ONE BY ONE, GOVERNMENTS BEGAN TO ASK FOR MY ADVICE ON how to improve their country’s standing. The advice they got from me was always not to waste public money on logos or media campaigns, but instead to find new ways of behaving that might, over time, earn them a solid and well-deserved international reputation.

“What can we say to make ourselves famous?” was the usual question, and I urged those governments instead to ask, “What can we do to make ourselves relevant?” Some were visibly disappointed, especially if they were facing an election in the coming months.

At about this time, the UK government was starting to take an interest in the idea that the image of Britain affected its ability to trade profitably, and in 1999 it commissioned a survey of international attitudes toward Britain. The survey sparked a good deal of discussion about how a country could understand and manage its own reputation, and a group was set up within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the FCO is Britain’s ministry of foreign affairs) to work on the issue. I was invited to sit on the working group, which later became known as the Public Diplomacy Board. This was a voluntary position which I retained until 2010. Working in this way as a semi-insider taught me more than I ever really wanted to know about the challenge of steering complex strategies and policies through the bureaucratic, legislative, financial, and political labyrinth of government.

My first overseas invitation, in 2000, was from the Croatian Ministry of European Integration. Their insight was that one of the main factors working against their country’s aspiration to join the European Union was the image of the country itself. In the eyes of most Western Europeans, Croatia was simply another ex-socialist country in the Balkan Peninsula and thus was associated in their minds with everything negative they had ever been taught about the Eastern Bloc. And the only things they had ever been taught about the Eastern Bloc were negative. Unless ordinary people in Western Europe could be encouraged to take another look and really see Croatia’s fascinating culture, its rich history, its economic potential, its delightful people, and its beautiful landscapes and coastlines, they were unlikely to support their own governments in recommending Croatia’s accession to the European Union.

The conversations with various experts and officials in the Croatian government were every bit as productive and fascinating as I hoped they would be, weaving in and out of disciplines that included international relations, mass psychology, public policy, ethics, media studies, history, sociology, anthropology, politics, economics, international law—and yes, a scrap of marketing communications too.

The last item was arguably the least distinguished of the disciplines involved, but it brought to the table a vital dash of insight into human nature. What the “creative industries” understood best, it seemed to me, wasn’t so much how to play around with words and pictures, but the crucial role that creativity plays in winning people’s attention and in encouraging them to think about things in new and different ways (my own definition of the much abused word creative is that it’s simply the opposite of boring). Without the addition of this particular magic, the more scholarly disciplines could probably do an excellent job of describing the challenges of national standing, but would be unable to achieve much traction in the real world of people, their perceptions, and their prejudices.

Part of me was surprised that this didn’t really feel like work, at least not the kind of work I’d been brought up to expect, the demoralizing office routine I’d seen my father submit to for most of his life. This was learning as I’d never experienced it before. I was encountering unfamiliar cultures, straining my ears to pick up words of unfamiliar languages, tasting new foods and learning new customs, trying to “read” buildings which spoke of an utterly different past, exchanging ideas with people planted and grown in such different soil from my own.

Most importantly, I wasn’t a tourist, simply gawping at other people’s countries. I was there by invitation, contributing to conversations about how those countries could be steered within the international community and toward the future. I counted myself very lucky indeed.

My work in Croatia produced an invitation to Slovenia, and then by various introductions and recommendations to Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Georgia, Albania, Russia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. It’s interesting, and possibly significant, that I learned all my early lessons about propaganda in and around the former Soviet Union.

I soon found that working with less developed countries was often more stimulating than working with rich countries, as they plainly needed every advantage they could get, and their governments were much more likely to take my advice than, say, the government of the United Kingdom, whose mighty civil service seemed to exist mainly to prevent anything ever changing. I suppose if you have a basically successful national recipe, as the UK feels it has had for so many centuries, it seems logical to make it as difficult as possible for anybody to interfere with it.

