Branding and the international community
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JACK YAN founded Jack Yan & Associates, JY&A Consulting’s parent company, in 1987. A graduate of Scots College and Victoria University of Wellington, Jack specialises in branding, identity, typography and cross-media branding. At JY&A Consulting, Jack’s focus is on examining branding and global business, including how smaller firms can leverage their intellectual capital by applying an international marketing strategy.
Abstract The international community has come up for analysis in the last few years. It was probably less prompted by 9/11 than by the growing concern over globalisation. Now, the very idea of the international community, the American national image, globalisation and the war on terrorism seem to be converging. The solution, or at least the framework in which to make sense of some of this, can again be found in branding. Nation branding could promote a sense of the international community and prevent countries from following a course of realpolitik at the expense of global harmony.
PULLING TOGETHER THE STRANDS
Jack Yan JY&A Consulting, PO Box 14-368, 13 Mamari Street, Kilbirnie, Wellington 6041, New Zealand Tel: ⫹64 4 387 3213 Fax: ⫹64 4 387 3213 E-mail: [email protected]
The ‘No Logo’1 movement, which saw Naomi Klein put together some of the threads that were concerning people — the opposition to NAFTA by Zapatista rebels, for instance; in the West, criticism of firms like Nike in the BBC’s Branded in the late 1990s — really took shape in mid-2000, as the book became adopted as a ‘bible’ for anti-globalists.2 Those same protesters descended upon McDonald’s and other symbols of American-led globalisation. The author thought that the charges stemmed from issues ranging from nation envy to an absence of ethical branding, rather than any fault of the underlying structure of capitalism.3 This remains the author’s view, but the caveats remain plentiful and the American brand has become an even more urgent inquiry since the USA began its war on terrorism. The
country risks facing isolation, if not at governmental level, then among the citizenry of some countries. Talking to young people in the autumn of 2002 for a paper in a special edition of the Journal of Brand Management on corporate social responsibility, the author found the usual, expected commonalities — tastes, a sense of duty and volunteer work being among them — but one gulf. Numerous American generation-Yers with whom the author spoke rejected a notion of a borderless world, while their counterparts in New Zealand embraced it.4 Meanwhile, young Canadians are behind the activist site TakingITGlobal, founded by a 19- and a 21-year-old. The demographic there was globally minded enough to take a lead and attend the world summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg in 2002.
HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1479-1803 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 10, NO. 6, 447–456 AUGUST 2003
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This is in contrast to the overall mood of 1990s USA, rapidly globalising, happy to embrace the (commercial) internet as it left the fringes of computer science. Th
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