Brand America: The mother of all brands
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hate you, but please send us Baywatch.’ This is one of the great soundbites that are liberally scattered throughout Anholt and Hildreth’s provocative text on America the brand. In some ways their book is a strange mixture of admiration and awe with regard to the power of brand America, tempered with an awareness and acknowledgment of the many and sometimes extremely destructive negative repercussions of the USA’s behaviour on the international stage. The Baywatch reference illustrates the phenomenon of how the USA is hated in many parts of the world for its political system and military interventionism, while simultaneously its cultural output is devoured insatiably in the very same places. As one of the first books focusing explicitly on the nation as a brand, ‘Brand America’ outlines the potential benefits to any nation in developing its brand reputation: it helps consumers make millions of everyday purchasing decisions; it can influence companies deciding where to set up their overseas operations; it can affect government decisions as to where to spend their foreign aid budgets; and it can play a role in international sporting bodies selecting which country will host their next event, and so on. The authors conclude that the brand image of a country has a profound impact on its
social, cultural, economic and political destiny. Anholt and Hildreth caution that ‘there is definitely something inflammatory about the language of marketing’, however, and the vocabulary of marketing can sound cynical, arrogant and even sinister. Therefore, politicians should not imitate it too closely, no matter how modern they think it may make them sound. In response to one of the common objections that is made to nation branding, namely that the process is ethically dubious, the authors declare that the idea of nation branding, like any kind of statecraft, is ethically neutral and that it can be used as an instrument of democratic progress or as one of manipulation and deceit. Engaging the country’s population in the nation branding project is advocated as one way to avoid the danger of deceptive practice in building a nation’s brand. Placing the USA in the context of other nation brands, the authors suggest that there are a handful of megabrand countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France with images so powerful and so positive that there might not appear to be any pressing need for these countries to manage their images. Each time a new brand emerges from one of these countries, suggest Anholt and Hildreth, it seems to have a head start over all its competitors.
䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1479-1803 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 12, NO. 5, 405–406 JUNE 2005
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BOOK REVIEW
In a class of its own and way ahead of its competitors is brand America, which is purported to lead the world in a number of domains, for example, the definitive youth lifestyle through brands such as Coca–Cola, Pepsi, MTV, Levi’s, Wrangler and so on; the definitive older male lifestyle through brands such as Marlboro, Budweiser, Jim Beam, Jack
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