First, two seconds of background…. I’m working this morning on my chapter on measuring and monitoring place brands for the upcoming third edition of Destination Branding. Doing some reading and research for it. I discovered that in the Q4 2005 edition of what was then called the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index (which was less than a year old at the time), a company called Brand Finance added “a new and very exciting dimension” to the NBI: a financial valuation of the 32 country brands in the index.

Now, I’m a huge sceptic of brand valuation — or, to put it more exactly, I’m a vociferous champion of the limits of brand valuation; brand valuation can be useful, but mostly by examining its delta, its change over time (the absolute figures brand valuation comes up with, in the context of place branding at least, I don’t trust [speaking of provenance] for a New York minute).

Having said that (as Larry David would say), I love the idea behind the “royalty relief” method Brand Finance uses to perform the valuations:

This approach assumes a country does not own its own brand and calculates how much it would need to pay to license it from a third party. The present value of that stream of (hypothetical) brand contribution payments represents the value of the brand.

Even if the figure arrived at by the valuers has little more validity than a finger in the breeze, “royalty relief” is still a great way to think about your brand — whether you’re a place, a company or an individual person: if somebody else owned your brand, your good name, how much would he or she charge you to rent it?

Or, to turn it around and add action implications, if you owned your brand (as you, in point of fact, probably do), and wanted to rent it out, will what your doing right now, today, this week, this month, mean you can charge higher rent for your brand in the future?

Follow up: As if to confirm my point about the delta being the thing, Simon Anholt’s just written a piece for Foreign Policy about how Obama raised America’s brand value by $2 trillion.

Having lived and worked in Europe for the past seven years, where everything to do with mobile phones is always noticeably better than what’s on offer stateside, I was amused by this fake tirade by the Fake Steve Jobs, who describes a phone call in which he berates AT&T head Randall Stephenson for not realizing what a gift the iPhone is (AT&T mentioned offhandedly the other day that they’d like to encourage some people to use the iPhone less on their network, which has the device exclusively, as apparently 3% of the customers are responsible for 40% of the data usage).

Fake Steve Jobs screams down the line at Stephenson, comparing the iPhone to “Meet the Beatles”:

Now there was a lot of demand for that record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not.

About America, Fake Steve Jobs laments:

We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

The whole article is an extremely tightly written piece of satire. Recommended for a hearty, bittersweet laugh.

21 December ‘09: A few days later the follow-up fake phone call story appeared.

A year ago in a short piece for Moncole magazine, I forecasted a Rio win: “One question the IOC will consider,” I wrote in my submitted draft, “is what will the Olympics brand do for the host city and what will the host city’s brand do for the Olympics?…Rio holds the DNA of Brazil; and Brazil is the great hope of Latin America. And can you imagine a more endearingly colourful games after the explosive regimentation of Beijing and the jaunty high-mindedness of London? Boy,” I gushed, “does this one make sense.”

For its part, Chicago seemed to take itself definitively out of the running only during the final IOC deliberations when its champions, including President Obama and his wife, played too much to type. Here’s Monocle’s Tryler Brule (“All down to the Rio brand?“) on how Chicago’s team showed its Yanks-will-be-Yanks daft side:

From the moment Air Force One touched down at Copenhagen Airport, Kastrup, the Chicago bid team was doomed, [not by] the swagger that comes with a 747 thundering into a tiny Nordic capital…but [by the] over-rehearsed, stiff, slightly smug and overly corporate presentations…. Chicago’s bid might have been technically up to scratch but [when] Mayor Daley got up and pitched his town like he was wooing another Boeing to move its HQ there, he lost Europe. When Doug Arnot butchered the French language, he lost the Francophone bloc. And whoever allowed the Obamas to serve up such helpings of cheese so early in the day should be sacked. Michelle Obama’s overly personal story was disjointed and her husband just looked annoyed that he had to address such a small audience.

(“Helpings of cheese.” Ouch.)

