Havana, Cuba: where a Yankee imperialist *is* a Yankee imperialist.

There’s a great expression in American English: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

It means: your point of view is probably highly correlated with what you think your place in the world is.

It’s a simple idea, but I have found it extremely powerful to keep it in mind when working on place branding jobs, or doing any kind of corporate identity work that involves getting to know the culture of an organization or a nation. And I’ve been grateful — and amused — whenever I’ve stumbled across something that makes me realize my perspective is just that: a perspective, not [necessarily] the gospel truth.

Example 1:

Once I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal about the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England. When I visited the museum, I found one placard on the wall which put the American Revolution somewhat differently than did my childhood history texts in Southern California:

Colonial rebels: The American War of Independence

By 1765 thirteen very different English-speaking colonies stretched along America’s east coast. But, from Georgia in the south to Massachusetts in the north, one thing united them. They disliked Britain imposing taxes on them.

The colonists kept spreading westwards, seizing land and starting wars with the local people. They expected British troops to defend them. But they objected when parliament tried to recover its defence costs by taxing them.

And so on. Not inaccurate — but certainly framed from an angle alien to the one I grew up accepting as reality.

Example 2:

In Havana, Cuba, the one-time presidential palace now houses the Museum of the Revolution. Outside the museum is the tank which supposedly (but why shouldn’t it be so?) Fidel Castro himself drove at the Bay of Pigs invasion. The text is all about Yankee imperialist invaders and heroic rebuffs. So, too, is the placard beside the pieces of Maj. Rudolph Anderson’s U-2 plane, which the Cubans managed to shoot down in 1962 just prior to the Cuban missile crisis. To an American it’s entertaining to read. Sure, it’s propagandistic, but it makes you realize there’s another side to the coin.

But my point is simple: I always try to remember that mine isn’t the only way of looking at things, and — possibly even more vitally — that people’s perspectives are always as real and truthful to them as mine is to me.

Something I’ve just run across has stopped me in my tracks and compelled me to write a quick post about it. If you work with marketing or branding in any way, this idea — it’s kind of a thought experiment, or in NLP terms a “re-frame” — may interest you, also.

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.

As I prep for the launch of the new edition of Simon Anholt’s and my Brand America: The making, unmaking and re-making of the greatest national image of all time, I’ve been taking more notice of the signposts of America’s future — both the encouraging ones (e.g., the election of a black president per se) and the dispiriting ones (e.g., the non-fate of the auto industry).

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.

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.