Brands And Marketing, Charity And International Aid

Brands And Marketing, Charity And International Aid

By: Simon Anholt

Countries depend on their international standing as never before: the way they are perceived by people around the world has a direct impact on their ability to export products, services, ideas, culture and people, and their ability to attract investment, tourists and talent. So it’s very important for governments to understand how national reputation is formed, and how and why it changes.

This is why the phrase “nation brand” was coined back in 1998. The other brand that coined was the phrase “nation branding”, which seems to contain a promise that if a country doesn’t like its reputation, it can manipulate it using the techniques of marketing. This promise is a lie. Countries are judged by what they do and what they make, not by what they say about themselves. So “nation branding” is a wicked waste of taxpayers’ money, and shouldn’t be tolerated.

Marketing commercial goods or services, it’s an essentially honest and straightforward process: offering people a product or a service and using advertising to tell them “buy this, it’s good”. But countries aren’t for sale, and the underlying message is “please change your mind about this country”.

We all know what that is: it’s state propaganda, and it can’t work in our modern, globalised world because every message is always challenged, and nobody is paying attention anyway! Using advertising for marketing tourism or investment or export promotion, by contrast, is entirely different because you are selling a product or service to people who might be interested in buying it.

The branding of one country with non existing circumstances cheapens and vulgarises countries, reducing their complexity and richness to the level of a childish, superficial stereotype. It’s insulting to their culture, to their history, to their geography and above all to their populations. It excludes all the people and organisations that don’t happen to fit the slogan: it’s a kind of repression, like all marketing. And it makes the country look naive and desperate. Products can be reduced to a “unique selling point” but places can’t. Any government that tries to do this is guilty of an act of cultural aggression against its own population.

The so called charitable activities of some big names have a negative effect on Africa’s reputation and have failed to see what a double-edged sword aid is for its recipients: we give with one hand and take away with the other. We provide much-needed money but in order to ensure the continued supply of that money from donors and taxpayers, we set about professionally degrading the image of the recipient country. We use all of our skills and resources - especially in communications - to brand the recipients of our aid as worthy causes: or, in other words, as desperate basket cases. The problem is that the negative image will outlast the economic problems by generations, and catastrophically blocks the recipient’s chances of independent development. This is because everybody will give money to a basket case, but nobody would go on holiday there, buy products or services that come from there, live and study there, hire somebody who comes from there. The image of a country that’s progressing and the image of a country that needs foreign aid are fundamentally incompatible.

What is needed now is a more equal form of partnership between rich and poor countries. As the old African proverb says, “The hand that receives is always beneath the hand that gives”. Rich countries and the countries they support need to find ways of learning from each other, and pooling their skills, wisdom and resources for mutual benefit. Despite all the hand wringing in the West about China’s investments in Africa, at least these engagements don’t involve the deliberate degradation of Africa’s reputation, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why recipient governments welcome it. For better or for worse, China treats them as partners rather than supplicants, and that makes a big difference.

Apart from the image problems, what I’ve seen in a few African countries over the years is governments completely reconfigured as distributors of foreign largesse and no longer equipped to build their countries; local entrepreneurs driven out of business because they simply can’t compete against free money and free products; and in a few cases I’ve seen the moral climate change from one of honest ambition and the desire to build and to better oneself, to an angry sense of entitlement.

It always takes a long time before people change their minds about other countries. People believe what they believe about Africa because they’ve believed it all their lives, and it takes many years of sustained and dramatic evidence before they are prepared to uproot all their fixed beliefs and reconfigure them. What’s starting to happen is that little pools of positive perceptions of Africa - some of which have been around for decades and centuries, like [around] sporting ability or beautiful landscapes - are gradually beginning to pool with each other, and create real, lasting perceptual change. Beautiful landscape is merging with beautiful nature and beautiful culture and good sport and good people and good resources into good growth, good human achievement and good prospects.

The engagement of China with Africa has a significant role in changing the image of the continent through the highly informed, elite audiences such as diplomats, serious journalists, direct investment and tourism experts. Hence, from this experience we should start to treat a person with more respect when we observe those who we already respect treating that person with respect.

African countries in order to stand out in the global market place they have to rely on their own resources and human capital rather than looking for handouts. Of course, African countries are certainly all different, with their own story to tell, their own resources and abilities and unique historical, cultural and human assets. It might take a while and there will certainly be laggards. But one could see that happening in some countries.

At the moment, the reputations of each African country are created by the image of the continent, which is generally negative. This is simply the wrong way round. It needs to be the countries of Africa that together build the image of the continent. It’s a long haul but many countries in the continent are well placed to start the process.

Countries are judged by what their citizens make and do, not by what they say. So the image can only be changed by a constant, unbroken stream of dramatic evidence that the country deserves the reputation it desires. A reputation cannot be constructed: it can only be earned. The solution to a weak or negative image is enlightened policies, investment and innovation - not marketing.

If Africa and Asia continue to invest in education, and Europe and North America continue to fail to do so, then the decline of Western civilisation - which is utterly clear no matter which aspect of its society, its culture or its governance one studies - will accelerate, and the South and the East will continue to rise.

Africa must not make the mistake of the West in confusing technological competence and connectivity with real learning, real literacy, and that essential broad grounding in culture, history, humanities, politics and economics. The superficial dexterity of the “internet generation” cannot be the basis for human progress since it fails to learn from the mistakes and achievements of past generations. Unless each generation absorbs the lessons of the generation before and builds on them, civilisation cannot move forward, the decline of the West is the decline of our ability to build on the past, our relentless superficiality, our shallow facility for grasping a million unconnected trivia, calling it knowledge and making markets out of it. Real wisdom requires significantly more application, and there are no shortcuts to it.

There is evidence that much of Asia has perceived this glaring competitive opportunity against the West. Africa’s rise depends on whether it can do the same. Rebuilding that patrimony is the key to Africa’s future.

(Extracted from an interview with the author posted on Dehai. org)

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