simon anholt

Soft Power as Moral Authority: a different perspective on national influence.

Simon Anholt

Introduction Countries, in the age of globalisation, compete with each other for their share of investment, tourism, markets for their products and services, and the attention and respect of other governments, multilateral institutions and donors, the media, and international public opinion in general. The competition for reputation has greatly intensified over the last century, as countries, cities and regions have recognised that in a world of increasingly footloose capital, customers and competitors, profile and image become paramount, just as in any busy marketplace. When it comes to attracting trade, talent, visitors and investment, countries with powerful and positive reputations spend less to achieve more, while those with weak or negative reputations spend more to achieve less. In short, countries with a good image trade at a premium; those without trade at a discount. In a 1998 academic paper, I coined the phrase nation brand to express the idea that the reputations of places were as important to their progress and prosperity as the brand images of products were to their corporate owners. The meme of nation brand established itself quickly, and it is by now taken for granted by most national, city and regional administrations that measuring and managing their place brand is a critical part of their function: as I remarked in that 1998 paper, governments need to be brand managers as much as policy makers. At least fifteen countries now have dedicated government departments or agencies with responsibility for the countrys overall image, and a large number of cities and regions too. In 2005, in order to measure the relative strengths of national images, I began to field a quarterly survey, polling 29,500 people in 35 countries on their perceptions of other countries. The Anholt Nation Brands Index ran quarterly until 2008 when it was relaunched, in partnership with the research company GfK Roper, as the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM. Now annual, the study measures covers 50 countries using a questionnaire of more than 50 questions, measuring perceptions of culture, people, government, products and services, educational system, policies, sporting prowess, technological competence, landscape and much else. The Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM has become one of the largest social surveys ever undertaken, polling a sample represenating 60% of the worlds population and 77% of its GDP each year, and forms a unique database of more than 164 billion data points tracking in detail how the world sees the world. A parallel study, the Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands IndexSM, has been performing a similar analysis on global perceptions of 50 key cities since 2005.

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simon anholt
In three further studies, in 2005, 2007 and 2010, in collaboration with Brand Finance, a royalty relief model was used to estimate the economic value of each countrys brand, just as corporate or product brands are valued. The figures were startling, producing valuations in the trillions of dollars for the more valuable nations. Just like their corporate counterparts, these intangible assets were often well in excess of the countrys turnover. The link between place image and economic performance is now well recognised, as more and more studies confirm. To cite just two recent examples, ... improving ones reputation in a target country by one place [in the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM] leads to a 2% increase in exports to the target country, which is equivalent to enjoying a tariff decrease of up to 3.86%1; and the Anholt Nation Brands Index, our measure for intangibles in the host country, has a large positive effect on FDI: a onepoint increase in the index is associated with a 27% increase in the flow of inward FDI.2 While my original concept of a countrys brand image is now well accepted by many governments, their understanding about what if anything a country can do to enhance that image remains fairly primitive. The extreme inertia of national images (most never change, as the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM has clearly demonstrated), combined with the short time horizons of democratic governments, have conspired to ensure that most countries do no more than waste large sums of money in futile propaganda exercises, which demonstrably fail to achieve any results. Governmental Social Responsibility Clearly, perceptions of countries cannot be manipulated directly, using the same tools of persuasion that companies use to market their products: countries are not products for sale to a consumer, they are cultural constants, the building-blocks of our world view. Over the last fifteen years as an independent policy advisor, working in more than fifty countries with Heads of State, Heads of Government and Cabinet, I have often remarked that if we are determined to apply commercial models to the public sector, then corporate social responsibility is a much more reliable guide than sales promotion, public relations or advertising. The same ethical principles which drive consumers to favour brands offered by companies that behave as good corporate citizens, are likely to drive those same consumers as tourists, investors, voters, students, immigrants and purchasers of foreign products and services also to favour the countries which satisfy their moral standards.

Yotov, Korschun, Dimitrova: Country Reputation and International Trade: a Structural Gravity Approach (Drexel University, 2012)
2

Kalamova and Konrad: Nation Brands and Foreign Direct Investment (OECD / Max Planck Institute, 2010).

