Eurovision Isn’t Just a Song Contest. It’s a Lesson in Branding.

It’s May — time to grab your remote and get ready to stream the wildly popular and often wacky Eurovision Song Contest. 

The world’s largest live song competition, now in its 70th year, draws some 160 million viewers worldwide. This year, it will take place in Vienna, after the Austrian singer JJ won the 2025 contest with his operatic pop-techno ballad “Wasted Love.” 

By the time the winner is declared at the 16 May Grand Final, 35 countries will have competed, each performing an original song lasting no more than three minutes. 

Luca Cian is the Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Marketing Area at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

For Luca Cian, the Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Marketing at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, Eurovision is more than a cultural phenomenon. 

It is also one of the most ambitious experiments in brand-building. 

In an essay published in the journal GlobalEurope, Cian takes a closer look at the contest — not just as entertainment, but as a platform with surprising insights for business.  

Drawing on his research in sensory marketing and consumer identity, including work with fellow Darden Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan on how external threats shape attachment to national brands, Cian explores what the contest reveals about how people connect, make choices and respond to brands. 

The Darden Report spoke with Cian to learn more. 

Q: What makes Eurovision more than just a song contest — from a marketing perspective? 

A: I grew up in Cortina d’Ampezzo, a small village in the Italian Dolomites. Every May, Eurovision was one of the few evenings when the whole family sat down together in front of the television. I didn’t understand all the languages in the show, and I certainly didn’t understand the staging — but I understood that a continent was putting itself on display. That intuition stayed with me. 

Coming back to it as a marketing scholar, what strikes me is the sheer complexity of what Eurovision is managing simultaneously. Most global brands face one central challenge: stay recognizable across markets. Eurovision has to do that — and simultaneously manage dozens of national sub-brands, in real time, in front of 160 million viewers — while trying to sustain a (at times fragile) community called Europe. That’s an extraordinary brand challenge. And what’s most interesting to me is that the design choices Eurovision makes to solve it end up revealing what Europe actually believes about itself. 

Q: Eurovision is often described as “united by music.” What does its evolving brand, especially the new “Chameleon Heart” — a heart-shaped logo that shifts colors and patterns to reflect different countries and performances — tell us about how Europe sees itself? 

A: The big strategic shift in the new brand is something branding professionals would immediately recognize: Eurovision has moved from being an event-brand to a platform-brand. 

For most of its history, each edition was primarily branded around its host city — the Eurovision logo played a supporting role. The Chameleon Heart reverses that hierarchy. The heart now comes first, and host countries express themselves through it, not the other way around. It’s the same move the Olympics made when it standardized the rings, or the World Cup when it introduced a persistent logo above each edition’s local identity. 

The Chameleon Heart can absorb the colors of the previous year’s winning country, the aesthetic of a performer,= or the mood of a campaign, while remaining unmistakably Eurovision. This is what brand strategists call a “living brand system”: an identity that is not fixed but adaptive, governed by rules flexible enough to accommodate diverse expressions without losing coherence. Think of Google’s ever-changing doodles, or MTV’s shape-shifting logo in the 1980s. 

And the chameleon metaphor is quietly revealing. A chameleon changes its surface while preserving its underlying identity — precisely what Europe aspires to be. The EU’s motto is “United in diversity.” Eurovision’s is “United by Music.” That parallel is not accidental. 

Q: Each country gets just three minutes on stage. What separates the performances that resonate from those that fall flat? 

A: Think about what three minutes on that stage actually represents. No trade fair, no diplomatic reception, no advertising campaign gives a country comparable reach at comparable cost — 160 million simultaneous viewers. And the country has exactly one song, one staging, one emotional arc to communicate who it is. 

What’s fascinating, from a consumer-behavior perspective, is the consistent pattern of what wins. Something pan-European, polished, English-language, sonically safe rarely wins. Winners are often entries that are most defiantly themselves. Finland’s Lordi won in 2006 dressed as monsters playing heavy metal. Salvador Sobral won for Portugal in 2017, singing a quiet jazz ballad in Portuguese. Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra won in 2022 with folk-rap, performing while their country was under bombardment. Måneskin won for Italy in 2021, singing rock in Italian. 

