Problem with your country's image? Mr Anholt can help

Saturday November 11, 2006
The Guardian

Got a problem with your national image?

Oliver Burkeman at the nation branding masterclass in London

Nobody from the government of Kazakhstan was present at the Langham hotel in London yesterday for the world's first masterclass in nation branding. This wasn't for want of trying: the Kazakhs had appealed for help in combating the Borat Problem, but Simon Anholt, the expert in the field of image makeovers for nation-states, had refused on ethical grounds. Still, representatives from 65 countries did attend - including a man from the Saudi tourist board, full of ambitious plans for oil-refinery tours, and an Armenian woman named Armine Yeghiazaryan.

"We recently completed a survey to find out what people think about Armenia," Ms Yeghiazaryan explained.

And what do people think about Armenia? "Lots of people don't really think anything about Armenia," she conceded. Then she brightened. "But quite a few of them had heard of it."

Mr Anholt, who works as a consultant to numerous governments, including Britain's, frequently gets hostile responses to the term "nation branding".

"At first there was outrage," he recalled. "People said: 'You're treating nations like nothing more than products in the global supermarket!' Which I actually thought was a great metaphor."

In fact, most big countries already have brands, Mr Anholt points out - gut associations that people make when they hear a country's name. "Nigeria? It's those scam emails. Japan? Technology, expensive ... Britain? Posh, boring, old fashioned. Switzerland? Clean and hygienic. Sweden? Switzerland with sex appeal." His job is making sure those associations are a help, not a hindrance.

"This is fundamentally not a marketing trick," he insisted. "It's national identity in the service of enhanced competitiveness."

Carol Hunter, from the Isle of Man government, listened intently. If your gut reaction to hearing Isle of Man is "birching", she'd like you to abandon it; if it's "TT races", she'd like you to broaden it. If it's "tax haven", you may not be too far off, but these days the preferred slogan for the Man brand is "freedom to flourish".

Striding the stage beneath the chandeliers in the Langham's ballroom, Mr Anholt told delegates that the image being promoted to sell a country to tourists is usually exactly the wrong one to sell it to investors.

"For years, the Scottish tourist board marketed Scotland as a country stuck about 100 years in the past, a place of emptiness, wildness and no buildings," he said. "Actually, there was one building: a thatched pub and some yokels inside drinking whisky." That might be appealing to holidaymakers. "But it's no good if you're trying to persuade Samsung to build their next factory there."

It was a tension acutely felt by the man from Madrid, who glumly noted that a reputation for siestas and all-night parties was not exactly helping promote the Spanish technology sector.

And what of Jamaica? "You think sun, sea and sand, don't you?" asked Nicole Maraj-Pandohie, from Invest Jamaica. "You don't think strong business infrastructure." You also think violent crime. "Yes. I deal with this every day. Every day," she said, with great forbearance.

Not that nation branding can't go embarrassingly wrong. "The trouble with Cool Britannia," Mr Anholt sighed, "was not the basic idea. The problem was that the government forgot it was trying to promote Britain, and started promoting the campaign to promote Britain." (These days, the representative from Visit Britain explained, the UK's brand values are depth, heart, and vitality.)

Mr Anholt makes moral judgments on who to work with. The Kazakhs did not make the cut, but if they had, he would have advised them to play along with Borat, the fictional Kazakh reporter. "At least they have a reputation now. It may be a bad one, but it's much easier to turn a negative into a positive than nothing into something." Which was not what the Armenians wanted to hear.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.