The UK’s bureaucrats enjoyed listening to new ideas from outsiders like me, but I began to suspect it was only so they could subsequently claim they’d meticulously examined all the alternatives and after careful consideration decided it was better to keep things as they were. The celebrated BBC sitcom Yes, Minister, in which an ambitious but naive politician is perpetually foiled in his attempts to introduce new policies by a cadre of wily bureaucrats, isn’t really fiction at all; it’s practically a documentary. I wonder how long it will take, in these turbulent times, before the British establishment and its European counterparts finally come to realize that change is no longer something to dodge, but something on which their very survival depends.

As I began to discover, the trouble with most governments is that while the civil service is mainly interested in initiatives that maintain the status quo, its political masters are mainly interested in initiatives that improve their chances of re-election. Very little of my work pushed either of those buttons, so if I wanted my advice to be followed rather than just purchased and put on a shelf, I would have to focus on countries that actually wanted and needed change.

So in 2004 I began to work in partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, a specialized agency of the United Nations, based on our common interest in how developing countries could better measure, manage, and benefit from their intangible assets. Those assets included their cultural traditions, their languages and their natural and agricultural produce, and of course the image of the country itself.

This felt like important work because it’s not only rich countries that have powerful and positive images, although they are the majority. Jamaica, for example, where my WIPO colleague Paul Regis and I worked, has a powerful and distinctive image which inspires a good deal of affection around the world, but foreign companies often make free use of Jamaican and Rastafarian imagery to sell more of their products. It never occurs to them that they are extracting value from the nation without its consent, just as surely as if they’d flown in during the night and taken sugar from the plantations or bauxite from the hills.

I don’t think that trying to prevent this kind of piracy by legal means is the right approach—and here my views differed somewhat from WIPO’s—because after all, when Adidas puts Jamaican colors on a pair of trainers, it is also helping to promote the image of Jamaica around the world and spending the kind of money that the Jamaican government would be hard-pressed to justify. But it seems only proper that Jamaica receive some kind of royalty on the profits its flag is helping others to generate and that it also have the right to ensure that its national assets are appropriately used. I’ll never forget the reggae legend Bunny Wailer describing to me the mixture of anger and pride that he and his fellow Rastafarians feel when they see the symbols of their religion used to sell teen fashions and ice cream around the world.

Over several years, Paul and I conducted UN-funded workshops to help governments manage these assets more effectively in Jamaica, Egypt, Romania, Tanzania, Botswana, and Bhutan. Those were unforgettable experiences, and if I’d done nothing else in my career, I’d have been able to look back on those trips with the pleasure of knowing that, for a lucky minority of which I was a member, work can be a pure delight.

More importantly, I began to realize that a country’s desire for a better image and its potential contribution to the community of nations were critically connected. As I wrote in an article at the time, “If the world’s governments placed even half the value that most wise corporations have learned to place on their good names, the world would be a safer and quieter place than it is today.”

At the time I first met them, the Slovenian government was thinking of spending several million euros on advertising to promote the fact that this was a more prosperous, more stable, and more beautiful country than any of its neighbors and indeed better off (in terms of GDP per capita) than Greece and Portugal, which were already members of the European Union.

It occurred to me that since there was evidently spare money sloshing around, Slovenia might instead consider becoming a donor to its more troubled neighbors in the western Balkans. This would not only put the money to better use than burning it on a communications campaign that would be forgotten in a week if it was noticed at all, but incidentally, would also demonstrate to anyone paying attention that Slovenia was in a rather different financial position than some of its neighbors.

To the government’s great credit, this is exactly what Slovenia did, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was soon able to report that the media coverage generated by the country’s surprising and generous gesture was worth significantly more than they were originally proposing to spend on advertising.

Slovenia’s role as an important regional donor is one that it continues to this day—and there is no question that the country’s image has changed almost beyond recognition since the 1990s. How much of this increased esteem was produced by the donations, and how much by Slovenia’s joining the European Union, becoming a desirable tourist destination, or coming seventh (twice) in the Eurovision Song Contest, is a matter for speculation. But something has definitely worked.

And a little light bulb went on above my head: people like it when countries are kind to each other.

One reason such imaginative and resolute behavior is so rare is that many government officials find it hard to see their country as others see it, even with the help of research. The same officials who can be admirably objective about most of the topics they deal with in their daily work are oddly incapable of applying the same skills when it comes to perceptions of their homeland. Or perhaps that isn’t so odd: a high level of patriotism is expected of elected politicians and bureaucrats, and that doesn’t sit naturally with cool-headed professional neutrality or sympathy with the ignorant prejudice of foreigners.

