It’s not about Mongolian Goat Cheese; it’s about how Mongolia as a whole – politically, geographically, natural resources, culture, etc – is percieved and “understood” in the “collective consciousness” (popular culture, media, etc.)

Of course there are good and bad sides to branding: pigeonholing vs. attention garnering and focussing, etc.

Branding is an act. It is the intention behind the act that matters, and how it is carried out. The act itself is meaningless.

I recently heard a teacher of English who spent six months in Ethiopia talk about her time there, and she siad the first question her students asked her was what she knew about Ethiopia. Before she came, she didn’t know much (to balance famine, she did know about Ethiopia’s fame in Olympic distance running). The high school students she spoke to were clearly aware that their country had a brand, and concerned about it. I don’t know whether they thought of a brand as a tool they might be able to shape for their own use.

I remember also seeing one well-made, well, infomercial I guess, about illegal immigrants and the slave trade that still goes on in the U.S. U.S. ads create brands for other countries, as people have pointed out. (Also talked about this in a modernism class; the Victorian idea that travelling in space can take you back in time still turns up in ads for Carribean cruises.) I wonder how often it’s deliberate, and how often it’s ignorant. I don’t see much TV. It seems that at least a few organizations here are trying to use advertisements to change national brands now… or I hope so.

Moreover, countries AND first families hire Public Relations companies. Hill & Knowlton represents more countries and first families than any other company that I know of, but I’m not on top of these statistics, so I don’t know if that is still true. What that means is that a private PR company then negotiates many international media deals, a relatively invisible united nations of sorts.

I think people who enjoy the fine essay above will be well served by reading Mickey Z.’s 7 Deadly Spins or Perkins’ Confessions of An Economic Hit Man. Both of these books deal with the branding of countries.

I am pleased to see the material above so well covered.

However, sampling issues of the research discussed is important to take into consideration. Who is polled? Many international studies only draw from participants with telephones. That greatly skews the results in less developed countries. In many countries, answering questions candidly is a brave act.

In the United States, most of the time, answering polls is safe. But, the results of polls are regularly ignored. When 80% of Americans favor some sort of socialized medicine but this is an initiative that is considered politically crippled, what they mean is that since no private company will make billions off the proposition that no politician should support it.

So, much of what is presented as the branding of a country is actually the branding of corporate interests as if they represented the desires of the populous.

That’s the real trick of branding, making one thing seem as if it stands for something else. Look at the word liberate. How liberated is a dead Iraqi? Or, is all my talk just intellishit?

Lloyd Davies has a write up from a talk by Theordore Zeldin on the art of conversation, both face-to-face and online. conversation is an art, so there is no guaranteed way of becoming a good conversationalist and everyone develops their…