Simon Anholt, Author, Researcher and Independent Member of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Public Diplomacy Board

Executive summary

Since the advance of globalisation, national image and reputation have become ever more critical assets in the modern world. Attempts to enhance these assets are sometimes pursued by governments under the name of ‘nation branding’ – all too often a naive, ineffectual and wasteful application of commercial marketing techniques – and sometimes in a narrow and primitive form of public diplomacy. However, new forms of public diplomacy and a more sophisticated approach to nation branding or competitive identity can work together to help create prosperity, improve international relations and ultimately address some of the ‘grand challenges’ of our age.

When I started writing about an idea I called ‘nation brand’ more than twelve years ago, my observation was a simple one: that the reputations of countries are analogous to the brand images of companies and products, and are equally critical to the progress and prosperity of those countries because of their influence on the opinions and behaviours of each country’s ‘target audiences’: foreign investors, tourists, consumers, students, entrepreneurs, trading partners, the media, other governments, donors, multilateral agencies, and so on.

The need for understanding in this area is critical. Today, the world is one market; the advance of globalisation means that every country, city and region must compete with every other for its share of the world’s commercial, political, social and cultural transactions. In such an environment, as in any busy marketplace, brand image becomes a critical factor, providing a vital short cut to an informed buying decision.

Countries, cities and regions that are lucky or virtuous enough to have acquired a positive reputation find that everything they or their citizens wish to do on the global stage is easier: their brand goes before them like a calling card that opens doors, creates trust and respect, and raises the expectation of quality, competence and integrity.

Places with a reputation – no matter how ill-deserved – for being poor, uncultured, backward, dangerous or corrupt will find that everything they or their citizens try to achieve outside their own neighbourhood is harder, and the onus is always on them to prove that they don’t conform to the national stereotype. Compare the experiences of a Swedish and an Iranian manager on the international job market, or the struggles of an exporter from Bangladesh with one from Canada. Compare the ease with which a mediocre tourist resort in a highly regarded country can gain glowing media coverage and celebrity endorsement with the difficulties experienced by an unspoiled and unique destination in a country with a weak reputation. Compare the way consumers in Europe or America will willingly pay more for an unknown ‘Japanese’ product than for an identical ‘Korean’ product that was probably made in the same Chinese factory. Compare how the international media will report positively on an ordinary piece of policy from the government of a country reputed to be fair, rich and stable, with the silence or sharp criticism that greets a wise, brave and innovative policy from a country saddled with a negative image.

Brand vs. branding

Places certainly have their brand images; but the extent to which they can be branded is still, quite properly, the subject of intense debate. The idea of nation as brand has created much excitement in the public sector, thanks to the tantalising but largely illusory prospect of a quick fix for a weak or negative national image. Many governments, most consultants and even some scholars persist in a naive and superficial notion of ‘place branding’ that is nothing more than ordinary marketing and corporate identity, where the product just happens to be a country, a city or a region rather than a bank or a running shoe.

It’s easy to see why governments are attracted by the idea of branding. Admiring glances have often been cast by the public sector at the creativity, speed, efficiency and lack of ceremony with which companies appear able to hire and fire, restructure, reinvent themselves, build and implement strategies, raise and spend capital, develop new products and get them to market, respond to competition and react to disasters. What really impresses politicians, as they struggle to squeeze a few extra votes from an increasingly apathetic electorate, is the apparent ability of certain companies to shape public discourse, to manipulate their own images at will, and to inspire unwavering respect, loyalty, even love for their brands.

This power, it must be said, is partly imaginary: companies find it easier to be popular with their audiences simply because they are offering something which those audiences actually want to buy.

Moreover, there is little or no evidence to suggest that private-sector marketing techniques can change national images. It is remarkable how many governments are prepared to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ and donors’ money on such campaigns without the support of any proper case-studies – there are none in the literature – and often without even the most rudimentary success criteria or mechanisms for performance measurement.

Sectoral marketing and branding campaigns can, it is true, have an indirect influence on national image, if they are carried out well and consistently – for example, the tourism and export promotions of New Zealand and Spain have helped to raise the profiles of those countries in recent decades – but such successes should not be conflated with ‘nation branding’. They are simply instances of countries whose reputation has been enhanced as a result of their high-quality products and services being sold around the world. When, on the one hand, the task is to sell a product (and a product can just as well be a holiday or an investment location as fast-moving consumer goods), then advertising is not only legitimate and useful but also necessary. When, on the other hand, the task is to persuade people to change their minds about a country, advertising becomes propaganda, which most people instinctively recognise and resist.