This patriotic blindness makes for hopeless strategists. I once asked a senior Croatian official what he thought were the most admirable qualities of his country, just one or two things he wished that people around the world might one day come to know about his homeland. As it happened, he was able to answer with great confidence because a commission had been set up to answer just this question. After three years of work, he told me, the commission had determined that the two things the whole world ought to know about Croatia were (1) that Faust Vrančić, the man who conceived the principle of the metal-stayed suspension bridge two centuries before the first one was actually built, was technically born in Croatia (or would have been if Venetian Dalmatia had been called Croatia in 1551, which it wasn’t), and (2) no fewer than a hundred distinct varieties of wild grasses grew on Croatia’s Mediterranean coast.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of questioning the importance to him and perhaps to other Croatians of these facts, but I think it’s unlikely they would impress a great many people around the world. Vrančić was indeed a remarkable visionary who deserves to be better remembered, but a country’s forgotten achievements are by definition of no use to that country’s standing today, or else they wouldn’t be forgotten. The only people guaranteed to be interested in Vrančić are historians of the Italian Renaissance, who are surely less than 0.00001 percent of the people that Croatia would like to engage with in order to enhance its commercial, political, economic, cultural, and social transactions. Botanists with an interest in Mediterranean wild grasses may well be a smaller group.

Like family jokes, these sorts of facts are meaningful only because they are in some sense yours: if they’re somebody else’s, they are automatically insignificant. What matters is not what your country has done, but what it’s going to do, and what matters to the world is what that has got to do with them.

At this point I began to wish I had more solid data to support the advice I was providing to governments. I sometimes caught myself making assertions about how certain countries were perceived but realized that these were mainly based on my personal perceptions of those countries and were therefore highly unreliable; they were also very likely to differ from the perceptions of people in other parts of the world. I searched for studies on how people perceived other countries, but all I could find was small-scale polling that asked people from one country what they thought about another country, in very general terms. I wanted to know what everybody thought about everywhere else, in detail.

So late one evening I put in a call to an acquaintance of mine with the portentous name of Rob Monster, who ran a company called Global Market Insite, in Seattle. GMI maintained an online panel of six million consumers around the world, which it hired out to market research companies.

I told Rob that I wanted to find out what everybody in the world thought about all the countries in the world, and proposed to create a ranking which I was thinking of calling the Nation Brands Index. In less than an hour, we had a partnership agreement. GMI would provide the services of its monstrous consumer panel; I would design the questionnaire and the basic methodology for the study; and we would jointly analyze and report on the findings.

The Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index, or NBI, was launched in 2005, and for the first edition we polled twenty thousand people in twenty countries on their views of eleven other countries. Later that year, we launched a companion study, the Anholt-GMI City Brands Index, which measured international perceptions of thirty cities. For the first three years, we ran the NBI quarterly, increasing the number of countries whose images we measured, first to twenty-five and then to thirty-five. The country with the strongest image turned out to be Sweden. America ranked fourth, equal with Germany, rather lower than I was expecting, but perhaps this was because the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—an act which had created enormous international controversy—was still rumbling on.

The questionnaire I had devised for the NBI was long and detailed, measuring people’s perceptions of each country’s government, its people, its built and natural landscapes, its traditional and contemporary cultures, its investment and immigration attractiveness, its products and services. We asked people how much they would value having a friend from each country, or employing one of its citizens; whether knowing that a product came from that country would make the product feel more or less valuable; whether its government seemed to care about international issues such as climate change and poverty, or was more focused on domestic concerns; whether it was the sort of country they would like themselves or their dependents to live or work or study in; whether or not they expected a warm welcome if they visited the country as tourists or migrants; whether they saw its population as honest, hard-working, reliable, or otherwise.

