Marketing can be a tricky business. For every advertisement which flirts with genius, imprinting a brand’s identity onto your brain via one clever trick of the camera or example of fine word-play, there is another which misses its target.

In fact, if you will indulge the metaphor, and a dive into the realms of football, a bad advert can not so much miss the target as seem to lose all concept of where it is and what it looks like – like a centre back for a team needing an equaliser, swinging his weaker foot at an injury-time corner, and watching aghast as the ball soars out of the stadium.

For some reason, travel destinations and tourist boards seem particularly prone to such departures from wisdom and common sense. Perhaps it is the belief that holidays are an easy sell – amid the knowledge that everybody wants to spend a week somewhere warm and interesting to fend off the stress of the daily grind. How hard can it be to attract a few tourists?

Or perhaps it is the comforting safety blanket of the glossy photos in the brochure or on the website, which do the job better than any pithy phrase, and lead to the assumption that words don’t matter. But some of the catchphrases unleashed on the public are enough to make you wonder whether any fully-fledged grown-ups checked the project properly before they applied their signatures.

The latest country to offer itself as a hostage to widespread incredulity and social-media ridicule is Albania, which, in the last few days, has unveiled its latest slogan – „Be Taken by Albania“.

Taken, you think? Surely they aren’t referring to Taken? As in the 2008 movie where two young American girls are kidnapped in Paris and sold into the sex trade by heavily stereotyped Albanian gangsters – unleashing a chain of events and a wave of violence that leaves one of them dead? As in the box-office smash which led to two sequels, Taken 2 and Taken 3 – which also sold lots of cinema tickets, but did nothing for the image of Albania on the global stage. They can’t mean „Taken“ in that sense, can they? That would seem an odd way to market your country.

But then you go to the accompanying website – which is inevitably listed as takenbyalbania.com – and you find that there’s more. Much more. For starters, there is an piece of introductory blurb which emphasises that, yes, they are talking about the movie Taken. And they are going to run with it.

„In popular culture,“ the text runs, „Albania has been coloured as a haven for thugs, criminals, and gangsters. While we understand that perception might make for good movies, like Taken, it’s wholly untrue! In reality, Albania is a beautiful and incredibly safe place to visit and live.“

And yes, they are absolutely right with the last bit about beauty and safety. But it might have been better to make that the gist of the sales pitch rather than mentioning gangsters and… oh dear, there’s more.

„That’s why we’ve started this campaign to personally appeal to famed Taken actor, Mr Liam Neeson,“ the blurb continues. „Watch the video and join us by signing the petition to get Mr Neeson to Albania and Be Taken by its beautiful nature, hospitality and eternal traditions.“ It signs off, of course, with the Instagram and Twitter-ready hashtags #takenbyalbania and #liamneeson.

Marketing can be a tricky business. For every advertisement which flirts with genius, imprinting a brand’s identity onto your brain via one clever trick of the camera or example of fine word-play, there is another which misses its target.

In fact, if you will indulge the metaphor, and a dive into the realms of football, a bad advert can not so much miss the target as seem to lose all concept of where it is and what it looks like – like a centre back for a team needing an equaliser, swinging his weaker foot at an injury-time corner, and watching aghast as the ball soars out of the stadium.

For some reason, travel destinations and tourist boards seem particularly prone to such departures from wisdom and common sense. Perhaps it is the belief that holidays are an easy sell – amid the knowledge that everybody wants to spend a week somewhere warm and interesting to fend off the stress of the daily grind. How hard can it be to attract a few tourists?

Or perhaps it is the comforting safety blanket of the glossy photos in the brochure or on the website, which do the job better than any pithy phrase, and lead to the assumption that words don’t matter. But some of the catchphrases unleashed on the public are enough to make you wonder whether any fully-fledged grown-ups checked the project properly before they applied their signatures.

The latest country to offer itself as a hostage to widespread incredulity and social-media ridicule is Albania, which, in the last few days, has unveiled its latest slogan – „Be Taken by Albania“.

Taken, you think? Surely they aren’t referring to Taken? As in the 2008 movie where two young American girls are kidnapped in Paris and sold into the sex trade by heavily stereotyped Albanian gangsters – unleashing a chain of events and a wave of violence that leaves one of them dead? As in the box-office smash which led to two sequels, Taken 2 and Taken 3 – which also sold lots of cinema tickets, but did nothing for the image of Albania on the global stage. They can’t mean „Taken“ in that sense, can they? That would seem an odd way to market your country.

But then you go to the accompanying website – which is inevitably listed as takenbyalbania.com – and you find that there’s more. Much more. For starters, there is an piece of introductory blurb which emphasises that, yes, they are talking about the movie Taken. And they are going to run with it.

„In popular culture,“ the text runs, „Albania has been coloured as a haven for thugs, criminals, and gangsters. While we understand that perception might make for good movies, like Taken, it’s wholly untrue! In reality, Albania is a beautiful and incredibly safe place to visit and live.“

And yes, they are absolutely right with the last bit about beauty and safety. But it might have been better to make that the gist of the sales pitch rather than mentioning gangsters and… oh dear, there’s more.

„That’s why we’ve started this campaign to personally appeal to famed Taken actor, Mr Liam Neeson,“ the blurb continues. „Watch the video and join us by signing the petition to get Mr Neeson to Albania and Be Taken by its beautiful nature, hospitality and eternal traditions.“ It signs off, of course, with the Instagram and Twitter-ready hashtags #takenbyalbania and #liamneeson.