National image as a fixed asset

In reality, the images of places appear to be remarkably stable, and highly resilient in the face of any kind of deliberate manipulation. The Anholt Nation Brands Index (NBI), a survey I have been running quarterly since early 2005 to track and analyse the global images of 40 countries using a panel of nearly 30,000 respondents in 35 countries, shows that almost no country’s image has changed by more than 1 or 2 percentage points during this period.

Part of the reason why national image is so stable – more of a fixed asset than a liquid currency – is because we all seem to need these comforting stereotypes that enable us to put countries in convenient pigeon-holes, and will abandon them only if we really have no other choice. The relevance of foreign countries to most people is limited; if people in Spain or South Africa or India spend only a few minutes each year thinking about, say, Britain, it’s not surprising if their perceptions of Britain remain largely unchanged for years on end. Images of foreign countries are in fact part of the culture of the country that holds the perceptions: Japan’s image in China, for example, is part of Chinese culture, and vice versa. National reputation truly cannot be constructed; it can only be earned. Imagining that such a deeply rooted phenomenon can be shifted by so weak an instrument as marketing communications is an extravagant delusion. As Socrates observed, ‘the way to achieve a better reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear’.

Image change usually takes place over decades and generations, not months or years. The high international esteem in which Japan and Germany are held today (respectively they currently rank eighth and first overall in the NBI) contrasts dramatically with their pariah status after the Second World War, 35 but the process has been a long and painful one: in both cases, image change took place as a consequence of a deliberate, long-term programme of political reform, improved social stability, economic growth and, indispensably, a retreat into non-militarism. Interestingly, it was through the politically neutral medium of consumer products that both Japan and Germany were able to start the process of rebuilding international trust; today they respectively rank first and third worldwide in the NBI for export preference.

It is, of course, by no means certain that building trust in one area will lead to wider acceptance for a nation; there are many countries that remain typecast for generations under a single reputational asset, and for whom success in a single sector proves a dead-end in the attempt to build broader international esteem. Jamaica, for example, has been known for decades as a world-class tourist destination, but still has difficulty earning a reputation for other areas in which it undoubtedly excels, such as higher education, customer service centres and IT support.

Nobody doubts that an improved reality will, eventually, result in an improved image, at least in some sectors. But it is because this process can take many decades if left to ‘natural’ forces, and even then may not benefit the country as a whole, that the idea of a technique with the power to accelerate it – perhaps to the point where it could occur within the term of office of a democratically elected government – and to broaden the base of the country’s international reputation and leverage it to the benefit of every sector, creates so much interest.

Competitive identity

Once it is accepted that communication alone cannot alter a negative or outdated national image, the critical question becomes whether it is indeed possible to close that gap by other means (assuming, of course, that the country in question does actually deserve a better reputation than it has). Hence the concept of ‘competitive identity’, a phrase I have coined in preference to the misleading term ‘nation branding’ to describe what is essentially a plan for mobilising the strategies, activities, investments, innovations and communications of as many national sectors as possible, both public and private, in a concerted drive to prove to the world that the nation deserves a different, broader and more positive image.

The theory of competitive identity takes its cue from the way in which country images are ‘naturally’ formed. By accident more often than by design, most countries engage with the outside world, and thus create their images, through six basic areas of activity:

1 their tourism promotion (often the loudest voice in ‘branding’ the nation or region, as tourist boards usually have the biggest budgets and the most competent marketers), along with people’s first-hand experience of visiting the country as tourists or business travellers;

2 their exported products and services, which – when their place of origin is explicit – act as powerful ambassadors for each country and region;

3 the policy decisions of the country’s government, whether foreign policy which directly affects the ‘audience’, or domestic policy reported in the international media;

4 for business audiences, the way the country solicits inward investment, and the way it recruits foreign entrepreneurs, workers, researchers and students;

5 cultural exchange, cultural exports and sport; and

6 the people of the country themselves – politicians, media and sports stars, as well as the population in general: how they behave when abroad and how they treat visitors to their country.