But as I’ve often joked, it soon became clear that I’d given birth to the most boring social survey in history: from one edition to the next, the results changed surprisingly little. We were asking different people the same questions each time, yet their answers hardly varied. It began to look as if national images were more of a fixed asset than a liquid currency which ebbed and flowed according to the vicissitudes of public opinion. The more data we collected, the more it looked as if people’s perceptions of other countries were rusted into place.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising. After all, there are around two hundred countries in the world, and if we all reassessed our views about them every time they won or lost a football game, had an election or a recession or an earthquake, got embroiled in a scandal or took in refugees, we’d have no time left to do anything else. Our perceptions of most other countries (at least, the ones we don’t have some strong personal connection with, or share a border with) are rigid, simplified, largely unchanging stereotypes that we keep in cold storage in the back of our mind, and simply never question unless we are absolutely compelled to.

When a country does something that doesn’t exactly chime with those perceptions, we will often disregard it. Only if that country keeps behaving in a strikingly different way for years, in a way that conforms to a new pattern we can easily understand, will we eventually and reluctantly unpick our lifelong assumptions and replace them with a new set (which might easily be just as unfair, superficial, and inaccurate as the previous set). In an important sense, the Nation Brands Index is also an index of ignorance. But however ill informed these views may be, that doesn’t mean it’s safe to disregard them.

These views of other countries aren’t simply opinions we pick up from day to day in the media. They are stories we begin learning from the moment we first acquire language, from our parents and teachers and friends and family, from the books we read and the products we use, the music we hear, and the food we eat.

National images are huge cultural constructs. The different ways in which Americans see Peru, or Koreans see Vietnam, are integral parts of the American and Korean cultures, and the same is true for every country on earth. We imbibe these attitudes from the air we breathe, from the society around us, and it’s hardly surprising we will go to such lengths to avoid having them challenged or changed.

After three years and twelve editions of the Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index, Rob Monster decided to take GMI public and suggested that one of his clients, the research company GfK-Roper, should take over the study. So, following some tweaks to the questionnaire and the methodology, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index was launched in 2008, with the list of countries whose images we measured expanded to fifty.

At this stage, I let GfK take over conducting, analyzing, and managing what had become a major annual survey. Now, when I told governments that the average city-dwelling thirty-five-to-fifty-year-old male Chinese professional had a more positive view of their country’s investment potential than his Japanese equivalent, or that young female South Africans wanted to explore that country more than any of the world’s top ten tourist destinations, I could say it with a certain confidence.

From time to time, I would throw in some questions from left field, asking our respondents, for example, how they would feel if their lost passport was accidentally replaced with one from the wrong country, and which country they would most and least like that to be; or how they would feel if they were the subject of an arranged marriage with a stranger from each of the other forty-nine countries in the list. The answers were always illuminating (for example, Canadians would most like to marry an American, but it turns out that Americans are two-timing them: they put both Canadians and Brits as their first choice).

For a couple of editions of the Nation Brands Index, we teamed up with Brand Finance, a firm that calculates the monetary value of intangible assets such as brands. Their calculations showed that Barack Obama had added three trillion dollars’ worth of “brand equity” to the United States simply by stepping into the White House.

The City Brands Index also showed something about the extreme stability of place image: over a fifth of the international panel still spontaneously associated San Francisco with its 1906 earthquake, ninety-nine years after the event and long before any of them were born.

The survey continues to produce thought-provoking results. It seems that a majority of Brazilians strongly dislike Singapore, ranking it below several nations that the majority of other nationalities see as virtual pariahs (if somebody can explain this to me, I’d be grateful); on average, Muslims worldwide admire the USA more than any other self-declared religious group anywhere in the world admires any other country; most people around the world actually started to regard the American landscape as less beautiful during the second presidential term of George W. Bush (a sort of negative halo effect which I won’t go into now or we’ll be here all day).

Controversially, the Nation Brands Index also showed that hosting the Olympic Games or the soccer World Cup was, statistically speaking, more likely to damage a country’s image than enhance it. Analysis of the NBI data before and after numerous major events showed that they are far more effective at drawing attention to the host country’s failings and defects and reinforcing negative stereotypes than promoting its image. Even highly successful events—like London’s 2012 Olympics—do little more than “pay the rent” on a highly respected country’s image and can do little to enhance it. In the case of Brazil and South Africa, these hugely expensive events have set back both countries’ image by many years.

