Rating Nation Brands: What Really Counts?

by Randall Frost October 6, 2008

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 started out as an online poll of consumer attitudes toward 35 nation brands around the world. Recently, Anholt teamed up with GfK Roper to produce an expanded (50 country) index.

Says Anholt, “The NBI is a unique resource: now that it’s approaching its fourth year, we have a vast database of literally millions of data points about ‘how the world sees the world,’ and it needs skills and experience like GfK’s to start exploring that resource and getting the most useful findings out of it.”

The NBI index considers a country’s exports, governance, culture and heritage, people, tourism, and investment and immigration. The survey asks questions like “If money were no object, would you like to visit this country on vacation?” or “If you were going to be falsely arrested for a crime you didn’t commit, in which country would you prefer this to happen?” or “Does this country make an important contribution to reducing global warming?” The questions are posed in local languages.

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. “Most of the governments that subscribe to the NBI want to compare perceptions of their country with those of their main competitors, not every place on earth,” he told us.

Anholt says subscribing countries find NBI’s detailed country reports more useful for such comparisons than the global average list. “The NBI’s individual country reports run to around 50 pages of detailed analysis, market by market, covering each aspect of their image, from the viewpoint of hundreds of different population groups,” he said.

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, including The Economist, The Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Straits Times (Asia), The China Morning News (Hong Kong), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Chicago Tribune, plus major regional publications that are translated into English and some digitized input from broadcast channels.

Says Cromwell, “Even with English-only sources, the number of articles surveyed for the index is huge, and there are millions of mentions. English is so dominant in the world that it is fairly safe to say that major stories are likely to appear in English media, sooner or later.”

Perception Metrics in Ohio conducts the media analyses for East West. According to Brad Snyder of the company, “The East West Index measures tone as a ratio of positive and negative messages grammatically connected to a country reference. The index score is then calculated by a complex algorithm that factors tone and the volume of country mentions.” He adds, “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?”

East West will publish both annual and quarterly indexes. “The annual indexes will tend to capture the long-term perceptions about countries, especially over time, while the quarterly indexes will tend to reflect short-term events or decisions that make news. This makes for a very useful tool for countries to use,” says Cromwell. East West also offers customized reports to its clients.

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 (below).

Rank NBI/East West

1 Germany/Singapore
2 United Kindom/Hong Kong
3 Canada/Malaysia
4 France/Taiwan
5 Australia/Australia
6 Italy/United Arab Emirates
7 Switzerland/Qatar
8 Japan/ Monaco
9 Sweden/Canada
10 United States/United Kingdom

Anholt argues that online polling creates a more accurate picture than media analysis of how people actually perceive nation brands. “Perceptions of places are based on far more than media coverage: they are literally part of the culture of each individual country where those perceptions are held. One of the shortcomings of media analysis is that most people will not be exposed to any of the coverage that is analyzed.”

But Cromwell defends his media-based approach. “Countries have to be more concerned about media perceptions than they are about individual consumer perceptions: the universe of the former is just so much larger and includes all those people who have had no immediate experience, or word of mouth experience, to counter media perceptions,” he told us.

Others argue that the two indexes complement each other. Says Jeremy Hildreth of Saffron Brand Consultants in London, “Anholt’s index looks at perceptions of nations from one angle, the East West index from another. Both ways are interesting. Both ways are valid. Both ways are limited. Both ways are helpful as far as they go.”

ConvergenceIs there some point at which the East West and NBI indexes converge? 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. Says Professor Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas, one of the pioneers in the field of media and public opinion analysis and author of Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (2004), "People are certainly aware of Iraq these days, but the news from there is largely negative. It would be interesting to determine if the tone of the news is related to the second level of agenda setting, that is, how people think about these countries. Or to borrow Walter Lippmann's venerable phrase, 'What are the pictures in their heads?'"

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.”

Randall Frost is a freelance writer based in Pleasanton, California. He is the author of The Globalization of Trade. His work has appeared in Worth, The New England Financial Journal, CBSHealthWatch, and a variety of educational publications.