SIMON ANHOLT is an independent policy adviser and researcher from the United Kingdom who has worked with the leaders and governments of more than fifty nations to help them improve their economic, political, and cultural engagement with the international community.

In 2014, he launched the Good Country Index, the first survey to measure how much countries contribute to humanity and the planet, outside their own borders. His TED talk launching the Index passed six million views in 2019 and was ranked by TED viewers as the fourth “most inspiring” ever. His seven TEDx talks have accumulated 1.5 million more views. In 2016 Anholt launched the Global Vote, a platform that allows anybody in the world to vote in the elections of other countries: more than 100,000 Global Voters from 130 countries participated in its coverage of the 2016 US elections.

Anholt, who devised the concept of nation brand in 1998, is founder and publisher of the annual Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index and biennial City Brands Index, which poll twenty thousand people in twenty countries to monitor global perceptions of fifty countries and fifty cities. He was vice chair of the UK Foreign Office’s Public Diplomacy Board between 2000 and 2009.

His first company was World Writers, an international strategy firm which he founded in London in 1989 and ran until its sale in 2002. It is still the world leader in its sector today. There, he developed culture mapping, a new approach to international marketing strategy based on an anthropological analysis of global consumer values and attitudes, for more than a hundred companies.

Anholt is the founding editor emeritus of the quarterly journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. His previous nonfiction books are Another One Bites the Grass (John Wiley & Sons, 2000); Brand New Justice (Macmillan, 2003); Brand America (Cyan Books, 2004, 2009); Competitive Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Anholt has a master’s degree from the University of Oxford and was a parliamentarian of the European Cultural Parliament. He was awarded the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Economics in Trieste in 2009 and the Prix d’Excellence du Forum Multiculturel pour un Développement Durable (Award for Excellence in Sustainable Development), at the seventh multicultural forum at the Palais de la Découverte, Paris, in 2010. He was appointed honorary professor in political science by the University of East Anglia in 2013.