MY STORY STARTS IN A PLACE WHICH MIGHT SEEM UNCONNECTED with the state of the world today or with the solutions we must find to the huge challenges that humanity faces in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In the late 1990s, ten years after founding and running a firm that helped companies navigate the complexities of language and culture around the world, I found myself getting more and more interested in the way people perceive certain products and the countries they come from, and the complex ways in which the two are linked. Many years would pass before I realized that the question of national image was much more than a curiosity at the fringes of marketing: it would prove to be a new and powerful incentive for governments to join the global fight against climate change, diesase, poverty, inequality, conflict, and other global challenges.

In 1998, I wrote an essay in a marketing journal. It was an academic journal, but my contribution wasn’t scholarly: I didn’t quote any other authors, the research I’d conducted was limited, and the entire paper had only two footnotes. Well, I’m not an academic and had no aspirations to become one. But I’d had an idea, and I wanted to share it with anyone who was prepared to listen.

In the paper, I explored the idea that all countries have images and that in our age of advanced globalization those images have become increasingly important. A country with a powerful and positive image (like, say, Switzerland) finds it pretty easy to attract tourists, foreign investment, students and researchers, international events, consumers for its products and services, and the attention and respect of other governments and the media. All this adds up to yet more progress and prosperity for countries like Switzerland. On the other hand, a country that fewer people know about (Suriname, for example) or that has primarily negative associations at this point in its history (like Syria), finds it difficult and expensive. To put it simply, countries in good standing trade at a premium; countries in poor standing trade at a discount.

However outdated, inaccurate, and unfair the popular images of countries may be, I wrote, they still have a huge impact because they influence the choices people make about what to buy, where to visit or work or study, where to invest, whom to believe, and whom to trust. In an interconnected and interdependent world, the casual and often uninformed beliefs of billions of ordinary people, driving their everyday behavior, truly determine the fate of nations.

To illustrate my point, I described how people will happily pay a premium for a completely new and unfamiliar product as long as it carries a familiar name: a new electronic gadget from Sony, for example. And behind the reassuring corporate brand of Sony, I argued, there was a bigger, even more powerful presence: the nation brand of Japan.

Perceptions of this sort—Japanese technology is more advanced, Italian fashion more fashionable, German engineering more reliable, American youth labels cooler—are so potent that even products from an unknown company will have a head start in the marketplace as long as the company looks or sounds as if it comes from one of the “right” countries. And countries that can’t provide these associations to their companies, that don’t evoke this feeling of trust or excitement or prestige with consumers in other parts of the world, are lacking a basic competitive advantage. “Made in Myanmar,” no matter how good the products might be, just won’t sell as much premium tech as “Made in Japan.” The value of Japan’s or Germany’s image to its economy is almost beyond calculation.

After my paper was published, a helpful academic wrote to tell me that the phenomenon I had described was properly known as “the country-of-origin effect” and that it had been thoroughly researched. In fact, he had personally authored, coauthored, and edited more than forty papers on the subject since the late 1970s. I felt suitably chastised and began to read up on the topic.

If there was anything original in my paper aside from the phrase I had coined, nation brand, I suppose it was my observation that the same phenomenon applied to many more aspects of a country’s international engagements than just its products. A country’s reputation seems to influence, and is in turn influenced by, everything that country and its people make, sell, say, and do. This effect extends from hosting the Olympics to promoting tourism; from the safety record of its national airline to the behavior of its diplomats; from the value of its currency to the ease or difficulty with which its citizens can find a job or be admitted to a university when they move abroad.

National standing matters, and it matters deeply. Yet it’s largely based on superficial, childish stereotypes that don’t begin to do justice to the richness and complexity of those places—which was why I made the comparison with the images of companies and products. It felt to me that the processes of globalization were turning the cultural, historical, and human wealth of nations into little more than products on the shelf of some gigantic global supermarket.

To my surprise, the paper produced a ripple of interest. It was read by a journalist from a national newspaper, who came to hear me speak at a conference in London and wrote an opinion piece about this unfamiliar new idea. He gleefully cast me in the role of spin doctor, trying to trick governments into spending public funds on acts of vulgar publicity (this was precisely the opposite of what my talk was about).

I suppose that the juxtaposition of the fine, sacred old word nation and the dangerous, slippery modern word brand produced a certain discomfort. Well, it was meant to. A number of the newspaper’s readers added their outrage to the columnist’s, and I found myself at the center of a minor public debate.

