The Homa Files

Excerpted from Brand Channel “Rating Nation Brands: What Really Counts” by Randall Frost, October 6, 2008

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Simon Anholt, a nation branding expert who advises governments on such issues, believes it is unacceptable for governments to spend taxpayers’ and donors’ money on nation branding campaigns if the results can’t be measured, tracked, or made accountable. For that reason, he launched his Nation Brands Index (NBI) in 2005…

The NBI index considers a country’s exports, governance, culture and heritage, people, tourism, and investment and immigration…

According to Anholt, the NBI ranking is not simply a list of the 40 or 50 ‘strongest nation brands’ in the world. Rather, he says, it’s a highly detailed analysis and comparison of 40 or 50 selected countries…

Last August, East West Communications in Washington, D.C., released a competitive ranking of nation brands. Unlike the NBI index, the East West Global Index 200 looks at all 192 UN members, as well as 8 territories, based on how they are perceived in the international media.

According to East West president Thomas Cromwell, the new index tracks 38 major media sources…plus major regional publications that are translated into English and some digitized input from broadcast channels…

Perception Metrics in Ohio conducts the media analyses for East West. According to Brad Snyder of the company,…“What we’re really trying to identify is the brand value by considering the number of mentions, and the tone; we believe both are essential. How much is the country being portrayed positively? And how often is that positive image reinforced? Or is a negative image being presented, and is it hitting home?”…

Both the NBI and East West indexes rank nations by how favourably they are perceived around the world. Because the NBI measures consumer perceptions, however, and East West media perceptions, one would not expect total agreement in the two rankings. But both indexes employ scientifically sound methodologies, so one might anticipate a little more overlap than appears to be the case..

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If one considers the top 100 ranked (positively nuanced) countries in the East West index, the ten most frequently media-cited countries are the US, the UK, Australia, France, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada. These countries correspond quite closely to those that have the highest rankings in the NBI index.

One interpretation of this result is that although the media sets the agenda for awareness of countries (what countries people think about), it does not influence what people think of those countries nearly as much…

Professor David Gerstner of Pace University in New York is currently developing yet another nation branding index. Says Gerstner, “Given the increasing importance, attention, and interest in place branding, more nation rankings are likely to appear in the future. The results of these studies are likely to vary. The reason is that, even though they claim to measure the same idea—how attractive or well-regarded a nation is—due to differences in methodologies they are actually measuring different things.”

Edit by SAC

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Full article:
http://www.brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=443

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