Mediamax’s interview with Simon Anholt, the founder of the Good Country Index and Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index

Simon Anholt is the world’s leading expert on nation brand - a term he coined in 1998. During the last 12 years, Simon Anholt has advised the governments of more than 40 countries - from the Netherlands to Botswana, from Jamaica to Malaysia - on questions of national identity and reputation, public diplomacy, trade, tourism, cultural and educational relations, export and foreign investment promotion. He collaborates frequently with multilateral institutions including the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank and the European Union. As a researcher, Simon Anholt created three major international surveys in 2005, the Anholt Nation Brands Index, City Brands Index and State Brands Index. His latest project, The Good Country Index, is the first to measure exactly how much each country contributes to the planet and to humanity.

- “Nations may have brands… but the idea that it is possible to brand a country (a city or a region) in the same way as companies brand their products is both vain and foolish”. This is the quote from one of your publications. First of all, let's distinguish the terms “nation brand”, which you coined in 1998, and “nation branding”. What is the difference between them? Many consider that “branding” is a process through which we could create a “nation brand”.

- When I coined the term “nation brand” in 1998, I was simply making an observation: that countries have images or reputations, and those images are critical to their progress in a globalised world.  I was using the term “brand” in the sense of “brand image”.

But as people spoke about the idea, the term soon turned from “nation brand” into “nation branding”. I’m still not sure what “branding” is supposed to mean, because so many people use it to mean so many different things. And this creates a good deal of confusion amongst governments, a confusion from which many marketing communications agencies have profited over the last twenty years.

Sometimes, “branding” means designing logos; sometimes it’s almost synonymous with advertising or marketing; and sometimes, most misleadingly, it is often used to describe a process by which the image or reputation of a company, a product, or even a city or country can be artificially enhanced: “branding is about building your brand”. 

In practice, this process usually turns out to be some combination of the three basic commercial communications practices: advertising, public relations and design. The underlying principle is that the country has a weak or negative reputation because the rest of the world is ignorant of its qualities, so in order to improve or enhance that reputation, those qualities simply need to be communicated. In other words, if people don’t know how great your country is, you need to tell them.

This underlying principle is, in most cases, fatally flawed. Countries usually have weak reputations because their existence is irrelevant to people in other countries; and they usually have negative reputations because they are known to do harm. If a country buys space in the international media in order to brag about its qualities – qualities which are usually of no relevance to people in other countries, and offer them no benefits – this will neither serve to make an irrelevant country relevant, nor to persuade people that a country they despise is suddenly worthy of their respect. It’s obvious that the message is government propaganda and thus carries no credibility; and even if it appears to come from a trustworthy source, it’s unlikely to change the beliefs of a lifetime.

- You are known to reject approaches based on advertising or PR, slogans or logos. Is your vision of building a nation brand close to public diplomacy, which works government-to-people (G2P)?

- Not really. Public diplomacy is a theory rather than a technique: it simply observes (quite correctly) that foreign publics are as important a target for diplomacy today as are foreign diplomats, but on the whole it doesn’t provide any new tools for carrying out this exercise. In consequence, it’s simply another reason for governments to waste taxpayers’ money on futile public relations exercises. Some of the tools associated with public diplomacy (cultural relations, for example) are quite effective, but since their effect requires enormous skill, time and patience, they are very seldom used well enough or long enough to make a real difference.

In the end, public diplomacy or nation “branding” fall into the same error: that of treating all foreigners as if they are either potential consumers (to whom you must try to sell something) or potential enemies (whom you must try to neutralise through persuasion instead of violence). The possibility that foreigners might actually be “on the same side as us” is, alas, usually overlooked.

- Many states try to brand or rebrand themselves. Wally Olins mentioned Spain as a successful example of national branding program, one country, which “transformed itself from an isolated, autarkic authoritarian anachronism into a modern, well-off, European democracy” and Joan Miró “immensely powerful sun symbol was an identifier for a massive promotional program that was closely linked to national change and modernization”. There are many other country branding examples (New Zealand, Poland, Scotland) deemed as successful. Do all those examples comply with your vision?

- This idea that a visual symbol somehow has the power to change the image of a nation is a primitive superstition, like believing you can make it rain by dancing. In fact if it wasn’t also such an easy way to make money out of gullible governments, the existence of the idea would be completely inexplicable.

It’s certainly true that Spain changed itself, and it’s certainly true that this change had an impact on the way people in other countries perceived Spain afterwards, but the Miró sun symbol is only associated with this in an entirely incidental way: the image of the country changed because the reality of the country changed. If I wrote a book claiming that the United States had become the richest and most powerful nation in history because the Stars and Stripes was the most attractive flag any nation had ever designed, would I be taken seriously, do you think? Or that Communism ultimately failed because the hammer and sickle was the wrong logo?

Whenever people speak of successful examples of “nation branding”, I always ask for proof (which, considering that these governments are spending taxpayers’ money on the process, doesn’t seem an unreasonable request). But it always turns out that the image of the country hasn’t been measured, either before or after the ‘campaign’, so it’s impossible to know whether the image of the country has really improved at all, let alone to identify the causes of this improvement. All of this ‘nation branding’ activity is simply taken on trust: most countries do it because most countries do it, not because any country has ever produced any real evidence that it has worked in the past.

My study, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, which annually polls a sample representing nearly 70% of the world’s population, shows that the images of New Zealand and Scotland have remained more or less completely unchanged since I started running the survey in 2005, so whatever those two countries have been doing to “brand” their nation has had absolutely no effect on its image (their sectoral promotion activities, of course, may well have produced an increase in tourism, foreign investment, exports and so forth, but that’s a different matter entirely).

