And so we went. Oliver, who was born in Estonia in 1974 when it was part of the U.S.S.R., was impressed. “It’s a real achievement,” he told me afterward. “What used to be the grimmest and gloomiest of all places in Russia has been turned into a beacon of historical truth and freedom of thought.” I had been moved also. Something about the experience jogged my memory. I thought of Ayn Rand — my favourite novelist when I was 19 — and something she once said. I looked up the quotation and started my article with it, in the original context:

“Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” Rep. John McDowell of the House Committee on Un-American Activities asked the novelist Ayn Rand. “You paint a very dismal picture.” It was 1947 and Rand, a Russian émigré, was giving testimony before the committee regarding life in Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

“Look,” Rand retorted, “it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free.”

Had McDowell been able to see Perm-36, the last remaining Gulag forced-labor camp, which is now a tourist attraction and memorial, he’d have needed no further explanation. As I toured the facility myself recently, I wondered the same thing I’ve wondered while beholding the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the former KGB prison in Lithuania, and the wrecked streets of East Timor: How did this ever seem like the right thing?

You can read the whole article here, without being a WSJ subscriber.

Victor Niederhoffer

Value created | Ballyhoo deflated | Damsels rescued

I was thinking of this because my friend Rhymer Rigby, knowing I’m an ‘identity guy,’ talked to me whilst researching a piece he wrote for the Financial Times. His article is about how people use business cards to represent themselves. My quoted contribution is meager –

“It’s an opportunity to be expressive and wear your thoughtfulness on your sleeve, and most of the time it’s a missed opportunity,” says Mr Hildreth.

– and I’d like to expand on my thoughts here.

By thoughtfulness I mean, for instance, leaving off the fax machine number. When was the last time you received a fax, or sent one? Yet, when was the last time you tried to ring someone up, got an earful of carrier tone, and realized you dialed the fax number by mistake?

Exactly.

My business card has the following information: name, email address, website URL, mobile phone number, and the three social networks I use most avidly. There’s some personality in the form of my doodles (which I’d been attempting, I think rather unsuccessfully, to incorporate into my corporate identity). I have found oftentimes I give somebody a card and a couple of days later he or she connects to me on LinkedIn or Facebook. The system seems to work.

The same rule applies to business cards, I suppose, as applies to good writing or good conversation: leave out the boring parts.

Postscript: Cheers to Wayne Elise for Tweeting about this post (and for partially inspiring it in some conversations we had last weekend). I could mention that Wayne — who probably doesn’t have actual printed business cards — identifies himself in his email signoff as ‘head honcho’ at Charisma Arts. I find this wonderful. It says exactly what his role is and communicates something of who he his as a person; it also suggests (i.e., communicates indirectly) far more about the company itself than would ‘CEO’ or ‘Founder’ or ‘President’, all of which would be equally descriptively accurate but far less evocative of the kind of outfit Charisma Arts is. Wayne’s title shows, furthermore, how personality can coincide with clarity and amplify it; one wouldn’t be perfectly sure what the ‘President’ did or didn’t do (or even whether her or she was a sole proprietor putting on airs), but if you’re talking to the ‘head honcho’ then you’ll probably guess the score pretty accurately: small and/or informal company closely run by one characterful individual.

I guess it sounds like it would be an appealing marketing claim.

But it’s not. Period.

In fact, I’ll buy dinner for anybody who convinces me that he or she spent actual money (denominated in any currency) on a flight to a LAND OF CONTRASTS qua LAND OF CONTRASTS.

At the same time, I found a link to a talk I gave in Budapest in 2006 at a conference on national identity. The organisers posted the whole PowerPoint, including amusing — and instructive? let us hope so… — slides about marketing claims for places: “An introduction to robust national branding (including a case study about Poland)”.

My stump speech has progressed since then, but the fundamentals are well-described:

“The task,” I say, “is to work out what is special and interesting about Hungary and then convey that — visually, verbally, experientally — so that people understand Hungary and are attracted to it”.

That’s as good a definition of the process of place branding as any.

There I go again about logos....

Chile's image programme dives deep

Simon Anholt, the man with whom I wrote Brand America, emailed me today to say his new website is finally live. Which reminded me I wanted to post an excerpt from a talk he gave in Chile in March (he spoke, as usual, without notes, slides or musical accompaniment, for 60 compelling minutes).

He’s been working with Chile — one of those countries which certainly deserves a better and more vivid reputation than it has — to establish ‘a machinery’ (his words) of brand development and maintenance for the country. He believes that a country really must learn to take charge of its own image, even if consultants help the process. Advertising is typically an extravagent waste of public funds. His research backs this up:

Since 2005, I’ve been asking about 39,000 of my closest friends around the world what they think about 50 countries. And in the years I’ve been doing this study I have never seen any, any evidence whatsoever that the millions of dollars that countries spend on changing their image has had any effect at all.

In fact, possibly the contrary. I’ll give you one very good example. One of the few countries whose image has been improving quite steadily over the last three or four years is Brazil. Brazil has done little or no nation branding. They talk about it, but they don’t do it.

By contrast, one of the countries that has spent the most money on nation branding is Malaysia.  “Malaysia truly Asia” is a non-rhyming slogan that many of us are familiar with. They have spent hundreds of millions on managing their image.  And the image of Malaysia has declined slowly but steadily over the last four years.  So you could even argue that there is an inverse correlation between the amount of nation branding that countries do and the health of their reputation.

I won’t claim that. What I do claim is that the two things have nothing to do with each other.

He was a tough act to follow, but I got the lucky post-lunch spot after Simon’s late morning session, and did my damndest with it.

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.

For their summer double issue on the world’s cities, they asked me for a cheat sheet of city brand fixes. I told them there are no quick fixes, and provided this readable but real list instead.

City Branding ticketsheet:
For the metropolis on the make, here’s your to-do list
Monocle magazine, Issue 15, vol. 1, July 2008

01. Stop running ads. They’re too expensive and unless they’re pitch-perfect, they make you look second-rate.
02. Call Frank Gehry—and hang up on him. Great architecture is splendid, but the “we hire a famous architect” gambit isn’t the infallible branding play it once was.
03. Put your anomalies to work. Just because you’re unhappy with an aspect of your city’s history or landscape doesn’t mean tourists feel the same way.
04. Create a sense of place on the ground. Rio’s black and white pavements or Norman Foster’s metro entrances in Bilbao are constant reminders you couldn’t be anywhere else.
05. Become the centre of something. Build on something true to you that locals can get behind, even if it’s bizarre. Rakvere, Estonia will hold the 2008 world sumo championships. But then Kaido Hoovelson, one of the world’s top wrestlers, is a local.
06. Synchronise tourism and investment promotion. This stops tourism officials from getting folksy and reminds the investment bureau there’s more to foreign business than hard numbers.
07. Get a movie filmed in your ’hood. It doesn’t even have to be that flattering: Strawberry and Chocolate showed Habaneros raising pigs in their homes and still made Havana look sexy and interesting. And interesting, after all is what you want to be.
-JH: Jeremy Hildreth is head of place branding at Saffron

(Note: I posted this first to Saffron’s website.)