The GREAT campaign is one of the most ambitious national promotion efforts ever undertaken.Timed to make the most of Britain's raised profile during Olympic year, the aim was to promotetrade, investment and tourism under a unified identity emphasising British achievements.However, the campaign raises a number of issues. The first is how and why GREAT emerged as analternative to established structures for soft power, public diplomacy and marketing in the UK. Thesecond is the ways GREAT engages with collective identity through the nationalisation and com-modification of symbolic resources. Third is the practices used to include and exclude specific targetgroups and stakeholders. Fourth is the interaction between economic and symbolic resources,including public-private collaboration and the evidence used to determine impact and value. Thesethemes contribute to an analysis of GREAT that will be of interest to scholars of politics and IR inthe UK and internationally.