essential COSTA RICA encourages greater excellence as a competitive advantage in international markets

• The B2B FORUM, an annual Country Brand event, promotes excellence as a tool to increase the competitiveness of Costa Rican companies in international markets.
• More than 500 representatives of licensed tourism and trade companies attended the event.

“Excellence is not an act, but a habit” – Aristoteles. Representatives of the institutions that make up the essential COSTA RICA Country Brand Committee, ended the 2019 B2B Forum conversation panel with an invitation to aspire to excellence as a tool to increase the competitiveness of Costa Rican companies in international markets, while expressing their commitment to licensed companies to work in a more comprehensive way to enhance what makes Ticos unique: culture and talent.

The President of PROCOMER’S Board of Directors, and Minister of Foreign Trade, Dyalá Jiménez, emphasized, “For the foreign trade sector it is essential to be guided by the value of excellence, because this gives us a competitive advantage and a distinctive seal. Connecting with the world with this seal allows us to provide more opportunities for foreign trade and foreign investment, which, in turn, creates opportunities for greater development and well-being. “

Committee members include Dyalá Jiménez, Minister of Foreign Trade, Sylvie Durán, Minister of Culture and Youth; Pedro Beirute Prada, General Manager of the Costa Rican Foreign Trade Promoter (PROCOMER), Jorge Sequeira, Director of the Costa Rican Coalition for Development Initiatives (CINDE) and Gustavo Alvarado, Director of Tourism Management of the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT).

Along these same lines, Pedro Beirute Prada, General Manager at PROCOMER and Committee Chairman, added “we are a small country that has managed to position itself as a world power in sustainability, democracy and peace; we must take advantage of that international image and the history of our Brand to continue positioning ourselves as a country that carries out business with purpose, excellence, social vision and sustainability. “

The Committee’s commitment to work in a comprehensive manner, uniting the strengths of the Foreign Trade, Tourism and Investment sector, to enhance the value of the Country Brand, as well as the competitiveness and excellence of the companies that represent it, was observed in the presentation of the talk “Developing competitiveness through the Country Brand”, by Ronald Arce, a researcher at the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development at INCAE. This presentation summarized the main findings of a study applied among licensed companies to identify the areas of improvement for the Costa Rica Country Brand, to generate greater benefits for the licensed companies.

Some criteria worth noting address the optimization of communication channels, the development of customized solutions based the productive sector, the use of the Brand as a symbol of Costa Rican identity and the possibility of using essential COSTA RICA as a competitive advantage in the national market, as well.

Based on the study results obtained, the Country Brand Committee will define the strategic routes for the coming years, taking into account the needs of the licensed companies and the unification of efforts to benefit companies from the different industries that make up essential COSTA RICA.

About the B2B Forum
The 5th edition of the B2B Forum, of the essential COSTA RICA, Country Brand was held on August 22 and was attended by more than 500 participants, representatives of licensed companies in the tourism and trade sector.

This year, the event was designed around excellence, as a space to update licensed companies and facilitate networking among the community. Some of the topics discussed during the forum, by national and international speakers, were place branding, the Sustainability Map platform, place making, excellence and disruption.