Swissness

Dear all,

I've just read an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about Swissness. It is a study done by the The Marketing Institute at the University of St. Gallen. They interviewed 8000 people from 70 countries and came up with the following conclusions.

So, let's start with explaining the definition of Swissness.Under Swissness the authors of the study understand the features/brand connections when the consumer thinks about the Swiss products.
The study shows that Swiss brands are associated with: high quality, reliability, luxury and premium prices.

In addition to this, other main insights of the study are:
- the industries most often mentioned - chocolate, cheese, clocks, banks
- negative associations - with the political attitudes and the position of the banking industry
- symbols - Swiss cross, or similar signs of origin: "of Switzerland", "Swiss made"

If you ask me, the results are not fantastic, unexpected, extraordinary. It's rather common sense what they've found out. If I were to judge their study according to Whetten's 7 criteria for evaluating the quality of a research, they would fail the test:
- What's new? - what new insights does this study bring? what is its value added?
- So what? - how can the results be used to help practitioners achieve a competitive positioning and how does it develop the research stream?
All in all, the study is rather testing some hypothesis and does not come up with something new.

Here is the link to the article:
«Swissness» bewährt sich als Kernbotschaft von Marken