Poland’s image has very slightly improved since 2005, but its GDP increased by an average of more than 7% per year during the same period, so if I had to hypothesize a relationship between these factors, I would be more inclined to believe that the country’s image improved as a result of its rising economic importance than because it briefly flirted with several colorful new ways of writing the word ‘Poland’.

As I said before, if designing logos and all the associated mumbo-jumbo wasn’t such an easy way of making money from impatient, naïve or even dishonest governments, then the whole idea would be simply absurd. But because it’s a big business, it’s not comic: it’s scandalous.

If countries could truly brand themselves with logos, corporate design, slogans and communications campaigns, I and my compatriots would be living in the Third Reich today, not the European Union: after all, nobody understood branding better than Hitler and Goebbels.

- In general, how should a country deal with its national reputation?

- I certainly think every country should be aware of its reputation, measure it, understand its strengths and weaknesses, because this is an essential part of understanding the country’s role in the world, its influence, its credibility and consequently its ability to achieve its aims.

As for changing that reputation, this can only happen if the country is prepared to play a new role in the community of nations. If it wants a better reputation, it has to do something for people in other countries. Recent analysis of more than 200 billion data points collected by the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index since 2005 strongly suggests that the quickest and surest route to an improved national image is through contributing regularly and noticeably to humanity and the planet: doing things that give people in other countries good reasons to feel glad that you exist.

This is why I created the Good Country Index: I wanted some measurement of reality alongside the measurement of perceptions provided by the Nation Brands Index, to see which countries actually contribute most to the global commons. 

- Let’s talk about Armenia. In your “Good Country Index” it ranks 72nd among 125 countries. What does your research reveal about the image of Armenia and overall, how does the Western world perceive Armenia?

- Unfortunately I’ve never included Armenia in the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index so I have no information about Armenia’s image, and I wouldn’t like to guess what people think about it: these are things that need to be properly researched. However, the country’s performance in the Good Country Index clearly shows that, relative to the size of its economy, Armenia contributed relatively little to the international community in 2010 (the year when most of the data was collected). If Armenia has a weak or negative profile, this fact may have something to do with it.

dossier

Dossier

The Good Country Index tries to measure how much each country on earth contributes to the planet and to the human race. Using a wide range of data from the U.N. and other international organisations, it has given each country a balance-sheet to show at a glance whether it’s a net creditor to mankind, a burden on the planet, or something in between. more

The Good Country Index tries to measure how much each country on earth contributes to the planet and to the human race. Using a wide range of data from the U.N. and other international organisations, it has given each country a balance-sheet to show at a glance whether it’s a net creditor to mankind, a burden on the planet, or something in between.

According to rating’s authors, Index’s aim is to encourage a global discussion about how countries can balance their duty to their own citizens with their responsibility to the wider world, because this is essential for the future of humanity and the health of our planet. Researchers consider that, the biggest challenges facing humanity today are global and borderless: climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery, pandemics, poverty and inequality, population growth, food and water shortages, energy and many others are stretch across national borders, so the only way they can be properly tackled is through international efforts. So in this context “good” means the opposite of “selfish”, not the opposite of “bad”.

Rating includes 7 categories, covering science and technology, culture, international peace and security, world order, planet and climate, prosperity and equality, health and wellbeing.

Ireland is ranked first the list in 2014. Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Great Britain, Norway, Denmark and Belgium are in the top 10.

Armenia is ranking 72nd. The lowest ratings it receives in the categories of “Health and Wellness” and “Culture”, and the most highest in the categories of “Prosperity and Equality,” and “International peace and security”.

Estonia comes 34th, Moldova (60th place), Lithuania (69th), Kyrgyzstan (74th), Georgia (77th), Kazakhstan (80th), Belarus (82nd), Latvia (83th), Russia (95th), Ukraine (99th) and Azerbaijan (122nd).

 

- Everything primarily hinges on education in the XXI century. Despite a number of domestic and foreign challenges, in recent years Armenia has developed good examples of educational projects such as TUMO center, Ayb school and UWC Dilijan College. Another idea promoted by the government is the development of IT sector, where we have recorded some progress as well. Do you think education and IT could be the sectors in perspective to accentuate in the long-term in order to create/brand the Armenian image? If yes, how much time does it require?

- A country’s educational system is, by definition, only of interest to the population of that country, since they are the only people who will benefit from it. It is therefore a mistake to imagine that such a purely domestic issue could have any major impact on the country’s international reputation: how much does the average Armenian know about the school system in Paraguay, or Iceland, or Mozambique? Why should it expect others to know more about its own educational system than it knows about others?

If Armenia were an innovative pioneer in education to the extent that its influence in this field were genuinely global – if it contributed regularly and prominently to educational progress and standards in other countries, then this might add something to the country’s reputation. But the basic principle is a simple one: if you want people to admire you, it’s not enough to be successful, you have to do something for them.

So the question to ask is not “which sectors can we excel in and therefore use to boost the country’s image?” The correct question is “What could be Armenia’s gift to the world?”

- When asked to give advice on what a state should do to improve its image, does your answer depend on the specifics and peculiarities of the concrete or are there are any universal formulas applicable to every nation? Lastly, as a continuation – besides, education, what should Armenia do to improve its image?

- Luckily, there are many universal formulas, or else my books on this topic would be nothing more than endless case studies!

If Armenia wants to improve its image, it has to do something for humanity – do it well, do it prominently, do it imaginatively, courageously and consistently for a very long time. It’s a simple as that.

Aram Araratyan talked to Simon Anholt