Retail Marketing - Shopping Center Marketing

Brand managers are fond of lists showing how their brands stack up against the competition.  The same is true for nation branding.  But how do you rank a nation brand?  How does Germany’s brand stack up against Singapore’s? Or France’s against the UK’s?
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.

East West Global Index 200
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?

[Full Story by Randall Frost at Brandchannel]