Public Diplomacy of Transnational Corporations on the Example of Sweden

The role of corporations in world politics continues to grow: today corporations are not only actors in world politics, whose capitalization competes with the nominal GDP of the world’s leading states. Nowadays corporations are the actors of public diplomacy gaining more and more weight. The goal of this article is to consider the theory of corporate public diplomacy and to research the formats of cooperation between the corporation and the state in the mutual promotion of their own brands on the example of the case study of the Swedish corporations IKEA, VOLVO, H&M: the article considers the use of the home country brand by the corporation in its own promotion, as well as the promotion of the national values of Sweden and the national brand of Sweden through advertising to a foreign audience. The article provides a SWOT analysis of corporate public diplomacy for both the state and the corporation, which demonstrates certain threats to both sides. As a conclusion a definition of corporate public diplomacy is given, based on the analysis of both the theoretical base and the practical operations of corporations.