One of the most disheartening sets of NBI results concerns Iran, a country that typically languishes in last position of the fifty countries measured. This in itself is perhaps unsurprising, since today the dominant association with Iran is trouble of one kind or another. But what seems tragic is that on the specific question about the importance of its cultural heritage, people around the world on average rank Iran—one of the cradles of human civilization, with six thousand years of continuous cultural production—thirty-eighth out of the fifty countries measured. Indeed, American and British respondents typically rank it forty-ninth or forty-eighth out of fifty, placing its contribution to human culture twenty or more places below other countries whose populations were living in caves and hitting each other with rocks while Persian culture flourished.

Disapproving of a country’s current direction or its leadership is one thing, but it’s disturbing to witness to what extent this has the power to occlude or perhaps even cancel the memory of its historical contributions, over millennia, to the rest of humanity.

What this all proves is a matter for debate. Does it simply reveal our ignorance and prejudice? Does it prove that national standing is never something you own, but something you rent, and the rent needs to be continually paid? Does it suggest that cultural heritage just isn’t something that most humans particularly prize? Does it prove the old Arab adage that “a good reputation arrives on foot but departs on horseback”? Or does it show that once the label of “rogue nation” has been slapped on to a country, no glimmer of the merit it has previously earned has the power to shine through?

One thing seems likely: Iran’s negative national image restricts its ability to conduct productive exchanges with the international community just as effectively, and probably for far longer, than any number of sanctions.

Giving talks, conducting surveys, and writing books and articles on what had definitely become my favorite subject was the easy part. Using that knowledge and data to provide real governments with real solutions to their very real problems was a challenge of a much higher order. After all, I wasn’t being paid to teach them about the topic of national standing, no matter how rich and fascinating the topic was turning out to be. I was being paid to advise them on how to proceed.

And while telling governments that a better national image couldn’t be acquired simply by spending money on advertising and PR campaigns was no doubt valuable advice—and I’m sure I have saved some countries a good deal of money in this way—the question, “So what does work?” still needed to be properly answered, if indeed it was answerable.

Looking through the data that the Nation Brands Index had so far accumulated, I couldn’t find any dramatic examples of nations moving up or down, and there was absolutely no correlation between the amount of money countries spent on promoting themselves and the strength of their image. This tended to confirm my assumption that international propaganda was futile, but it didn’t give me any clues about what did cause people to change their mind about countries.

I looked instead at a number of historical examples of countries whose international standing did seem to have risen, fallen, or otherwise altered over time, but in almost every case this process was clearly the result of a fundamental and sustained change of social, economic, or political direction, and had taken decades or generations to achieve.

Japan and Germany, to use those powerful examples once again, were the object of universal condemnation at the end of the Second World War but by the end of the twentieth century were almost universally admired (Chinese views of Japan and, to a lesser extent, Italian views of Germany are among the exceptions to this pattern). And the reasons were clear too: both had retreated from militarism and nationalism; embraced the multilateral order; reformed their domestic society, polity, and economy; and had grown greatly in wealth and influence.

Such a dramatic turnaround in less than half a century seemed about as fast as one could reasonably hope for. By the time an entire generation of humanity has absorbed the idea that a country is a “rogue nation,” surely nothing less than the replacement of that generation with the next can begin to erase the idea from human memory.

But where the change in national standing was less dramatic—not so much from pariah to paragon, but simply from ignored to noticed—a few cases did stand out, and the change seemed to have been quicker and clearer. It felt as if Ireland’s image, for example, had gone from wretched to promising—almost, one might say, from loser to winner—in scarcely more than a decade after the mid-nineties. There was even a phrase that went with its foreign-investment-fueled economic growth: the “Celtic tiger.”

Clearly, this improved image wasn’t the result of any propaganda campaign; it was simply reality with delay. The country was doing well, people gradually got to hear about it, and they revised their opinions accordingly.

Yet alongside the economic upturn, Ireland did sometimes do things that seemed to capture people’s attention: surprising, original, occasionally inspiring things. Things that seemed to help tell the story of a perennially unlucky country that had suddenly found new confidence in the genius of its people.

