Israel, Want to Improve Your ‘Brand’? End the Palestinian Conflict.

That’s just one bit of advice from nation-branding guru Simon Anholt, the founding editor of Place Branding, a wonkish quarterly journal devoted to nation brand management. It’s covered in a recent issue of Foreign Policy (even if you’re not a policy wonk, the dessert recipes in the back are fabulous). Why are we writing about it? Why have we just created a new weblog category devoted to nation branding? We can’t get enough of the topic, in part because we know at some level it drives the travel decisions we make. As we’ve noted before, branding efforts have completely changed public perception of countries like Spain and New Zealand. That makes one wonder whether countries with bigger image problems can turn things around with a slick marketing campaign, a few well-timed commercials on CNN and a funky-hip logo. Probably not, says Anholt.

Writes Jeremy Kahn:

[T]o Anholt’s credit, he is acutely aware that “rebranding” a country is a difficult business. He is especially disdainful of marketing campaigns that attempt to slap a new slogan on a country that remains fundamentally unchanged. “A lot of very poor countries—Uganda and Nigeria, for instance—are spending millions on TV campaigns. I would be astounded if that made any difference to people’s views of the country at all,” he says. “In fact, I suspect it will make it worse because people know how much advertising costs. It will simply reinforce the idea that these places are corrupt because they are spending so much on what amounts to propaganda while their people are starving.”

The more one talks to Anholt and reads his essays, the more one realizes that his vision of branding isn’t really about marketing at all. It’s about reforming “the product,” i.e., the actual country. That means changing policy. For instance, he cites the “rebranding” of South Africa as an example. “The rebranding miracle was a political miracle. It was the end of apartheid,” he says. “Marketing may have helped communicate that internally to people, but it didn’t create the miracle.” Anholt is aware that the real work—reforming legal systems, building new roads, or reducing poverty—can take decades.

The problem is, when you start defining branding as policy innovation, what a marketing consultant says about it becomes less and less important. And much of the policy advice in Place Branding is so facile as to be useless. Anholt’s answer to Israel’s negative image? End the conflict with the Palestinians. His idea for improving perceptions of the United States? Ask permission before invading a country.

Piece of cake.