Slogan mediteran kakav je nekad bio

”Croatia, full of life” is soon to be chucked, in favour of a new, more ”Croatian” slogan, says Tourism Minister Gari Cappelli.

The long-standing ”Croatia, full of life” (Hrvatska, puna zivota) slogan that has come to dominate the Croatian tourism industry is heading into the realms of the past according to Gari Cappelli who spoke to RTL on the matter. He believes that the new slogan needs to be more ”nationally painted” and be more Croatian.

In Mr Cappelli’s opinion, ”Croatia, full of life” hasn’t really been, well, full of life. Many would agree with him. The new campaign, he says, needs to be much stronger and, as mentioned, more Croatian. What that means exactly, is of course rather subjective and will almost certainly be a dominating story in the media over the coming weeks, particularly as we enter into the height of 2017’s summer season.

Cappelli believes that something needs to alter, but he insists the longtime ”Full of life” slogan does not have to be entirely removed, it can continue to be applied to one part of the ”package” as it were, but not as the main slogan for the Croatian National Tourist Board or for the face of Croatia’s booming tourism industry. This old slogan (The Mediterranean as it once was/Mediteran kakav je nekad bio) apparently remained more recognisable to tourists than the current ”Full of life” one, according to the study of the author of the book on Branding Croatia.

“I would certainly prefer a slogan that could tell us what the greatest comparative advantage of Croatia is, which would be very attractive, bring attention and be more memorable,” stated communications expert Bozo Skoko.

Otherwise, ”Full of life” was introduced

Brent Sadler first came to Beirut in 1979 as ITN's correspondent covering the civil war in Lebanon, which was just beginning to heat up. As his Jelena drives us through the city, he shows me the streets where Hezbollah's guards used to be, the place where his friend, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, was blown up with explosives in 2005, the square where seven years later Brigadier General was killed in a car bomb explosion. Wissam Al-Hassan, who was in charge of the investigation into Hariri's assassination, the road that leads to the former refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila where in 1982 the Christian militia committed a massacre of Palestinian civilians.

Beirut is still healing the scars of the brutal civil war of 1975-1990, the Syrian occupation that lasted until 2005, the wars with Israel, the tensions caused by the fact that the Shia militia Hezbollah is still not disarmed and that after 2011, about one and a half million Syrian refugees came to the country.

However, the photos of the streets of Beirut "before and after" at the International Airport named after Rafik Hariri - as well as what I could see, hear and feel during my several days in this city - show that Lebanon, despite the still present war in the surrounding area and of great destruction in the past four and a half decades - it is moving forward with big steps. Much larger than our region, where the last war (NATO bombing) was exactly twenty years ago and lasted 72 days, and the civil war in Croatia and Bosnia lasted much shorter than the one in Lebanon.

Unlike in our region where the wars of the 1990s, their causes and consequences are still a dominant topic in the public, in Beirut people only talk about work, food and entertainment, it is on the front pages of newspapers, it is discussed in restaurants and in meetings, they talk about it on television.

In the past four decades, Brent has become a recognizable face of Lebanon, he worked for ITN, and from 1991 for CNN