patriotism as brand loyalty

One of the more intriguing ideas to come along over the past few years is the notion of “nation branding,” which made the NY Times Magazine end-of-year list of big ideas. There are two main aspects to nation-branding, one economic, the other political. On the economic side, the idea is that a strong national brand can act as a “value-added” to branded exports, sort of the way an “Intel inside” sticker adds value to your IBM laptop. On the political side, nation branding is also called “public diplomacy,” and it has been pitched as a vital part of a nation’s soft power. Simon Anholt is a British marketing guru who has done a nice job of staking out a large claim on this relatively untouched terrain. As Anholt argues, nation branding "involves close coordination of the often disparate factors that go into a country’s international image: tourism promotion, trade, even foreign policy." I think he exaggerates the extent to which a nation brand must be as tightly controlled or coordinated as a corporate brand. People are generally able to distinguish a country’s "political" brand from its "tourism" or "culture" brand, which is why we find it easy to both denounce China’s human rights record, but still go there on vacation in search of the exotic orient. Evidence for this is actually found in a study that Anholt himself recently did, in which he calculated that Canada has the third most popular nation-brand in the world, after the UK and… Switzerland. Canada is surpassed only by the United Kingdom, with ranked first, and Switzerland, which ranked second, on a list of 35 nations. The United States ranked 10th on the list.

Simon Anholt, creator of the Anholt Nation Brand Index, said that the result means that Canada is a much admired country. “What it says is that everybody rates [Canada] very highly," Anholt said in an interview. "It scores particularly strongly for things like governance and for tourism."

Another problem with the nation branding field is that it is sorely in need of some sort of normative analysis. What are the ethical limits of nation branding? What sorts of controls are legitimate? What forms of marketing should be allowed? Given that Canadian politics has been dominated for the past year or so by a scandal directly related to an attempt at marketing the national brand to Quebecers, it is unfortunate that there has been so little public attention paid to this normative dimension. I talk a bit about this in a column I wrote for Maclean’s here. (Thanks to reader Julie Crysler for the Anholt link)