This piece from the Times Magazine's annual "year in ideas" issue is worth quoting in full:
If the British consultant Simon Anholt had his way, sitting at the cabinet table with the secretary of defense and the attorney general would be a secretary of branding. Indeed, he foresees a day when the most important part of foreign policy isn't defense or trade but image - and when countries would protect and promote their images through coordinated branding departments. "I've visited a great many countries where they have ministers for things that are far less important," he says.
This year, Anholt, a prolific speaker, adviser to numerous governments and editor of the journal Place Branding, published "Brand America: The Mother of All Brands," in which he predicted that the days when countries will essentially open their own in-house marketing shops are right around the corner. "Governments understand this very well, and most of them are now trying or have tried in the past to achieve some kind of control over their images," Anholt writes. He may be on to something, since governments are quickly realizing that image maintenance isn't just about reeling in tourists - witness Karen Hughes's high-profile public-diplomacy efforts or Tony Blair's Public Diplomacy Strategy Board, an outgrowth of Britain's "Cool Britannia" campaign. Late last year, the Persian Gulf state Oman hired Landor Associates, a brand consulting outfit, to develop and promote "Brand Oman."
Public boosterism campaigns are nothing new. But true nation branding, Anholt says, involves close coordination of the often disparate factors that go into a country's international image: tourism promotion, trade, even foreign policy. Just as companies have learned to "live the brand," countries should consider their reputations carefully - because, he says, in the interconnected world, that's what statecraft is all about. "Today's community of nations is open, transparent and substantially democratic - in many ways, like a marketplace," he writes in "Brand America." "The state's reputation is therefore of critical importance." Given how difficult it is for an unpopular America to make its way in the world, maybe Anholt isn't as crazy as he sounds.
Without going into Anholt at length—I haven't read any of his work—other countries can conduct global branding exercises because they are relatively small, ethnically homogeneous and don't export their culture worldwide. They are capable of either relatively swift about-faces, as some of the Gulf emirates have done and Singapore is contemplating, or determine that they will hold in place culturally like England.
Brand America is much harder to categorize—although Anholt's publisher certainly makes a stab on the cover of Brand America, showing a little Asian girl dressed up in a cowboy outfit for Halloween trick-or-treating.
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