Governments are turning to branding to woo tourists, attract investment and improve their international standing. But is it really possible to rebrand a country? Neil Gibbons reports:

How’s this for a fun competition? Simply think of Nigeria then dream up a logo and slogan that sums up the country and send it to the government for a chance to win a prize.

The process may be more in keeping with the naming of a Blue Peter dog, but it’s a serious business. Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Communications, Professor Dora Akunyili, is bent on a new image and will take whatever help she can get. Her country is following in the footsteps of other African countries such as Uganda with its ‘Gifted by Nature’ campaign, and South Africa which launched a ‘Proudly South African’ image programme.

Having latched onto the power of branding, more governments are clamouring to give their identity a facelift. You don’t have to be a brand professor to see that global perceptions affect a country’s ability to attract capital and develop relationships.

Investors are a key target. According to Lord Bell, head of global consultancy Bell Pottinger Sans Frontières: “It’s a particular concern at the moment when the economy is struggling. The export of capital has virtually stopped. And if a country is downrated by a ratings agency, the reaction is ‘Let’s go and convince people we’re open for business.’ After all, the investment community are like sheep. They’re exactly like the people queuing up outside Northern Rock.”

Tourism authorities are willing drivers of the rebrand bandwagon. It’s a popularly held view that Spain successfully reinvigorated its tourist trade using Miro’s vibrant Espana painting as a national logo which summed up the countries positive post-Franco optimism. Since then, attempts to ape that success are springing up. Colombia has invested heavily in its ‘Colombia is Passion’ campaign while the French government has launched a new brand, featuring the tag line, ‘Rendez-vous en France’.

But an effective brand also percolates down to individual companies. In his book ‘Britain?’, Geoff Mulgan of think tank Demos argued that, when a nation builds an attractive brand, it creates a patina – an ‘identity premium’ – that attaches to businesses associated with that country. Electronics retailer Dixons was no doubt aware of this when it named its house brand Matsui – a clear attempt to sound Japanese and create an association with a well respected nation of electronics manufacturing.

But how can a country glean whether its brand is well-regarded? Investment attractiveness is reflected in Standard & Poor’s sovereign risk ratings for countries that issue debt on global markets. Meanwhile, brand consulting firm FutureBrand conducts an annual study across 30 categories to come up with the final index of national brand appreciation. It ranked Australia number one in its 2008 table; the UK was placed 8th.

Simon Anholt, a British government adviser and creator of the concept of nation branding, launched his own index, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, in 2005. It measures the power and quality of each country’s brand by analysing exports; governance; culture and heritage; people; tourism; and investment and immigration. Through interviews conducted among 25,000 citizens in 20 countries, 50 nations are evaluated. It places Germany at number one, followed by the UK.

“Some of the findings are weird,” says Anholt, “like the fact that Brazilians hate Singapore. But it also provides insight into why nations like or dislike others. Quite a few corporations subscribe to it too. L’Oreal for example is so closely associated with France that it would be a blind spot for it not to know how France is perceived globally.”

Having established that your homeland is loved or loathed, respected or scorned, is it really possible to apply marketing techniques to improve brand?

“I think it is possible,” says Bell. “The technology of national branding is exactly the same as that of product branding. It’s the scale and scope that’s different. It’s not so much nation branding as country promotion – presenting countries as a positive environment for, say, foreign direct investment.”

Graham Hales, executive director of brand consultancy Interbrand, agrees. “If you see a brand as something that creates an expectation then yes, you can brand a country,” he says. “It’s possible to create a strategic profile of activity to change it. That’s broadly similar to the branding of products or corporations.”

Although theoretically possible, nation branding throws up specific challenges. “It requires lots of stakeholder involvement,” says Hales. “And these projects tend to be publicly funded and therefore resource-light. That can lead to shortcuts but it’s essential to understand the business case fully.

“Elections can also get in the way,” he adds. “These projects tend to be personally owned by people who are then replaced. It works if they remember it’s not about their own agenda, but the country’s. That doesn’t always happen though.”

Another common pitfall is the attempt to too radically overhaul a country’s image, replacing it with a spanking new identity that jars with existing perceptions.

“That’s particularly difficult where that perception is based on a stereotype,” says Hales. “If the brand promise is so divergent that is becomes remarkable, you need to be able to substantiate it. It’s better to be pushing with the grain of the wood. You can remind people of forgotten traits or accentuate what they already know.

Not everyone agrees that national branding is possible or desirable though. Simon Anholt is an outspoken critic of magic-wand branding, despite acknowledging his inadvertent role in popularising the concept. In 1998, he wrote a paper for the Journal of Brand Management called ‘Nation Brands of the Twenty-First Century’. While it pointed out that countries depend on their good brand image, it stopped short of saying places can be branded like soap-powder, or that marketing communications can change their image.

"Branding is about reducing the complexity of a product into a single promise to penetrate the thick skull of the consumer. For countries, the opposite is true."