For clarity, these ‘natural’ channels of influence, communication or representation can be shown as the points of a hexagon (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1: The hexagon of competitive identity

The theory of competitive identity is based on a three-pronged approach of strategy, substance and symbolic actions, planned and executed through a close and long-term coalition between all the stakeholders around the hexagon:

strategy: the coalition needs to form a clear, inspiring, truthful narrative of what the country and its people really are, what they stand for, where they are going and how they are going to get there;

substance: the coalition must find ways to stimulate and coordinate the policies, strategies, investments, behaviours and, above all, innovations – because it is new things that most interest the media and public opinion – of all six points of the hexagon to realise and reinforce this narrative; and

symbolic actions: a certain proportion of the substance produced by each point of the hexagon must have an intrinsic communicative power: innovations, structures, legislation, reforms, investments, institutions or policies that are especially suggestive, daring, memorable, picturesque, inspiring or otherwise ‘media-friendly’.

Of course, it is not possible for a democratic government to interfere with the operation of any of these sectors (especially private business) to the extent of dictating their sector-specific strategies or communications; nor would it be wise to attempt to do so. The only way in which such a course can be pursued is through a ‘soft power’ approach, where the fundamental attraction – and ultimate benefits – of a shared national strategy are communicated well enough to stir a genuine motivation on the part of the various stakeholders, both public and private, to join forces. Improved coordination between the points of the hexagon, the joint development of a national strategy, more sharing of resources and expertise, the encouragement of innovation, and the establishment of common standards and quality measures can achieve a great deal. Even a modest amount of such ‘joining up’ tends to result in a more effective management of national reputation than most countries currently achieve, or ever have achieved.

Interspersing the substance with occasional symbolic actions can be highly effective in projecting an enhanced or updated image of the country. Examples of this include: the Slovenian government donating financial aid to its Balkan neighbours to prove that Slovenia was not part of the Balkans; Spain legalising single-sex marriages to demonstrate that its values had modernised to a point diametrically opposed to those of the Franco period; the decision of the Irish government to exempt artists, writers and poets from income tax to prove the state’s respect for creative talent; or The Hague 39 hosting the European Court of Human Rights to cement the Netherlands’ reputation as a global bastion of the rule of law. Even a building such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Sydney Opera House may have a symbolic value for its city and country well beyond its economic footprint. But for every truly resonant project of this kind there are dozens of expensive glass towers – anonymous trophy buildings that add nothing to the image of a city, because they are emblematic of nothing but the desire to look wealthy and ‘western’, and that communicate nothing of the true narrative of the country or city in which they are built.

Certainly, engaging some or all points of the hexagon (see Figure 3.1) in a national strategy is an ambitious project, and is a more realistic aspiration for smaller and poorer countries with fewer and leaner institutions, as well as simpler aims and more direct forms of engagement with the rest of the world; happily, these are also the countries that are most likely to benefit from such a project.

For countries like Britain or the United States, uniting a large, complex and mature bureaucracy around a shared national narrative is probably beyond the realms of possibility: their complex and sophisticated interactions with other states and regions are more likely to be hampered than strengthened by a single ‘positioning’, and in any case, their reputations are probably too substantial to be amenable to deliberate influence.

Competitive identity and public diplomacy

Clearly, national reputation is a critical issue for governments today; but the means by which it can be meaningfully influenced during any administration’s term of office are neither well nor widely understood. ‘Competitive identity’ and its precursor, ‘nation branding,’ are recent constructs – I coined the latter phrase in a 1998 academic paper,¹ and the former is the title of a book I published in 2007² – but the need for, and the desire of, leaders to wield some influence over the external images of the places they rule are, of course, as old as civilisation itself.

The only other systematic approach in history for tackling this kind of issue is public diplomacy, which has been recognised and practised as a discipline for well over 50 years. The relationship between nation branding and public diplomacy has, however, never been very clearly defined or described, mainly because there is little consensus on the definition of either term.

Interpretations of nation branding, as I have shown, vacillate uneasily between private-sector marketing communications crudely transposed to the public sector and the more ambitious concept of strategic, cross-sectoral national policy-making implied by competitive identity. Public diplomacy, for its part, has been subject to a number of different interpretations through its longer history; and, depending on which definition one selects for each discipline, one could equally claim that public diplomacy is a subset of nation branding; that nation branding is a subset of public diplomacy; that they are virtually synonymous; or indeed that they are largely unrelated. My preferred interpretation of the two terms, as I will show, leads me to conclude that they are more distantly related than is often assumed.

The way many governments speak about public diplomacy today makes it sound like nothing more than a decorous euphemism for nation branding of the most primitive, sector-specific, communications-oriented type. Ministries of state don’t like to use words like ‘brand’, but national or sectoral brand management is precisely what many of them are trying – and generally failing – to perform.