These entries share nothing stylistically. What they have in common is a stance: the confidence to be culturally specific rather than strategically palatable. Eurovision turns out to be quite efficient at detecting inauthenticity. That’s actually an important lesson for any brand: the temptation to smooth away what makes you distinctive is usually a mistake. 

Q: Your research with Professors Sonal Pandya and Venkatesan finds that external threats can strengthen attachment to national brands. How does that dynamic show up on the Eurovision stage? 

A: In that research (published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2024), we studied what happens to consumers’ behavior when their country faces an external threat. We found that people increase their attachment to nationally associated brands as a form of identity affirmation: consuming that brand becomes a way of saying who you are under pressure. 

Eurovision offers a vivid natural experiment in the same psychology. When countries perform under geopolitical strain, their entries often become more culturally distinctive, not less. The clearest example is Jamala’s “1944,” which won for Ukraine in 2016 — a song about the Stalinist deportation of the Crimean Tatars, performed with extraordinary directness. It was a refusal to dilute national identity for the sake of palatability, and a continent-wide audience rewarded it. The Kalush Orchestra in 2022 followed the same logic. 

Q: Eurovision is built on a promise of unity, but recent controversies have tested that. What happens when a brand’s values and its actions start to diverge? 

A: There’s a concept in marketing called the “say-do gap”: the distance between what a brand claims to stand for and what it actually tolerates. When that gap widens, trust erodes. It’s one of the most reliable mechanisms of brand failure. 

The 2026 contest is a serious test of this principle. Five countries — Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia — have withdrawn. The 2024 winner, Nemo, returned their trophy in protest. The trigger was Israel’s continued participation in the contest amid its military campaign in Gaza, which some broadcasters argued was incompatible with the values Eurovision claims to represent. What makes this particularly sharp is the precedents: Russia was expelled after its invasion of Ukraine, and Belarus was suspended over press-freedom violations. 

The European Broadcasting Union’s response has been classic brand protection: tighten voting rules, introduce safeguards against coordinated or fraudulent voting, bring back professional juries in the semifinals, and reaffirm the contest’s neutrality. It is the kind of procedural reform organizations deploy when legitimacy is perceived to be at stake. Whether it will be enough is not a question marketing alone can answer, because the controversy is not primarily about stagecraft. It is about belonging — who gets to remain inside Europe’s cultural space and under what terms. 

Q: Looking ahead to this year’s contest, what should we be watching — not just as fans, but as observers of one of the world’s most ambitious branding experiments? 

A: A few things stand out to me. First, watch the field itself. With 35 competing countries — the smallest number since 2003 — the contest is visibly smaller than it has been. Whether that reads as a temporary disruption or the beginning of something more structural is one of the most important questions Eurovision faces right now. 

Second, pay attention to what the three-minute performances say. Under charged political conditions, entries tend to be more expressive, not less. The contest has always been a mirror of Europe’s anxieties as much as its aspirations. This year, with the boycotts and the tensions around inclusion, I expect that will be reflected. 

But the thing I’d most encourage people to notice is the voting itself. The rule that you cannot vote for your own country is actually a sophisticated behavioral architecture. It forces every viewer to invest emotionally in someone else’s country. And Eurovision is, in that sense, one of the last genuinely shared live cultural moments: 160 million people watching the same thing simultaneously and voting together. In an era of algorithmic personalization, where everyone is watching something different on their own schedule, that is almost anachronistic — in the best possible way. Watch whether the ritual holds. If it does, it tells you something important about what Europe still wants to be. 

 Luca Cian is the Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Marketing and Chair of the Marketing Area at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. His research on visual persuasion, social identity, and consumer responses to artificial intelligence has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research and Nature Communications, among others.