Some people may not have thought of their country as a brand before, but when you think about it every country has a brand identity. This can take the form of identity elements like flags, costumes, uniforms etc. and products like food and drink, sports and so on. What does France mean to you, food, cheese, wine, the language maybe?
Anyway countries do have identities and associated attributes, and apparently the American brand is having an image problem that some ad execs want to try and change. Hmmm, well a slick ad campaign is one way to go, maybe a new spokes model or celebrity endorsement will help. I wonder how much PR and advertising can offset the negative perception that comes from unilateral military action, an administration that insults other countries, and an increasing reputation for misconduct by business leadership.
Ad execs, marketers seek to revamp U.S. image abroad.
“I wonder how much PR and advertising can offset the negative perception that comes from an administration that”… impoverishes its inhabitants by expanding the hiatus between the obscenely rich and the incredibly poor, increases reputation of liberated paid sex and drugs by inaction, and so poorly conducts its foreign affairs that makes citizens both embarrassed and excluded from the world economy.
That’s how I see Brazil; and I’ve been living here since I was born. It’s not PR which will solve these issues and it’s not PR which will solve the US’s issues. The concept of national brand is not new. Just think of the sentence “Made in Japan” and what that represented in the 80’s and early 90’s. Japan did a hell of a good ad campaign. We have also started the “Industria Brasileira” for our products a couple of years ago… So naive! It was not a brand issue, it was a product issue. How could they expect to win the foreign market by stamping the same old commodities with a new name? So naive it’s embarrassing. We needed to export non-commodities, not commodities with a cute packing design.
Likewise with the United States. It’s not a perception problem, it’s a factual problem. The US government is being led disastrously, that is why its image is disastrous. That’s what they should try and fix.
I have spent my entire life embarrassed by the presidents that are elected here - and embarrassed to see how gullible and forgetful people are (since they keep re-electing them) - but I had an “image” of the US which indicated that no similar thing would happen there. And now, there you are…
When folks looking from outside the US saw Bush being put in the presidency (put, as in *not-elected*), it not only made people wonder if the US’s positive image (the ‘American Way of Life’, the ’self-made man’ image) was a hoax, but also if this implausible experience of having that ignoble in the government represented what the US *is* now.
Doing PR to show the world that this is not what the US is about, is the same as masking the situation because you are embarrassed of who’s leading the government. Which is understandable, of course, but does NOT solve the problem. Giving the problem a pretty face doesn’t make it go away.
What a waste of time and money. And in such a fruitful country. It’s something I would except from *my* government. Embarrassed as that makes me.