Way back in 1969, for example, the Irish government had passed a law decreeing that people who earned their living through the arts would pay no income tax on their royalties. Journalists were fascinated by this story, as might be imagined, and it was much discussed in the media. This wasn’t a public relations stunt, it was a real policy—one that cost Irish taxpayers a certain amount of money over the years—and one that virtually promoted itself. It seemed to prove that Ireland was a country which truly valued culture and its contribution to society: that idea, in its turn, served to reinforce some of the more flattering things that people had long believed about Ireland and the Irish.

I’ve often used the term symbolic actions to describe such behaviors, although if the word symbolic somehow suggests a lack of substance, that’s unfortunate: these have to be, above all, real projects and real policies that prove to the world that a country deserves the reputation it desires; that are imaginative and unusual enough to “do their own marketing”; that are coherent with a clear, long-term strategy relating to the country’s desired role in the world.

I can hardly stress enough that the purpose of this approach can’t be and shouldn’t be to create a certain image for a country. The purpose is to find, first and foremost, a helpful and productive role for the country in the community of nations. If the country succeeds in doing this, an enhanced reputation will follow almost as a matter of course.

Reputation is not something countries can achieve by aiming directly at it, nor should they try. They should aim directly at the cause of their reputation—their behavior—and reputation will be the consequence. If governments allow themselves to think even in private that the reputation is the true purpose of the exercise, as opposed to being what it is—a desirable side effect—then they probably won’t make the right choices. Absolute integrity of purpose is indispensable.

The idea that simply sending out the right messages can change the image of a nation reminds me of those vibrating weight-loss belts that were once supposed to magically massage away your fat. Everybody knows that you can’t make flesh disappear by doing anything to it directly, you need to operate on its causes: that is, you need to eat less and exercise more.

Slovenia’s decision to demonstrate that it occupied a different role in its region than its neighbors did, by becoming a donor instead of the recipient of aid, was a good example of a symbolic action. If you look carefully, other examples can be found once in a while. In 2001, Estonia declared internet access to be a human right and so proved that it understood and valued technology more than other countries did. In 2010, Catalonia banned bullfighting and thus obliged the world to understand that it wasn’t the same place as Spain.

Because they were one-offs, none of these rare acts was able to exert a sustained influence on international perceptions, but for the short time they were noticed and remembered, they probably made a small difference and encouraged a certain number of people to revisit their fixed prejudices about what kinds of places these were.

And even frequent symbolic actions don’t do much unless they tell a longer story about the country. They must be the natural expressions of a long-term strategy that guides its actions in the international community.

It’s back to that disconcertingly simple question once again: What is your country for? Or, to put it another way: If the hand of fate were to slip on the celestial keyboard in the middle of the night and delete your country, who apart from your own citizens would notice, and why would they care?

Such a strategy should ensure that symbolic actions aren’t episodic and random, but that they follow a clear strategic path toward a clear goal. And for each symbolic action, many more ordinary policies and projects will be devised mainly for the benefit of the nation and its people, without any need or desire for them to be noticed around the world. Sheer substance must outweigh symbolic actions by orders of magnitude, or the whole exercise runs the risk of becoming fundamentally insincere.

This seemed to be the basic recipe: a strong strategy underpinning a good deal of substance, occasionally punctuated by symbolic actions. In the intervening years, I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the recipe isn’t a good one, but a great deal to show how very difficult governments find it to follow the recipe consistently and long enough to produce meaningful and measurable results.

In 2007, I wrote a book called Competitive Identity, which set out this new approach and in which I did my best to kill off the idea, once and for all, that a country’s image could be deliberately altered through communications.¹ Indeed, the title of the book itself, Competitive Identity, was the result of an attempt to replace, once and for all, the misleading phrase nation brand with something a little less ambiguous and provocative.

It was to take a few more years before I realized that the phrase Competitive Identity was in its own way an unfortunate one. It managed to sidestep the distraction of marketing communications, but mired the discipline even more firmly in the territory of competitiveness. And soon enough, this notion that nations needed, above all, to defeat or at least surpass each other, began to emerge as the really mistaken assumption, and the one which, above all others, I felt compelled to challenge.