The branding industry seized on his idea of national branding but began, he says, “to apply standard marketing techniques”.

“As a result, there are a lot of desperately poor countries who see branding as a black box than can cure their ills,” he says. “Agencies pander to this view. They suggest that countries are essentially no different to Toilet Duck. That’s criminal. There are countries who are spending obscene amounts because of a wicked and dangerous lie.”

In his view, marketing communications have little or no effect on global perceptions. “Public opinion is what brands a country and that takes generations to shift,” he says.

Moreover, a nation – diverse, sprawling and complex – is naturally inimical to the simplicity of branding.

“I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who says they can crystallise the essence of a country into a single brand identity,” says Anholt. “Branding is about reducing the complexity of a product into a single promise to penetrate the thick skull of the consumer – washing powder that gets washing whiter than white, for example. For countries, the opposite is true. Their complexity is what makes them. They’re deep, rich, nuanced, full of contradiction.”

Such opposition to simplistic branding techniques isn’t to say that a country lumbered with a shoddy reputation is stuck with it for life. Anholt – who describes himself as a policy adviser – argues that it’s possible to make improving reputation more efficient but says, “It can only come about by what countries do.”

“It requires periodic symbolic action,” he says. “If a country wants to be regarded as green, it can affect opinion by real policies and action, not through spin.”

He cites the example of Ireland. In the 1980s, it had attracted investment and become relatively affluent, to the extent that people were forgetting its culture, that it was the country of Yeats, Joyce and Shaw. To counter this, the Irish government passed a law exempting anyone who could prove they were a poet or writer from paying income tax.

“It was action that was enshrined in the country’s fiscal culture,” says Anholt. “Or look at Spain. It legalised gay weddings – a move which did a lot to distance itself from the country of Franco. And when Slovenia wanted to appear the most prosperous nation in the Balkans, it made financial donations to the other nations to cement this. It was money well spent – periodic symbolic action. It’s all policy.”

Although he contends that there’s no evidence that marketing communications does anything to “move the needle” in brand appreciation, there’s little doubt that a market exists. “It’s complex, but growing,” says Bell. “There are at least half a dozen nations going through this process at the moment. It tends to be Eastern European countries who are keen to be seen as their own country, rather than a Soviet satellite.”

Russia, he says, has put its $50 million image campaign up for grabs after dispensing with Ketchum. Israel, meanwhile, has recently hired British company Acanchi for its branding efforts. Still, that’s relatively small beer, given the supposed benefits of effective branding. Why is the market not exploding?

“One reason is that there’s no Minister of Brand,” says Bell. “There tend to be lots of contributors – the transport department, tourism, financial departments – and that makes the process difficult to manage.” Hales puts it down to the fact that previous disappointments have “poured cold water over the idea”.

“It was quite fashionable a while ago, but a lot of it was done poorly and that dented expectations,” he says.

He agrees that too many practitioners have viewed branding as a cosmetic exercise in which a nation’s image is tarted up for public consumption. “The trap is to see a theme and a logo and set about creating a mask,” he says. “It’s okay to bring a brand idea to life but people are too often guilty of just grandstanding behind a logo. Logos take a while to fill with meaning. They need to be grounded behind a purpose. The more real you can make it, the better. It’s got to have substance. You have to be able to deliver on your promise.”

Back in Nigeria, the rebrand’s lack of substance is causing concern. It’s not just that Professor Akunyili is considered out of her depth but that the campaign, with the logo and slogan competition, is seen as spin.

“As a country, we need personal, corporate and institutional reformation to achieve a transformational repositioning of our national brand identity,” says Charles O’Tudor, a branding consultant at Adstrat BMC in Lagos. “Branding cannot be conjured or invented by mere logos and sloganeering.”

Britain branded

Britain is not immune to rebranding fever. As well as spending £1 billionplus of public money each year on communicating its image, it has wrestled with its brand for over decade.

April 1996 - Cool Britannia, a Ben and Jerry ice-cream flavour (vanilla with strawberry and chocolate covered shortbread) is launched.

November 1996 - The British media take up the phrase after Newsweek declares London to be the coolest capital city in the world.

1997 - The Design Council publishes the discussion paper ‘New Brand for a New Britain’. It calls for the government to position Britain “as one of the world’s most forward-thinking, innovative and creative nations”.

1997- The Council commissions Demos, to produce ‘Britain™: Renewing our Identity’. Author Mark Leonard found that Britain was regarded as fusty and backward looking .

1997– BA decides to drop the union flag from its livery and spend £60 million to rebrand itself as a multicultural world airline. June 1999 – BA reintroduces the union flag, after a barrage of negative publicity.

2002– ‘UK:OK’, the most recent brand makeover of Britain, is unveiled by the British Tourist Authority. Created by ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, it was an attempt to distance the country from Cool Britannia and woo tourists in the aftermath of foot-and-mouth disease and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.