Is Nation Branding a Marketing Communication Exercise? contd.....

If marketing communications works so well for products and services, why shouldn’t it work for countries and cities?

According to Simon Anholt, the simple answer is that they don’t work so well for products and services. Although great advertising, is strongly associated with powerful commercial brands, they aren’t the reason why those brands are powerful: brands become powerful when the product behind them earns trust and promotes sale.

Nations are complex

No single body, political or otherwise, exercises nearly this much control over the national ‘product’ or the way it communicates with the outside world.

The tiniest village is infinitely more complex, more diverse and less unified than the largest corporation, purely because of the different reasons why people are there. Places have no single, unifying purpose, unlike the simple creed of shareholder value that binds corporations together: a contract of employment is mainly about duties, whereas a social contract is mainly about rights.

National reputation cannot be constructed; it can only be earned

To imagine 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.

Whilst governments cannot hope to manipulate the perceptions of millions of people in distant countries, there are three important things that they can do to enhance national reputation:

First, they can understand and monitor their international image in the countries and sectors where it matters most to them in a rigorous and scientific way, and understand exactly how and where this affects their interests in those countries and sectors.

Second, if they collaborate imaginatively, effectively and openly with business and civil society, governments can agree on a national strategy and narrative – the ‘story’ of who the nation is, where it is going and how it is going to get there – which honestly reflects the skills, the genius and the will of the people.

Third, governments can ensure that their country maintains a stream of innovative and eye-catching products, services, policies and initiatives in every sector, which keeps it at the forefront of the world’s attention and admiration; demonstrates the truth of that narrative; and proves the country’s right to the reputation its people and government desire to acquire.

More engagement, not simply more communication, with the rest of the world can enhance the profile of places, and higher visibility does tend to go together with stronger appeal.