Treating public diplomacy as essentially sector-specific marketing may, if competently carried out, produce short-term benefits for the sector in question, and it can certainly improve the country’s outputs. But outcomes are another matter, and it is doubtful whether such approaches do much to address the foreign policy challenges faced by governments today, or can achieve any lasting traction in the intensely competitive environment of the global marketplace.

The core of competitive identity lies in considering how the nation as a whole behaves towards, interacts with, and presents and represents itself to other nations, whereas what most countries call public diplomacy concentrates exclusively on the presentation of government policy to foreign publics: what David Steven calls ‘the publicization of diplomacy’. Policy is simply one point of the competitive identity hexagon, so this ‘primitive’ public diplomacy is a weak subset of the whole, a diplomatic monologue whose audience happens to be society at large rather than other diplomats.

Happily, this narrow interpretation of public diplomacy as a subtype of nation branding is not the end of the story. More recent varieties are concerned with broader and longer-term effects: the discipline has evolved from the initially rather primitive government PR practised by the United States Information Agency after the Second World War, through something closer to nation branding (which recognises the importance played by national image and attempts to influence this, as well as understanding that a one-way sales pitch can’t rebrand the nation, and that actions speak louder than words), to the more radical redefinition of public diplomacy now being explored in the United Kingdom. Following Lord Carter’s review in 2005,³ we have defined a new approach to public diplomacy, which aims to use it as an instrument of policy, rather than as a method of communication.

The importance of credibility

This new approach is fundamentally different from nation branding, since its primary purpose is neither to present government policies nor to build, enhance or preserve national reputation. At first sight it might be assumed that it has no connection whatsoever with nation branding, an approach which, no matter how sophisticated and policy-driven it becomes, has reputation as its ultimate concern.

Yet of course there is a connection: the success of the ‘new public diplomacy’, in common with other and earlier forms of the discipline, is predicated entirely on the credibility of its perceived source. As Anthony Trollope wrote in his 1881 novel Dr Wortle’s School:

‘So much in this world depends on character that attention has to be paid to bad character even when it is not deserved. In dealing with men and women, we have to consider what they believe, as well as what we believe ourselves. The utility of a sermon depends much on the idea that the audience has of the piety of the man who preaches it. Though the words of God should never have come with greater power from the mouth of man, they will come in vain if they be uttered by one who is known as a breaker of the Commandments; – they will come in vain from the mouth of one who is even suspected to be so.’

The credibility of the perceived source of any message or action is as significant in determining its impact as the cultural lens through which it is observed; and, just like the cultural factor, we ignore it at our peril.

A nation’s credibility is virtually synonymous with its ‘brand image’; so even countries such as Britain, which eschew narrow self-promotion for the sake of the more collaborative, more global aspirations of the ‘new public diplomacy’, will still find that they are severely hampered in their aims without the support of an international reputation that is as strong, true, fair and positive as it can be.

Managing national reputation is by any standards a gigantic task, demanding a rare combination of vision, authority, patience, consensus, creativity and organisational skill; but it is no longer a matter of choice. Countries must either take some control over their good name or allow it to be controlled by public opinion and public ignorance; governments must either learn to value and cherish this precious asset of international reputation, or find that every action they perform, no matter how disinterested, is interpreted according to whatever negative attribute is currently ascribed to their nation.

Not every government, and indeed not every population, treats international 43 approval as an important goal in its own right; but when we speak of the images of places, we are talking about something more significant than mere popularity. The only sort of government that can afford to ignore the impact of its national reputation is one that has no interest in participating in the global community, and no desire for its economy, its culture or its citizens to benefit from the influences and opportunities that the rest of the world offers them.

It is the duty of every responsible government in the age of globalisation to recognise that the nation’s reputation, one of the most valuable assets of its people, is given to it in trust for the duration of its period in office. Its duty is to hand that reputation down to its successors, whatever their political persuasion, in at least as good health as it received it, and to improve it if possible for the benefit of future generations.

Whether we are speaking of competitive identity or public diplomacy, there seems little doubt that if the world’s governments placed even half the value that most wise corporations have learned to place on their good names, the world would be a safer and quieter place than it is today.

Notes

1. Simon Anholt, ‘Nation-brands of the 21st century’, Journal of Brand Management 5: 6, July 1998, pp. 395–406.

2. Simon Anholt, Competitive identity: the new brand management for nations, cities and regions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

3. Lord Carter of Coles was asked by the Foreign Secretary and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to conduct ‘an independent review of Public Diplomacy’ and examine the effectiveness of current public diplomacy activities. His Public diplomacy review was completed in December 2005.