THE GLOBALISATION OF CULTURE

A talk by independent policy advisor Simon Anholt

Be careful what you wish for, as it may develop a life of its own. 'Nation brander' Simon Anholt discovered this when his ideas were turned into propaganda by impatient governments and greedy marketeers. He told One World Week 2012 his story.

“Back in 1998 I wrote a paper in a pseudo-academic journal… the paper was called Nation brands of the 21st century," Simon Anholt revealed to the One World Week delegates. He thought he’d just invented the idea that countries have their own images just like products and corporations. In this age of globalisation image is incredibly important because in a very, very large, global marketplace you just can’t know what every country is about. “Most people know very little about other countries,” Anholt explains. The image and the reputation of a country also transfers into the product. Take Sony and BMW. What countries would Japan and Germany be today if they didn’t have those products? “They have worked as extremely successful informal ambassadors for those countries over the last 40, 50, 60 years.”

It turned out, however, that Anholt hadn’t invented the idea at all. It had been a subject of academic study for many years under the name ‘country of origin effect’, as the leading academic on the subject subsequently pointed out to him.

Anholt then tried to take the idea a bit further, not just thinking of products and their country of origin, but developing the idea that the nation itself is a brand. By brand he meant “that that cloud of trust or perceived trust, or association which surrounds a nation, affects almost everything that the nation tries to do in the modern world”.

The more he thought, the more it occurred to him that today, the destiny of nations lies in the eyes and mind of the global population. “If a country has a good, positive reputation and people think good, positive, warm things about it, everything that country does it is going to be able to do better, faster and cheaper and it will be more welcome”. On the other hand, “if you’re saddled with a weak or negative reputation, deserved or undeserved, everything you try to do as a country is harder and slower and more expensive”.

Here’s where he made his self-confessed awful mistake. He coined the sentence “governments in the 21st century have to become brand managers as well as policy makers”. Some governments and marketing communications businesses then got together in an unholy alliance, cooking up a version of nation branding that entailed using marketing to try to change public opinion about a country. “It’s of course a lie,” Anholt says about the result. Even today, desperately poor countries do nation branding, usually involving giving large amounts of taxpayer or donor money to media outlets to run television commercials, logos and slogans. Does anyone actually listen to it or believe it?

What Anholt has discovered is that people almost never change their minds about other countries.

To the receiver, Anholt thinks, nation branding in that sense makes countries look extremely insecure. The reality is, nobody pays any attention to it. To him it’s a waste of time and money and he feels partly responsible for its popularity.

For it’s not nation branding that these countries are doing: effectively it’s propaganda. Pure propaganda is only ever possible when the controller controls all the channels of communication reaching the audience, leaving them with no choice but to hear your message. These days, says Anholt, propaganda doesn’t work anymore, even in regimes such as North Korea and Myanmar. “In most of the rest of the world it’s simply impossible.”

So where do reputations come from if they can’t be artificially constructed? Since 2005 Anholt has conducted large-scale research which he calls the Nation Brands Index, which involves polling nearly 20,000 people in 20 countries each year. What he has discovered is that people almost never change their minds about other countries. “There is some evidence to suppose they are changing them slightly faster than they used to but still it’s pretty slow… the US is a little more volatile because it’s one of the only countries that people ever think about." Most people over the age of 30 never seem to think much about other countries, he says, that’s why their images simply never change.

About ten to 15 countries benefit from a positive, inherited relationship because of their active engagement around the world for generations. What you know, you trust and you like. For all practical purposes the rest of the countries don’t exist because they don’t have a reputation: “nobody knows about them and nobody cares about them”.

What do those countries have to do to gain a reputation? Go back to the basics of marketing and think about the consumer, Anholt advises. What are they looking for and can you provide it to them? What can you teach that people want to learn? What can you mend that people regard as broken? We live in an age of multiple global challenges such as climate change, land mines, human rights, pandemics and the global economic crisis. Institutions our grandfathers set up to tackle them are patently unfit for purpose in the modern world. “There are no politicians out there who seem to show the remotest interest in the real, gigantic, shared challenges that define our age.” Any country that wants to earn its reputation and better its quality of life for its citizens has to do that.

Anholt has his own definition of a nation branding success – “what can we do to make someone go to bed at night and think they’re really glad that the other country exists? It’s as simple as that”.

Simon Anholt advises governments on questions of national identity and reputation, public diplomacy, trade, tourism, cultural and educational relations, export and foreign investment promotion. He works closely with heads of state, heads of government, ministers, private sector and civil society leaders in a series of one-day policy planning workshops called conversazioni.

At home in the United Kingdom he is a member of the Foreign Office Public Diplomacy Board. 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, which he now produces in partnership with GfK Roper Custom Research, one of the world’s leading research firms.

He is a regular writer and broadcaster on issues relating to the images and identities of places, and has written five books on the subject which have been published in many languages.

By Penelope Jenkins