Expo 2020 Dubai’s Impact on the United Arab Emirates’ Brand: A Quantitative Analysis About American and European Media Companies

Countries implement corporate communication initiatives to improve their international relations, achieve different business objectives, and reinforce their brands. Nation branding activities are mainly based on international events: sport, culture, social issues. This paper evaluates the Expo 2020 Dubai’s impact on the United Arab Emirates’ brand. We conducted a literature review about nation branding, and then we resorted to 15 indicators to analyze how the most important newspapers from some of the most influential countries (United States, Russia, France, and Germany) covered this event from a journalistic and corporate communication perspective. Our results proved that 82 articles were published about this topic, and the most common criteria respected were quoting organizers (n = 61), using the Expo’s logo (n = 45) and the image of a falcon (n = 43). We concluded that most media companies focused on facts related to the Expo and did references to the country’s identity (values, flag, falcon), but most of them did not include links to the Dubai Expo’s and UAE public authorities’ websites.