Countries are countries, not brands
Share
The World Cup approaches and, once again, the English nation hopes against hope that it can win the tournament and finally end 44 years of hurt. Meanwhile, in South Africa the dreams are just as bold but aimed in a very different direction. FIFA’s World Cup presents its hosts with, what they believe to be, their biggest ever opportunity to build a stronger country brand.
Mark Ritson is a Associate Professor of Marketing, an award winning columnist, and consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands
That’s a shame because, despite its growing popularity and firm establishment within marketing, the business of “country branding” or “nation branding” is nonsense. Countries are not brands. They are countries. Brand strategy should be reserved for brands. I may have a hammer, but it doesn’t mean that every problem is shaped like a nail. Real expertise in a field is to know the limitations of that field and behave accordingly.
I can appreciate the attractions of country branding. Selling a brand strategy to a public servant in Finland or Ghana must be a lot easier than pitching to a trained marketer from the likes of Unilever or Ford. And I can also appreciate that even the gigantic budgets of P&G or HSBC are dwarfed by a nation’s coffers. I can imagine, too, that measuring the impact of a country branding strategy is far less taxing than the typical corporate branding work, where sales figures and brand equity scores always influence the assessment of impact. But the core problem endures: conceptualising a country as if it were a brand is stupid.
For starters, the concept of brand does not fit something as wide and variable as the perception of a country. Aside from tourism (where destination branding makes sense) you don’t ever buy a country - you buy a product or service from a country. Country of origin does have an impact on a product’s perception, but that impact varies from category to category. You might agree with FutureBrand’s recent assessment of the US as the strongest country brand in the world, for example, if you are looking for investment banking or fast food. But what if you were interested in eco-resorts or super-hip nightclubs? Wouldn’t Brazil, which FutureBrand deems a much weaker country brand than the US, prove a better alternative?
Which brings us to another problem with country branding. Am I the only marketer who is outraged when countries and cultures are relegated to the bottom of the pile based on very basic analytical data? Corporations and brands are capitalist entities and I am entirely comfortable with ranking them on their relative value. But is it acceptable to tell the people of Cuba their country brand is only three-quarters as good as Canada or Switzerland? That’s what GFK claimed in its 2009 Nation Branding Index. And are you comfortable with GFK’s relegation of Iran as the least valuable country brand on Earth? Doesn’t a nation with 70 million inhabitants and a heritage going back more than 9,000 years before the birth of Christ deserve more respect and cultural sensitivity?
Even if country branding were possible in theory, how could it ever work in practice? The whole premise of brand strategy is to change every aspect of the brand’s operations to deliver on core positioning. The superficial, unimportant aspects of a country branding strategy like a logo or ad campaign are entirely possible, but how about all the crucial operational stuff? An effective country brand strategy would have to change laws, policing, street names, unemployment benefit, health policies, family planning guidelines - all to fit the country brand positioning. Insanity.
An effective country brand strategy would have to change laws, policing, street names…
Proof of country branding’s nonsensical status is in the embarrassing and ineffective campaigns that have emerged over the years: the work of Russo, Marsh & Rogers and its strategy for Kurdistan that positioned the country as “The Other Iraq”; the £;750,000 Interbrand charged Estonia for a country branding strategy that centred on the unforgettable slogan “Welcome to Estonia”; the current “Good People, Great Nation” branding campaign in Nigeria that has recently been lambasted by Nigerian marketers for its total lack of data, positioning or tracking.
The tragedy in all of this is that many of the nations seeking a “stronger country brand” have much more endemic, structural problems. But, because they have been told their solution lies in country branding, vital resources are spent on an illusory, nonsensical quest instead of essential and practical solutions. South Africa does not need a stronger country brand. It needs to provide water to the 20 million people in its country who don’t have a reliable supply. It needs to reduce the proportion of its citizens murdered each day, given that its current murder rate is among the highest on Earth. It needs a President who does not sleep with a woman with HIV and then reassures the population he is fine because he took a shower.
Let’s start there, rather than the futile, shameful practice of country branding.
View results 10 per page | 20 per page | 50 per page
Readers' comments (23)
Chris | Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:52 pm
Hooray! Finally someone with marketing expertise has come out and said that nation branding is nonsense on stilts. Reading the nation branding literature is nevertheless quite a lot of fun, as the enthusiasts go out of their way to try and distinguish it from tourism promotion and then go on to cite a whole lot of examples that — surprise! — sound and look suspiciously like tourism promotion.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Rossitza Ohridska-Olson | Wed, 28 Apr 2010 4:43 pm
While there are measuring issues with country | nations' branding, and it is true that all stakeholders of a country have to change policies, legislation, etc. to be truthful to a brand message or positioning, the author of the article forgets the following basic principles in branding:
1. Countries | nations should have branding for concrete markets and "products", such as tourism, investment, culture, etc. Like companies do: branding FORD in Europe is different from the one to the USA. The market is different, different core values of the target market, etc.
2. The products produced in a country influence its branding as a country. Consumers tend to buy a VW because is made in Germany (even when it is made in Mexico), because BMW and Mercedes established Germany as the best car making country in the world.
3. Brands in industry and private sector not always correspond to their branding message - the financial giants have shown that. I agree that South Africa, or any other country has to change the way they do things internally, but do industry change their ways to fit the brand image? No, they continue to put chemicals in products, and claim themselves eco-brands, continue to fire employees left and right and claim "greatest company to work for" etc.
