Branding an Australian company or product seems, in theory, difficult to screw up. The country is well known and generally well liked. Its peculiar native fauna in particular is a menagerie of potentially distinctive logos. But how difficult is it to sell Australia, at home or abroad, without lapsing into cliché?

“It’s easy to cite the obvious and overused tropes,” says Nick Sammut, managing director at Sydney branding agency Toast Creative. “The green-gold palette; kangaroos and koalas. As a nation we continue to mature culturally and intellectually, and with that comes a particular style of brand communication, a particular tone of voice. Designers have a responsibility to draw upon the international language of design and apply it to their projects, wherever they are.”

Sometimes, though, the obvious is the obvious because it works, as Sammut agrees when asked to name an enduringly resonant Australian image. “It’s got to be the kangaroo,” he says. “And I’m going to hold Qantas up as one of our all-time successful and still current brands that uses it. It’s true what they say: you land at Sydney Airport after time away and it’s hard not to feel that pull on the heartstrings when you lay your eyes on that kanga.”

Australia’s wildlife provides irresistible but complex temptation for Australian brands. While the peculiar creatures that populate the country are indeed distinctively Australian, a disconcerting quotient of them possess qualities that one might hesitate to associate with one’s merchandise, among them venomousness (snakes, spiders), doziness (koalas, wombats), weirdness (echidnas, platypuses) and the likelihood that they’ll claw your face off if you’re foolish enough to pat them (possums, kangaroos).

Former prime minister John Howard once said that his job was the second most important in Australia, behind that of captain of the national cricket team. It’s quite possible that he wasn’t joking. With the country’s footballing loyalties split between Australian rules and rugby league, cricketers emerge as the most bankable endorsees. As such, you will not be able to consume much Australian media without someone who wears – or once wore – the national team’s baggy green cap trying to sell you something. That said, you will not see the baggy green cap itself used as a commercial entreaty: in accordance with its mythic stature, it is copyrighted.

A tricky area: folks can bristle when you steal their ancestors’ land at gunpoint, condemn them to a marginal life summarised in some of the worst statistical indices for any people anywhere, then use what survives of their culture to sell stuff. Though most usage of Aboriginal art in particular is now honest homage – see Qantas’s occasional deployment of it on liveries – bizarre insensitivities do still occur. Subaru had to pull a TV advert for one of its models after uproar at the voiceover’s cloth-eared pun on “corroboree”, which many saw as a disrespectful application of a word that refers to a sacred Aboriginal meeting.

For all that Australia is overwhelmingly a society of coastal urban-dwellers, the idea that its vast, empty outback somehow represents the “real” Australia is bizarrely persistent. Advertisements for four-wheel-drive vehicles tend to prioritise shots of them raising clouds of ochre dust rather than picking up groceries. The media image of the Australian pub remains a tin-roofed bush hotel with wide verandas, rather than – as is far more common in reality these days – an artisanal micro-brewery in a renovated tram shed serving quinoa burgers on bathroom tiles.