[stop-imf] Brand USA (Naomi Klein LATimes)

[Robert Weissman]

 http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-000017617mar10.story
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  March 10 2002
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       Brand USA
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       AMERICA'S ATTEMPT TO MARKET ITSELF ABROAD USING
       ADVERTISING PRINCIPLES IS DESTINED TO FAIL.
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       By NAOMI KLEIN
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 TORONTO -- When the White House decided it was time to address the rising
 tides of anti-Americanism around the world, it didn't look to a career
 diplomat for help. Instead, in keeping with the Bush administration's
 philosophy that anything the public sector can do the private sector
can do
 better, it hired one of Madison Avenue's top brand managers.
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 As undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs,
 Charlotte Beers' assignment was not to improve relations with other
 countries but rather to perform an overhaul of the U.S. image abroad.
 Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the
 top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies,
 and she's built brands for everything from dog food to power drills.
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 Now she was being asked to work her magic on the greatest branding
 challenge of all: to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to
 an increasingly hostile world. The appointment of an ad woman to this
 post understandably raised some criticism, but Secretary of State Colin
 L. Powell shrugged it off. "There is nothing wrong with getting
somebody who
 knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who
 can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy." Besides, he said,
 "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice." So why, only five months in, does the
 campaign for a new and improved Brand USA seem in disarray? Several of its
 public service announcements have been exposed for playing fast and loose
 with the facts. And when Beers went on a mission to Egypt in January to
 improve the image of the U.S. among Arab "opinion-makers," it didn't go well.
 Muhammad Abdel Hadi, an editor at the newspaper Al Ahram, left his meeting
 with Beers frustrated that she seemed more interested in talking about vague
 American values than about specific U.S. policies. "No matter how hard you
 try to make them understand," he said, "they don't."
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 The misunderstanding likely stemmed from the fact that Beers views the
 United States' tattered international image as little more than a
 communications problem. Somehow, despite all the global culture pouring
 out of New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, despite the fact that you can
 watch CNN in Cairo and Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, America still hasn't
 managed, in Beers' words, to "get out there and tell our story." In
fact, the
 problem is just the opposite: America's marketing of itself has been too
 effective. Schoolchildren can recite its claims to democracy, liberty and
 equal opportunity as readily as they can associate McDonald's with
family fun
 and Nike with athletic prowess. And they expect the U.S. to live up to its
 promises.
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 If they are angry, as millions clearly are, it's because they have seen
 those promises betrayed by U.S. policy. Despite President Bush's
 insistence that America's enemies resent its liberties, most critics of
 the U.S. don't actually object to America's stated values. Instead, they
 point to U.S. unilateralism in the face of international laws, widening
 wealth disparities, crackdowns on immigrants and human rights
 violations--most recently in Guantanamo Bay. The anger comes not only from
 the facts of each case but also from a clear perception of false advertising.
 In other words, America's problem is not with its brand--which could scarcely
 be stronger--but with its product.
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 There is another, more profound obstacle facing the relaunch of Brand
 USA, and it has to do with the nature of branding itself. Successful
 branding, Allen Rosenshine, chairman and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, recently
 wrote in Advertising Age, "requires a carefully crafted message delivered
 with consistency and discipline." Quite true. But the values Beers is charged
 with selling are democracy and diversity, values that are profoundly
 incompatible with this "consistency and discipline." Add to this the fact
 that many of America's staunchest critics already feel bullied into
 conformity by the U.S. government (bristling at phrases like "rogue state"),
 and America's branding campaign could well backfire, and backfire badly.
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 In the corporate world, once a "brand identity" is settled upon by the
 head office, it is enforced with military precision throughout a
 company's operations. The brand identity may be tailored to accommodate
 local language and cultural preferences (like McDonald's serving pasta in
 Italy), but its core features--aesthetic, message, logo--remain unchanged.
