de

del

Eduardo del Buey
Photo: Reuters
La Jornada Maya

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

This is the fifth and last article on nation branding.

In the past four articles, we have seen how four very different countries have tried to brand themselves either by their own governments, or have been branded by foreign audiences based on the country’s activities or policies.

And this leads me to ask if a possibility to create a single brand for any given state is at all possible, or if public diplomacy practitioners will have to find a new way to connect their overall messages with target audiences.

Can a country have an overriding national brand, or does a nation have a matrix of brands based on different aspects of its existence?

Can a nation create a brand based on values that transcend time, or do national brands always end up being based on physical, political or geographic characteristics that may define a country at any given time?

A nation is an amalgam of people, their history, evolution and their present state of affairs. In the present, people with shared history can sometimes have differing views about who they are and what they represent. They can also have differing views of their history and their culture. In a democracy, political parties can represent some of these different views, thus, at times, rendering the idea of one overriding concept of political identity difficult to achieve.

In an autocracy, the nation revolves around the views of one person or one small group of persons whose values and vision are often forced upon citizens, precluding them of exerting the freedom of thought and expression required to form a national brand based on real values and not on some forced myth. If history is written by the victors (as is often said), then the autocrat who controls the past controls the present.

In my past few articles, I have tried to see how some of the major states try to brand themselves, and with what level of success.

My conclusion is that creating an overriding national political brand is very difficult in a democracy, since governments and states generally follow their own particular and parochial interests. When these interests change or a new government comes into office, so can their country’s image.

One has only to look at the United States that for many years exerted global leadership when many of its citizens in fact had no interest in the world beyond their borders. When a leader like Donald Trump emerged, many embraced his vision of “America First” and that became the leitmotif of its foreign policy. This policy was embraced by his followers who support Trump despite his having won only 48 percent of the popular vote, and has led to tectonic shifts in international relations.

The once highly respected State Department is in shambles, public diplomacy officers have few if any credible messages to share with international audiences, and the American “brand”, if it ever existed, has ceased to be respected globally.

Nations can brand their geographic or cultural products more easily – Thailand’s beaches, France’s wines, Italy’s art, Canada’s winter and national beauty.

Countries can brand their products (like maple syrup or tequila), they can brand their tourism attractions, and they can brand their educational systems and artistic culture.

But can their branding of certain sectors of their geography, cultural products, or commercial products become a brand that reflects the nation as a whole?

I don’t think so.

A state’s interests determine the path that it is going to take at any given time, while its history and culture often take a back seat to contemporary realities. As the path changes, so may the overall brand.

Hence, public diplomacy officers cannot simply base their messages and strategies on historical or cultural bases but, rather, they must create strategies that meet the interests of their government’s political ambitions at any given point in time.
As is the case for many communications strategies in this new technological era, messages must be selected in such a way that they will resonate with target audiences. These audiences can be as big as the globe or as small as a few people.

The strategic use of data analytics can allows practitioners to select a wide matrix of audiences for each of your messages. Each message becomes the country’s brand in the eyes of the target audience, and this allows a public affairs officer to connect with an infinite number of people.

Indeed, the story of the five blind people trying to describe an elephant by concentrating their touch on different parts of the beast’s body comes to mind. Each has his or her own unique perspective, and each defines the animal according to that perspective.

While there is not one single brand that can necessarily apply to any given country, one can reach different decision makers with tailor made messages that can create, in their minds, the brand that most likely suits one’s purposes.

And that is how branding nations will occur more frequently in this new millennium.

[i]Mérida, Yucatán[/i]
[b][email protected][/b]


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