Today, we live in a world which globalisation has turned into a single marketplace, where every country must compete with every other country for its share of the world’s consumers, tourists and investors, and for the attention and respect of the international media, of other governments, and the people of other countries. It is also a world in which international public opinion matters as never before.

 

Nations are brands because people perceive them as brands. Few of us have time to learn what most countries are really like, so we navigate through the complexity of the modern world armed with a few simple clichés about places: France is about fashion, Italy is about style, America about power and money, Germany about engineering and Japan about technology.

 

We may not like this, but there’s little we can do to change it. It’s very hard for a country, even a famous and powerful country like America, let alone the less well-known countries of the developing world with virtually no presence in the international media, to persuade people in other parts of the world to go beyond these simple brand images and start to understand the real complexities, the contradictions and the social and cultural riches which lie behind them.

 

So it becomes the primary responsibility of national leaders to find out what their country’s brand image really is, and to develop a proper strategy for managing it; to build a nation brand that is fair, true, positive, attractive, memorable, genuinely useful to their economic, political and social aims, and which honestly reflects the spirit, the genius and the will of their people. Managing the national brand has become one of the primary skills of governments in the 21st century.

 

Obviously countries aren’t soap powder, but just like companies, they depend on their reputation, and must look after it very carefully: it is their most precious asset. A strong national brand helps to attract investment, talent, consumers and tourists, and enhances the country’s cultural and political influence. It’s virtually impossible for countries to compete today without one.

 

NATION BUILDING

 

It’s easier for countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland, which aren’t in the mainstream of  global politics, to achieve good rankings; negative attributes nearly always accrue to prominent countries as a result of unpopular foreign policies (America, which comes 13th, is a good example of this).

 

Countries which don’t have powerful and distinctive brand images of their own often suffer from “continent branding effect”, where, rightly or wrongly, they are closely identified in people’s minds with the overall characteristics of their region or continent.

 

This is the fate of all African nations with the sole exception of South Africa, most Latin American countries, and several countries in the Middle East: from a distance, people find it hard to distinguish between little-known states, and the consequence is that several prosperous, well-governed and attractive countries end up sharing the brand images of the poorest and least stable. And the problem is always compounded by media attention on conflicts and crises, which ensures that the most troubled nations are the ones with the most powerful brand images.

 

BRAND MANAGEMENT

 

Any discussion about the brand values of nations raises the question of whether there is anything that can be done to change them, to reverse a negative image, or just to manage a brand as well as the better corporations sometimes succeed in doing.

 

Just as advertising can’t sell a product which doesn’t deliver on its promises or which people don’t need, so a country can’t 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’s so much of it. If someone has already decided to buy, then they will welcome information; if not, they will simply ignore it.

 

In the end, if a nation wants to change its brand image, it must learn to behave differently — not an easy or a quick task by any means. But only through constant innovation, in all sectors, which is aligned to a clear national strategy, can the new “story of the nation” be proved to be the true story to the rest of the world. Almost every place, at some level, gets the reputation it deserves, so if it wants a new reputation, it needs to do 
different things.

 

Fortunately, there are examples to prove that a country’s international reputation can be managed and changed to better represent the current reality and future aspirations of the place, as long as there is a clear strategy for doing so, leadership, and proper coordination between government, the public and private sector, and the population in general. The natural channels of communication of all places — what I call the “nation brand hexagon” of governance, culture, people, products, tourism and trade and investment promotion — need to be harmonised around a single, clear, visionary strategy for positioning the nation competitively in the global marketplace.

 

The message about nation branding is of critical importance to developing nations, which don’t have the time to wait until their image catches up with the rapid pace of their development. In a deeper sense, nation branding also provides a way for newer, smaller and less well-known countries to establish their true cultural, social and historical identity, and carve themselves a “perceptual niche” in the global community. Nation branding is a new paradigm for statecraft, and one of the most powerful tools for competitive advantage in the modern age.