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 This consistency is what brand managers like to call "the promise" of a
 brand: It's a pledge that wherever you go in the world, your experience
 at Wal-Mart, Holiday Inn or a Disney theme park will be comfortable and
 familiar. Anything that threatens this homogeneity dilutes a company's
 overall strength. That's why the flip side of enthusiastically flogging a
 brand is aggressively prosecuting anyone who tries to mess with it, whether
 by pirating its trademarks or by spreading unwanted information about the
 brand on the Internet.
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 At its core, branding is about rigorously controlled one-way messages,
 sent out in their glossiest form, then hermetically sealed off from
those who
 would turn that corporate monologue into a social dialogue. The most
 important tools in launching a strong brand may be research, creativity and
 design, but after that, libel and copyright laws are a brand's best friends.
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 When brand managers transfer their skills from the corporate to the
 political world, they invariably bring this fanaticism for homogeneity
 with them. For instance, when Wally Olins, co-founder of the Wolff Olins
 brand consultancy, was asked for his take on America's image problem, he
 complained that people don't have a single clear idea about what the country
 stands for, but rather have dozens if not hundreds of ideas that "are mixed
 up in people's heads in a most extraordinary way. So you will often find
 people both admiring and abusing America, even in the same sentence."
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 From a branding perspective, it would certainly be tiresome if we found
 ourselves simultaneously admiring and abusing our laundry detergent.
But when
 it comes to our relationship with governments, particularly the
government of
 the most powerful and richest nation in the world, surely some
complexity is
 in order. Having conflicting views about the U.S.--admiring its creativity,
 for instance, but resenting its double standards--doesn't mean you are "mixed
 up," to use Mr Olins' phrase, it means you have been paying attention.
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 Besides, much of the anger directed at the U.S. stems from a
 belief--voiced as readily in Argentina as in France, in India as in Saudi
 Arabia--that the U.S. already demands far too much "consistency and
 discipline" from other nations; that beneath its stated commitment to
 democracy and sovereignty, it is deeply intolerant of deviations from the
 economic model known as the "the Washington Consensus." Whether these
 policies, so beneficial to foreign investors, are enforced by the
 Washington-based International Monetary Fund or through international trade
 agreements, the U.S.'s critics generally feel that the world is already far
 too influenced by America's brand of governance (not to mention America's
 brands).
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 There is another reason to be wary of mixing the logic of branding with
 the practice of governance. When companies try to implement global image
 consistency, they look like generic franchises. But when governments do the
 same, they can look distinctly authoritarian. It's no coincidence that the
 political leaders most preoccupied with branding themselves and their parties
 were also allergic to democracy and diversity. Think Mao Tse-tung's giant
 murals and red books, and yes, think Adolf Hitler, a man utterly obsessed
 with purity of image: within his party, his country, his race. Historically,
 this has been the ugly flip side of politicians striving for
consistency of
 brand: centralized information, state controlled media, reeducation camps,
 purging of dissidents and much worse.
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 Democracy, thankfully, has other ideas. Unlike strong brands, which are
 predictable and disciplined, democracy is messy and fractious, if not
 outright rebellious. Beers and her colleagues may have convinced Colin
 Powell to buy Uncle Ben's by creating a comforting brand image, but the
 United States is not made up of identical grains of rice or assembly-line
 hamburgers or Gap khakis.
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 Its strongest "brand attribute," to use a term from Beers' world, is its
 embrace of diversity, a value Beers is now, ironically, attempting to stamp
 with cookie-cutter uniformity around the world. The task is not only futile
 but dangerous: brand consistency and true human diversity are
 antithetical--one seeks sameness, the other celebrates difference; one fears
 all unscripted messages, the other embraces debate and dissent.
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 Making his pitch for Brand USA in Beijing recently, President Bush argued
 that "in a free society, diversity is not disorder. Debate is not strife."
 The audience applauded politely. The message may have proved more persuasive
 if those values were better reflected in the Bush administration's
 communications with the outside world, both in its image and, more
 importantly, in its policies.
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 Because as President Bush rightly points out, diversity and debate are
 the lifeblood of liberty. And they are enemies of branding.
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 Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies."
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 http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-000017617mar10.story
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                     Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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