3. Branding a sector of a country, specially on global markets attracts investments and money from tourism. That will help South Africa to provide 20 000 people with water, or Chile to build the remaining 40 000 houses needed to be constructed to house the victims of the earthquake.
4. There are some gaps and confusions in FutureBrand and GFK reports, but that is due to methodology of research and some analysis mistakes, when analyzing the data. Overall, it is logical that the USA has the strongest brand in thee world, if you measure (here it goes, it is measurable) the GDP.
5.Country branding reports help enormously governments (when they are centralized) to correct policies. If the USA, for example had a country branding policy for culture, it wouldn't place so low in the reports. Croatia, in order to separate itself from the "Balkans" bad branding, related to wars and underdevelopment, branded itself for tourism as "The Mediterranean as it once was". Brilliantly and with enormous effect on tourism.
6. Product and company branding, when not delivering to the brand message and core values, have the same effect as country branding mistakes. EU forbids soy paste imports from US companies, because of the high content of glutens. No matter who is the manufacturer. And yes, until the FDA and other departments don't change policies, legislation, etc. this cannot be fixed, but even if they are fixed, the branding of the US as for eco-friendly country will suffer, as China brand suffers from defective toys, human rights, etc. As Toyota suffers because of the breaks problems. No difference there between product, company or country branding.
In conclusion: country branding is not nonsense. It is the same as product or private company branding: it has to be done professionally and to follow the basic principles of branding: to target a group of people or geographies, it has to deliver on the brand promise and it has to be consistent with aim for higher profits. In the case of a country: investments, tourism, buying products "Made in...". That last, btw, helps the private companies and products and increase their MEASURABLE brand value.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Timothy | Wed, 28 Apr 2010 6:17 pm
Spot on analysis! Country branding doesn't work - with the possible exception of tourism.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Stephen Byrne | Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:10 pm
Mark,
Do countries as brands fail or, as you point out, are their brand strategies really a failure? Don't confuse the two. I don't think there is anything wrong with conceptualising a country as a brand for certain purposes. I think, as is the case with Australia and other countries, the failure of strategy is really the lack of a strategy. As you note, most continue to see this as a slogan, tagline and logo and employ agencies to do this and not as strategic positioning and alignment over an extended period of time.
Stephen Byrne
Director
DIFFUSION
Australia
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Adam Joseph | Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:58 pm
Well said Mark, Yoda of Brand Management :-)
A further problem with "country branding" is defining exactly what is and isn't a country, as this article from The Economist argues:
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15868439
And if countries were brands, would that mean unbranded countries would be defined as "commodities" by default?!
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Anonymous | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 2:30 pm
Agree that the country must address it's problems,however; i reside in Egypt and the brand values of histroy, Pyramids, red sea resorts etc work well to attract tourists worldwide, although there are social problems in the country, tourism is a large industry and so Egypt needs to be marketed, i wouldnt say through a brand but through a certain perception. america do this very well through films, people often have an inaccurate perception of America before travelling there.
Lastly Bejing Olympics worked well in shifting my perception of China, i think this can be measure through surveys and focus groups. For a lot of these countries torusim and foreign direct investment contributes a significant part of GDP.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Anonymous | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 2:48 pm
farcical concept, good article. Any volunteers to 'brand' Greece?
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Matt Hampshire | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 2:57 pm
I know it's important to have a contentious headline, but surely you're missing the point.
There's nothing wrong with consciously positioning a nation in a particular way. Sometimes it works very well (look how perceptions of Spain have changed in the last 30 years - or Ireland, for that matter).
The problem is when the positioning is done badly - when the 'brand promise' just doesn't ring true, or doesn't say anything unique about the country.
That's not unique to nation branding. You've only got to watch CNN to see how badly most large businesses position themselves.
And, in a world where national identity is being submerged beneath a tide of multinational blandness, isn't it a good idea to give countries a chance to stand for something?
The trick, as with any kind of marketing, is to be able to tell the good stuff from the nonsense.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Jasmine Montgomery | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 3:17 pm
Absolute rubbish. Mark needs to update his definition of a brand. A brand is not just something that comes in a piece of packaging, it is the way a product or company or destination manages its reputation. Countries attract earnings from tourism and business travel on the basis of their brand and that brand can be well managed or badly managed. I suggest Mark tries imagining being put in charge of increasing tourism to a country. If he really needed to move the needle on tourism revenues, I think he would be on the phone to brand consultants fast. And strong revenues from tourism are key to giving developing countries the dollars required to give their people water and HIV medication. Sometimes brand consultants are even the ones helping make things better. We just build a nursery school in the slums of Nairobi as part of our CSR.
Jasmine Montgomery, CEO Seven Brands
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Matt | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 3:56 pm
Why do marketing people always talk about branding as if it's something they invented?
Nation-branding isn't a new idea. Countries had logos (flags) and jingles (anthems) long before Unilever did.
Some of the more progressive countries even had a clear brand vision and brand values ('life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...')
Leaders have always sought to define and use national identity as a way of building confidence and a sense of belonging.
Sometimes, the effects have been inspiring (the Gettysburg address) and sometimes terrifying (the Nuremberg rallies).
Of course, it's no coincidence that the most effective examples of national identity have come at a time of crisis.
With the right motivation (threat of defeat or natural disaster), most nations are more than capable of defining what they stand for.
The problem comes when they're doing it as a means of self-promotion to the outside world, which is when they get all self-conscious and rely on the advice of 'experts' to do it for them.
So there's nothing wrong (or new) with the idea of nation-branding.
The only mistake Kurdistan, Estonia and Nigeria made was to call in the consultants.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment