When people hear the word brand, they typically think of corporate and product brands.

But people,
countries, cities, conventions, and lots of other things are brands as well. In fact, we have a number of
countries and even cities as brand clients. Which raises the question: If a company or product brand is
ultimately about making money, what benefit does a countrys brand bring? And that leads to the
follow-up question for national governments and national business organizations: Should they actively
manage their country brand is it worth the effort?
For a recent speech I gave at the Council on Foreign Relations, we identified two important impacts
that a country brand can have, and the aspects of the BAV model that quantify those impacts. The work
provides some important insights for national governments and national business communities.
The first impact that a country brand can have is in the political arena. Having a strong country brand
means that when the company speaks in the political realm of national and international affairs, it is
more likely to be listened to. Having that sort of clout makes it more likely that the country will be able
to gets its national priorities implemented sometimes on issues that have critical importance for the
country. In the BAV four-pillar model, the Esteem pillar provides the quantitative measure of a
countrys political respect, and country esteem is also tightly connected to perceptions of a countrys
Leadership, one of the BAV brand attributes.
The second impact that a country brand can have is in the economic realm, and according to our
analysis, that impact can be direct or indirect. The direct impacts a country brand can have are in
attracting tourism and business investment, both of which are driven in significant part by the
emotional attraction that a brand creates among the target audience (i.e., the countrys brand).
The indirect impact a country brand can have is by creating premium pricing power for brands in the
country. Sometimes this impact is within particular categories. For instance, the same bottle of wine
costs more if its from France, and (to go to a city or regional level), the same electronic gadget may
cost more from a Silicon Valley company. But our analysis shows that this impact operates at the
aggregate level as well. Brands across the board from particular countries can command higher prices
than those from other countries, simply by virtue of the strength of the countrys brand.
The pillars in the BAV model that quantify these direct and indirect economic impacts of a country
brand are Energized Differentiation and Relevance. That is perhaps no surprise, given that in the
corporate realm those pillars, taken together, are the strongest predictor of future stock market returns.
The lessons here for governments and business communities are perhaps obvious. A strong national
brand provides both political and economic lift to the country and its brands, and so its worth
managing country brands with the same tools and focus that the best companies bring to the
management of their own brands. The idea that countries behave rather like brands is by now fairly
familiar to most marketers, and to many economists and politicians too. Originally a reconditeacademic
curiosity, the notion is gaining broader acceptance, and its value as a metaphor for how countries can
position themselves in the global marketplace in order to boost exports, inward investment, tourism and
much more besides, is pretty well understood. International marketers, too, are at last beginning to
understand just how much equity can be added to their brands through the judicious leveraging of their
real or perceived country of origin. John Pantzalis and Carl A. Rodrigues (1999) have even proposed
that the movement of international capital is influenced by perceptions of countries as brands by
investors. Thus, they claim, brand positioning and brand management (where the brand is the country)
become critical in attracting global capital, and they also affect how and when capital may flee a
country in situations such as the 1997 financial crisis. It is certainly a striking thought: that apparently
hard-headed investors may form their view of a countrys economic prospects as a result of the way in
which that countrys brand image has been presented to them in the media, or that they may class
several countries together because of superficial brand associations (the Asian tigers, for example),
rather than anything more scientific. Clearly, there is far more to a powerful place brand image than
simply boosting branded exports around the world: if we pursue the thought to its logical conclusion, a
countrys brand image can profoundly shape its economic, cultural and political destiny. What
ultimately makes the European Commission decide which countries will be considered for membership
of their lite club, and in which order? Their brand image, of course, and what it might or might not
ultimately contribute to the brand image of the European Union itself. When complex wars erupt
between countries, and even experts are hard-pressed to say which is truly the victim and which the
aggressor, it is surely the brand image of each country that sways world opinion towards its customary
blackand- white view. And when suspects are tried by international courts for acts of terrorism or
espionage, how sure can we be that the jury is not swayed by their brand of origin? One can even make
a case for place branding encouraging more moderate foreign policy: after all, there is nothing like a
proper sense of the value of a nations good name to make its leaders think twice before acting
aggressively or irresponsibly towards their neighbours. A positive place brand encourages inward
investment, and tourism is a magnet for talent (both new immigrants and returning members of the
diaspora), and if Destination Branding