It took me a little while to understand that my mildly ironic use of the word brand had backfired. What I couldn’t have foreseen was how, in the years to come, a global throng of design firms, advertising and public relations agencies, marketing consultancies, newspapers, websites, and TV channels would see this as a new and exciting opportunity to sell their advice, messages, and media to governments, and to tap into a virtually limitless global supply of public money. Selling countries looked to them like a far better and bigger business than selling banks, beer, or toilet paper.

What I’d failed to explain properly in my paper was that I was simply describing the way we perceive other countries, the way we reduce them to convenient stereotypes. I wasn’t recommending this as an approach. I was ruefully observing the fact that this is what we all do.

Before long, my unhappy phrase had somehow morphed from nation brand into nation branding. That tiny suffix made a big difference, because it turned an innocent observation about the importance of national reputation into something that sounded like a promise: if you don’t like the image your country is saddled with, it seemed to suggest, here are mysterious, expensive, but devilishly effective commercial techniques for improving, enhancing, and manipulating it.

I had failed to anticipate how governments could be seduced by an idea that was so easily reframed as a simple shortcut to a better national image: an approach, they hoped, that might deliver rapid increases in foreign income without their having to go to the trouble of improving the country itself. I went into a sort of slow-motion panic and over the following years turned out dozens of articles and interviews and talks, each energetically ridiculing the notion that the image of a country could be artificially constructed, but nothing I could say or do would put the meme back in its box.

It was an idea whose time had probably come anyway, but twenty-two years after the publication of my unscholarly paper, the notion that countries, cities, and regions have images which need to be looked after has become a multibillion-dollar global industry. Several times a year now, I hear about some desperately poor country wasting vast sums of its taxpayers’ or donors’ money on logos, slogans, public relations, and advertising campaigns in an effort to raise its profile and burnish its image. And, if asked, the government’s only justification is that so many other countries do it already. The whole industry is little more than a siphon for transferring public money into the pockets of media owners and communications agencies, on a gigantic scale.

What a disaster! And it was partly my fault.

It’s important here to make a clear distinction between these grandiose attempts to manipulate a country’s overall standing and the more traditional, straightforward promotion of a country’s individual sectors, such as tourism or exports.

This may sound like a rather technical distinction, but it’s crucial. Advertising, PR, and even logos can certainly play a useful role in promoting tourism, culture, events, exported products, and to a limited extent even foreign investment, because this is a country selling its products or services to potential customers, and selling things is exactly what marketing is designed to do.

But changing the image of a country—uprooting and manipulating people’s long-standing beliefs and prejudices about that country—well, that’s another matter entirely, and that’s where so much time, money, and effort are wasted.

As I’ve often repeated over the last twenty years, nobody is going to change what they believe about a country just because its government transmits expensive messages declaring that those beliefs are wrong, or tries to distract them by talking about something else. Where I come from in the West, we called this propaganda when the Nazis or the Soviets were doing it, and what so many countries are trying to do today is really no different.

Of course, propaganda can be brutally effective when it’s targeted at a nation’s own citizens. If a government controls all the channels of communication reaching its population, then, as history tells us, most people will eventually come to accept what they are told. It takes a generation or two, but sadly, it often seems to work in the end. Most people in North Korea believe what the state tells them about their own country, its leadership, and the rest of the world because it’s the only version of the story they, their parents, and grandparents have ever heard.

What doesn’t work, and as far as I can tell has never worked, is international propaganda: trying to change the way people outside your direct control view your country. Because you have no influence over the other messages those foreigners hear, every time you try to peddle your version of what your country is doing, they’ll hear any number of contradictory versions. In consequence, nothing will stick, and anyway, as I’ll explain later, messages are not the main way in which we form our views about other countries. Even the United States of America, which pretty much invented the techniques of marketing communications and public relations, and has vast resources for implementing them, has never had much success in shaping its own international image. Like every other country, it’s at the mercy of international public opinion, which is a highly unpredictable force.

Frankly, if international propaganda was possible, then I’d probably be living in the Soviet Union or the Third Reich today, and not (until recently, at any rate) in the European Union. Few people have understood the techniques of nation branding better than Goebbels and Stalin.

Countries aren’t for sale, and for anybody who doesn’t actually live there, a country’s past achievements or current successes are of limited interest. Bragging about your own country, which is what governments so often end up doing, is like a standup comedian who goes onstage and tells the audience how funny he or she is. Don’t tell them to laugh. Be funny. And likewise, for countries: Don’t tell them to admire you. Be admirable.