Simon Anholt - Places: Identity, Image and Reputation

Simon Anholt

Simon Anholt 2010

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First published 2010 by

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For Alexandra, Claudia and Luca

Let me be clear: there is no such thing as nation branding. It is a myth, and perhaps a dangerous one.

In books and papers and lectures and talks over the last few years, I have repeated such sentiments so many times that somebody commented to me a while ago that I now spend more time explaining what I dont mean than what I do mean, and more time telling people what my subject is not about rather than what it is about.

This is disconcerting, but not surprising. In one sense Im still paying the price of a careless piece of branding I did 14 years ago, when I coined the phrase nation brand. I little guessed how potent the combination of those two little words would prove to be, or what a double-edged sword the idea of branding would become when applied to countries, cities and regions.

On the one hand, brand is a perfect metaphor for the way places compete with each other in the global marketplace for products, services, events, ideas, visitors, talent, investment and influence: this is simply the reality of globalization, and its inescapable. On the other hand, branding makes many people think of superficial marketing tricks, perhaps even some cynical betrayal of the nation state and other human communities. This is a misunderstanding, and an unfortunate one for many reasons.

These days I use the B-word less and less, but it is still a useful metaphor and hard to dispense with altogether. It pops up fairly frequently in this book partly because several of the essays I have included are my editorial prefaces from a journal I launched in 2004 and still edit, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. I often refer to the international research programmes I have been conducting since 2005, the Anholt Nation Brands IndexTM and Anholt City Brands IndexTM. I also quote from my previous books Brand NewJustice and Brand America amongst others. So, try as I might, I cannot escape completely from the B-word, since it is attached to so much of my work. To some, it may seem perverse that I constantly try; but words are important, and it is problematic to have a word which many associate with superficiality and cynicism attached to a field of study and practice which, at least in my view, is most emphatically the opposite.

So, with apologies to regular readers of my work, I must once again preface this book with a brief summary of my basic position on the issue of places and their reputations.

Nations may have brands in the sense that they have reputations, and those reputations are every bit as important to their progress and prosperity in the modern world as brand images are to corporations and their products but the idea that it is possible to do branding to a country (or to a city or region) in the same way that companies do branding to their products, is both vain and foolish. In the 15 years since I first started working in this field I have not seen a shred of evidence, a single properly researched case study, to show that marketing communications programmes, slogans or logos, have ever succeeded, or could ever succeed, in directly altering international perceptions of places.

In fact there is some evidence to suggest the opposite: between 2005 when the Anholt Nation Brands Index was launched, and the latest study in 2009, there has been no detectable correlation between changes in national image and expenditure on nation branding campaigns. Several countries which have done no marketing (aside from normal tourism and investment promotion) during this period have shown noticeable improvements in their overall images, while others have spent extremely large sums on advertising and PR campaigns and their brand value has remained stable or even declined.

I continually repeat this mantra partly because I long to be contradicted. It would be fascinating to see some evidence that international perceptions of countries really can be influenced by marketing communications techniques, and such proof would have important, far-reaching and frankly rather alarming consequences. Yet I have seen no such evidence, nor even heard any very convincing arguments in favour of it: I see a good deal of research showing that tourism campaigns can persuade people to go on holiday to a certain country, but theres nothing surprising or controversial about that everybody knows that products or services can be effectively sold to a target audience using marketing communications. And I occasionally see research showing that nation-branding campaigns are effective in so far as they succeed in creating awareness and even recall amongst certain target audiences, but theres nothing surprising about that either. If you repeat a slogan frequently enough, people will end up recognizing it, and may even be able to repeat it when asked. Whether it actually has the power to alter their opinions and their behaviour towards that country is quite another matter.

Yet all around the world, in country after country and city after city, such marketing campaigns are cheerfully sold to governments, and billions of dollars of public money are spent producing them and placing them in the media, where they disappear without a trace.

In truth, nation branding is the problem, not the solution. It is public opinion which brands countries in other words, reduces them to the weak, simplistic, outdated, unfair stereotypes that so damage their prospects in a globalized world and most countries need to