Russian and Finnish tourists speaking Finish. We are in Estonia they say, not Finland, despite that their media is flooded with media content and shows coming from Finland’s media machine. If you don’t speak Estonian, you better speak some English.

The local train and the trams feel like entering Starship Enterprise and any point in the city of Tallinn can be reached within 20 minutes. Locals enjoy free transportation. Bank branches do not appear as bank branches at all. Some of them feature mammoth size aquariums right at the center of it and other enormous social areas bigger than my high school library with coffee machines desks and chairs and even Pilates gear. All to make your waiting more comfortable that is if you have to wait at all in the first place. 

Estonia attributes its fast economical success on the shock therapy its government implemented after its independence in 1991 and aggressive adoption of the free market principles and neoliberal ideologies (full case study by The Heritage Foundation).

Only 17% of Estonians declare as religious and of them, only 2% attend the Sunday ceremony.

But breach the topic of technology with them and marvel their reaction over the country’s dominant religion. Everybody knows Skype, the country’s greatest tech export. Taxify, Europe’s largest competitor to Uber recently raised another $175 million dollars by Daimler and others, making it a unicorn. Headquartered in Tallinn. Their vehicles were glittering on the summer sun all across Tallinn. Pipedrive CRM just raised $50 million to compete against Microsoft and Salesforce. Co-headquartered in Tallinn.

Guess what I found as I walked back to my hostel. Malware Bytes’s headquarters. Just a few buildings away from my hostel. Up to that point, I was clueless that MB is also an Estonian company. I’ve been a fan of their product for more than 2 years ever since my personal laptop picked up a nasty piece of redirection malware and their product was the only thing that fixed it. Ecstatic, I rushed back to drop them an email asking if they are kind enough to grand me a quick audience with their CEO as a mega-fan and fellow company founder. Less than an hour later I got a reply back that he is out of the country for few days, that he is even aware of StayUncle’s achievements in India and that he would love to share a drink a week later if I am still in the city.

That’s it. The city conquered me. Small, beautiful and full of high tech companies. Its skilled workforce is proficient not only in building products that work but in designs that appeal too. If this is not enough, the city hosted North Europe’s most popular startup event called Lattitude59. Two days after my scheduled flight back, Nickelback was scheduled for a concert. A city of 400,000 people having Nickleback. Insane!

Estonia seems to understand that the best way to ensure long term growth prospects despite its minuscule size and scarcity of natural resources is to attract the best minds from across the globe to work from her soil, no matter what it takes. The Startup Visa initiative aims to achieve exactly that. It grants foreign startup founders who wish to explore doing business from Estonia, a Temporary Residence Permit while relieving them of their duty to invest the mandatory $65.000 investment in the local economy.

The country’s dedication to technology is not only noticed in the private sector.

The very government itself breathes technology. Every bus station prominently invites you to share your Estonia experience using #visitestonia. Voting is 100% online in Estonia. All sorts of government services and schemes are digitized. My experience in picking up my E-residency from the Police and Border Guard Office was as smooth as it can be. And fast. Trust me, one is not usually accustomed to obtaining government services that fast.

Inside that building, inside the trams and the trains, on billboard and panels, inside the airport there was a symbol which tells the story of a new and aspirational Estonia. The EV100 (“aastasada” or century) logo was made to mark Estonia’s 100 old jubilee in 2018 and also Estonia’s presidency over the EU since July 2017.

The EV100 logo appears the single most featured outdoor piece of visual identity after its national flag. It’s one heck of a symbol. It signifies the number 100 and the number 18 as well. But to many it also represents the binary 1 and 0, once again reflecting Estonia’s focus on technology-driven growth.

After it became public it popped out everywhere. It is the first thing you notice as you land at their airport and is subtly present all across the city. I’ve never seen a branding exercise done upon an entire country done so brilliantly, so coherently.

Country branding pundits talk about soft power away for a country to impose itself subtly onto the world stage through cultural cues and image export. For India, yoga is such an export. However, Estonia meant both hard and soft branding all in one. The EV100 logo is even present on chocolates. That’s right. If you decide to bring nothing more than mere chocolate as a souvenir back from Estonia, it will feature not the symbol of the nation but the very vision of their future.

Both, Macedonia, my native country and Estonia got independent in 1991. Both emerged from communist regimes. Both underwent painful transitions towards free-market economics. Yet Estonia is far more developed than Macedonia with GDP per capita of over $17,500 vs Macedonia’s $5,500.

All this makes me overly excited to spend a few months in this remote cornered little country and dig these people and their ways.

Anyone there I should meet?