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.

That’s the lead-in to my Wall Street Journal story on Easter Island (“Before the Trees Disappeared”). For space, the Journal cut a few interesting asides and one paragraph where I quoted Jared Diamond (the Guns, Germs and Steel guy) from his chapter on Easter in his book Collapse.

Mr Diamond nicely, if a touch shrilly, sums up the story’s modern relevance: “Easter’s isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources….The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth [sic] is today in space….These are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our future.”

In another excised aside, I’d mentioned that whilst Diamond and others — especially devoted environmentalists — have helped popularize this epic warning, and although archeologist William Mulloy first stated it in the 1960s, according to Sergio Rapu, the Easter Island archeologist whose Elderhostel charges I joined on a tour of the island, it was actually Margaret Thatcher who brought it to the world’s attention at the G8 summit in Houston in 1990. To the degree that Easter’s warning is a valid one for the whole of civilization, let’s give credit to [the conservative!] she who first raised the alarm.

The final aside, which I didn’t manage to work into my original draft, is the odd fact that Easter Island’s airstrip is apparently much longer than those at many major international airports: it was expanded to be used as an alternative landing place for the space shuttle! Ancient meets modern — and again, Easter’s isolation was the reason.

To see a cool experiment in how to make a giant stone head walk under its own power, watch this 7-second YouTube video.

Recommended.