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.