Yes, it’s official: Barack Obama, however conciliatory and charistmatic he is as a world leader, is still capable of being humstrung by, and making his own contributions to, the dark elements of Brand America: earnestness, unctuousness, entitlement, etc. I might even take comfort in this realization, if it weren’t so damned disappointing. (Really, he never should have gone to Copenhagen. The New Republic was right about this.)

So, congrats to the cariocas. My friend Flavio Azevedo, who was a consultant to the Rio 2016 project, emailed me two days before the announcement: “If we win, I will pay you a bucket of caipirinha in Ipanema beach.” Flavio, you’re on!

Some of my fellow Yanks will be doing this to my new book

Probably I shouldn’t post this for copyright reasons, but what the hell. I found it whilst trawling some academic journals on the subject of place branding, including the formidable Journal of Brand Management from whose pages I have digitally ripped this.

It’s a 2005 review (and a very positive one) by the academic Keith Dinnie of Brand America, the book I co-authored with Simon Anholt…the book which was translated into five languages (Polish, French, complex Chinese, Hebrew and German…there was even a German-language audio version, believe it or not)….

…and the book which is coming out again, in a glorious revision.

I spoke to the publisher last week and we’re looking at a November pub date for the second edition of Brand America, with the new subtitle: The making, unmaking, and remaking of the greatest national image of all time.

That’s really what it’s about, too — no exaggeration. Simon and I finished the re-write months ago, so I don’t know what’s taken so long. Luckily, the historical tales and anecdotes remain true, and fascinating, and our recommendations are still fresh and awfully provocative (sorry — no bean-spilling…mum’s the word).

I can’t wait for this to hit the shelves, and the streets.

Writes Mr Dinnie, by the way, amongst other remarks:

As one of the first books focusing explicitly on the nation as a brand, ‘Brand America’ outlines the potential benefits to any nation in developing its brand reputation.

‘We hate you but please send us Baywatch‘ [is] one of the great soundbites that are liberally scattered throughout Anholt and Hildreth’s provocative text on America the brand.

Pre-order a copy now.

How did Al happen to get religion? As Backroads of American Music has it:

After cementing countless encounters with a voice that speaks directly to the genitals, in 1976, Al Green found Jesus. While Green reports his conversion happened after a visit to Disneyland, local rumors link his conversion to an incident reminiscent of the death of Henry IV, involving an adolescent boy, and bathtub, an angry woman, and a pot of hot grits (a.k.a. “Memphis Napalm”).

The story has the woman coming into the house and pouring a pot of grits, which she found boiling on the stove, all over a bathing Al.

An hour or so later at Graceland, I learned that Elvis Presley not only owned a pink Cadillac, he’d also had his own corporate identity, which he used for various business purposes and which was emblazoned on the tailfin of his personal jet, the “Lisa Marie”. It consists of three letters — TCB — arranged around a thunderbolt, and it stands for “takin’ care of business…in a flash”. Nice one, Elvis. Interbrand couldn’t have said it better.

It is as though people have two Brand America dials in their heads and hearts: one labelled “affection” and the other marked “disappointment”.

The last few years saw a moderate turn down of the affection dial (though not as much as is popularly believed) combined with a huge clockwise twist to the disappointment dial. America discovered, to its chagrin and naive surprise, that in the words of Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel, “This one goes to eleven.”

In fact, of course, the two dials are linked: the disappointment many people felt for America was driven and animated by their long-standing and deep-seated affection for the place. For reasons both justified and unjustified (reasonable people can disagree here), people in many quarters felt let down by America. And in the way only a jilted lover or backstabbed friend can, they pumped the pain of their unrequited love into hurt feelings and anti-American rhetoric.

Barack Obama’s election, all by itself, gave everybody from Kenyan villagers to German intellectuals just what they have been secretly craving for years: something to hang their hat on, an excuse to turn down that disappointment dial and let the music of their long-pent-up affection for America be heard again. With Mr Obama in charge, Americophilia is no longer the love that dare not speak its name.