The US and the Nation Brand Index

I came across the Nation Brand Index today while breezing through a local newspaper article. Simon Anholt, author of Brand America, has started doing a survey of how people around the world look at specific countries, as if each country is its own brand. The following is what he wrote regarding the United States, and part of his conclusion. I have a few comments at the end.


The United States

It has been pointed out many times – in the first Nation Brands Index, amongst others – that America’s brand image has suffered severely as a result of the unpopularity of the current administration’s foreign policy. This is not an unfamiliar situation for the USA as the country has faced international opprobrium for its foreign policies more than a few times during the last century.

Two questions spring to mind in this context: firstly, is the effect of these spells of unpopularity iterative, or cumulative? In other words, does Brand America fully recover its prestige after each unpopular overseas engagement, or does the ill-will gradually build up? If cumulative, Brand America may be truly in deep trouble. The second question is whether we are witnessing for the first time some symptoms of this political harm beginning to leach out into other areas of the nation brand. I addressed these questions in my last book, Brand America, and will not go into detail here. The second NBI, however, does provide some new evidence.

The US scores extremely poorly on the ‘heritage’ side of the culture axis, ranking last of the 25 countries in the survey. One is tempted to assume that this is a deliberate slight on the part of our respondents, a kind of protest vote. Still, there is a question on the ‘governance’ axis that offers a much clearer opportunity to express disapproval of US foreign policy:

"Please rank how much you trust the following countries’ governments to make responsible decisions which uphold international peace and security"

Here, America comes in nineteenth, certainly a very low ranking, but not twenty-fifth. The governments of South Korea, India, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and China are still rated by our panel as being less responsible (South Korea, as I mentioned in the first NBI, being probably the victim of a certain amount of confusion with North Korea).

In some ways, I find the low culture score of Brand America more disturbing than the low governance score. One could argue that a degree of unpopularity is the unavoidable price of being the world’s only military superpower. However, the culture score is associated with the maturity, prudence, wisdom, cultivation, humanity and intelligence of the nation. Such a low score for Brand America hardly provides a positive context in which to evaluate America’s political and military acts.

Perhaps this poor showing in serious culture is only to be expected, since successive administrations have dismantled much of the machinery of cultural diplomacy that helped to The Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index – Second Quarter, 2005 win the Cold War, and now serve so well as a foil to many of the country’s currently negative brand attributes.

All things considered, American brands are still doing well. However, there are worrying signs at the margins. As I mentioned earlier, in the 2004 Interbrand/Business Week survey of the world’s top 100 global brands, no less than 57 are American owned. The number has fallen slightly, from 63 two years ago, but the survey still evidences the most staggering domination of the global ‘brandscape’ by American firms. Germany is in second place with a mere 9 billion-dollar global brands, followed by France (as we have seen), Japan and the UK.

What is most surprising, given this state of affairs, is the fact that our panellists now rank Germany higher than America as a desirable producer of branded products and
services, despite the fact that American brands outnumber German brands on the global marketplace by more than 6 to 1. This has changed in the space of three months since the first NBI, both in terms of satisfaction with products and how highly the country of origin is rated on those products. In these cases, the positions of these two countries have reversed.

It is also noticeable that only two of the new entries in this year’s Business Week Survey are American and the other seven are European: one is Swiss, one is Dutch, one is French, one is Italian, and three are German.

It looks as if American brands have a serious competitor on their hands: tiny in terms of numbers, but significant in terms of consumer preference.


Conclusion

The Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index – Second Quarter, 2005 respected political figures; neither is an especially prolific or prominent contributor of cultural offerings on the worldstage. Both, however, are large, beautiful, relatively remote countries with relatively small populations. They both have Any discussion about the brand values of nations, their importance in the modern world, and their impact on people’s decisions inevitably raises the question of whether there is anything that can be done to reverse a negative image.

The promotion of tourism, cultural relations, media personalities, branded exports, politicians, investment promotion and the people of the country all play in to creating the brand image of the nation. However, in the end, deliberate acts of communication, no matter how well performed or how well funded, can only work at the margins of perception, and one simple truth about nation brand emerges from the NBI: a reputation can only be earned.

People form their views about countries in the following ways:
a. By the things the country does, and how it does them
b. By the things the country makes, and how it makes them
c. By the way the country looks – or people think it looks
d. By the way other people talk about it
e. By the company it keeps
f. By the way the country talks about itself

There is a common misconception that nation branding is mainly about (f); in other words, that the image of a country can be built through paid-for communications, through attractive logos and clever slogans. Actually, this is one of the least effective and least reliable ways of communicating the ‘national brand’. Saying things is not enough: they either have to be said by respected independent voices – (d) – or better still, proven: (a), (b), (c) and (e).

Just as advertising cannot sell a product that does not deliver on its promises or that people don’t need, a country cannot build its reputation by singing its own praises, or spewing out endless information about its wonderful products, investment opportunities, people, places and achievements. In today’s world, information is virtually valueless because there is so much of it.

In the end, if a nation wants to change its brand image, it must learn to behave differently. However, before changing its behaviour, a nation needs insight into how it is really perceived by its various audiences and stakeholders. It also needs a firm understanding of how nation brands form and change. With this knowledge, a nation’s new behaviour will help build its new brand as effectively, efficiently, fairly, truthfully, usefully and predictably as possible.


JD: I find the last three paragraphs of the conclusion to be the most interesting. Of course, many (if not all countries) need to take these words to heart, but as an American, I think the US needs to take these paragraphs to heart more strongly than others. The US government's reaction to 9/11 was, in part, to create an "advertising campaign" in Muslim countries extolling the virtues of the US and American culture. And yet, Mr. Anholt here is quite plainly saying, this is the least effective means for winning over the minds of Muslims (or anyone else for that matter). If the US really wants to win over the minds of Muslims, *they* need to change their behavior - and this extends not just to the US government, but to the average American citizen as well. Otherwise, you're never going to convince non-American Muslims that the US has their best interests at heart.