We often discuss PR with international companies and everyone always refers to "the Nordics" or "the Nordic region". From an international PR budget terms Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and to a lesser extent, Iceland, get bunched together and seen as one regional market.

If you ask a Dane or Swede, Norwegian or Finn about how often they think about themselves as being Nordic they say "hardly ever". On one very general level we are very similar across all these countries, but look closer and we are also very different. Some of the media may be owned by the same publishers, like Schibsted and IDG, but from a PR perspective there is very little crossover of news stories. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians may understand each other, but often discussions between these nationalities happen in English, and everyone feeling a little bit ashamed that they don't understand the other languages well enough. Finnish is totally different from the other Nordic languages so here English is definitely necessary! If you ask a journalist or PR consultant in Sweden about the media situation in Denmark, he may know the big newspapers but that's as far as it goes. PR agencies in one market very rarely work across the region, and if they do it's almost always via a partner or through a separate office. Even on existing longterm clients there is no more contact between the different national PR teams than there would be between a PR team in the UK, France and Germany. So is there no Nordic sense of belonging at all? Well, yes there is, in the same way as we all feel European, we can feel Nordic. One example is looking at research results or surveys. If we've only been covered as "the Nordic region" we will show interest. But present individual research results for Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland and we will immediately get excited, start comparing and appoint winners and losers!