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simon anholt
In other words, if a country wants to be admired, its not enough to be successful: it needs to give people in other countries good reasons to feel glad that it exists; it needs to make itself useful to humanity and to the planet if it is to earn the reputation it needs. This concept of Governmental Social Responsibility or GSR has informed the strategic work I have carried out over recent years, and has produced many successful outcomes. The validity of GSR has now received further confirmation by a new meta-analysis of the NBISM data: the MARSS model. The MARSS model: an account of national influence. Joseph Nyes model of soft, hard and smart power has proved useful as a simple distinction in this context3. The reality however is that there are many different types of power, influence, appeal and authority that a country can wield over the public imagination and over reality. Most are soft (in the sense that they draw people towards them) and perhaps three are truly hard (in the sense that they can be used on people against their will): but a more sophisticated distinction is needed to understand how more than 200 countries, not to mention countless cities and regions, really compete against each other today for influence and primacy in the world order. The MARSS model is based on analysis of the nineteen large-scale surveys of international perceptions of 65 countries and 73 cities which I have carried out between 2005 and 2013, when the latest Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM was fielded. Deeper analysis of the cumulative NBISM database shows that the key drivers of overall national standing can be characterised as morality, aesthetics, relevance, sophistication and strength. These five drivers which together form the MARSS model co-exist and overlap in an almost infinite variety of combinations. People may know very little about what a country actually does, makes, or looks like, but they nonetheless have a fairly strong idea of whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, sophisticated or primitive, and whether it is relevant to their lives or not. Morality is concerned with whether people approve of the country (which is to say, some combination of its leaders, its population and its commercial and public institutions). Countries like Norway, Holland and Switzerland are able to punch considerably above their weight (i.e. above their hard power) as a direct result of their strength on this dynamic. Morality is of course a highly subjective matter, and its precise components will vary from culture to culture, indeed from individual to individual. Perceptions of the morality of a country will also differ (in reality as in perception) depending on whether one is considering the government, the population, or the public or private institutions of a nation, but in most cases, international public opinion does not care to make such fine distinctions. In the case of better-known and better understood countries, people may
3

Nye, Joseph S., Jr: Soft Power (Foreign Policy, Autumn 1990, 153-171).

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simon anholt
distinguish between all of these moral players; in the case of less well-known countries they are more likely to perceive the entire country as a single moral entity (this is bad news for the populations of failing states). Aesthetics is a measure of whether the country (in terms of its people, its built and natural environment, products, cultural output, etc) is regarded as pleasing to the eye or, in some cases, to the other senses. On the whole, we find it difficult to dislike or disapprove very strongly or for very long of beautiful places, people and products and we have a pronounced tendency to associate beauty with virtue and wealth. Intriguingly, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM showed that many people around the world started to regard the American landscape as less beautiful during the second presidential term of George W. Bush; many Muslim respondents had a similar response to the Danish countryside after the publication of the cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad by a Danish newspaper in 2006. Japan and Germany derive much of their huge aesthetic power from product design: each well-designed product from Sony, Bosch, Porsche, Toyota or Panasonic sold in another country is a tiny ambassador for the aesthetic power of its place of origin. Relevance is a critical factor when considering national image. One of the most interesting observations from the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM was that, on average, it appears that most people seldom think spontaneously or regularly about more than three countries: their own, the United States, and a variable third country with which they have some personal association, experience or ambition. They will only think about the remaining 202 countries if they are prompted to do so, and the tendency is for them to continue to do so only for as long as the prompting continues. Relevance is a significant challenge for most countries trying to put themselves on peoples mental maps: the more relevant the country is to the target, the better the conditions for rapid and profound change in their perceptions of that country. Theres a catch: people who already feel that a country is relevant to their lives are more inclined to notice the things that country does or says or makes, but less likely to change their minds as a result, whereas people who dont feel a country is relevant are less likely to pay attention, but more likely to change their minds. Sophistication is a measure of how modern a country is perceived to be; whether it is regarded as primitive, unsophisticated and backward, or whether it is modern and highly-developed. Unsurprisingly, this question is often associated with technological development as much as human and economic capital, and indeed technology is a useful proxy for measuring this axis of the MARSS model. Strength is concerned with our perception that a country can wield influence over us or others, independently of the other three attributes. Hard power, as described by Nye, is typically military and economic, but to this I would also add media power: the countrys ability to force its views on international public opinion via its influence over, or more likely its ownership of, a substantial portion of the media messages reaching people. The

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simon anholt
US is of course the category leader here, and is fully capable of what I have called belligerent branding to another country using this variety of hard power: it has been doing this to Mexico for several centuries. Soft power tends to be associated more with the first two attributes, moral and aesthetic, but this isnt an absolute distinction. The combination and balance of morality and strength is critical: a country perceived as actively immoral that is also perceived to possess significant hard power is likely to end up with a strongly negative image. Relative strengths of the MARSS components In the MARSS meta-analysis, a group of questions from the standard NBISM questionnaire is selected as being most indicative of each of the four components. Each countrys morality score is produced by a combination of its average global rankings on questions related to its perceived contribution to poverty reduction; fair treatment of its own citizens and respect for human rights; competent and honest governance; responsible behaviour in international affairs, its contribution to global peace and security; its care for the environment and the level of equality in its society. The aesthetic score is produced by a combination of questions relating to perceptions of attractive cultural heritage and popular culture, beautiful landscapes and an attractive built environment. The relevance score is a combination of personal familiarity with the country and beliefs about its international influence. The sophistication score is based on perceptions of technological prowess, and the perception that the country has vibrant, modern cities. The strength score is produced by combining rankings for technological and sporting prowess, investment value and perceptions of global impact. The average deviance of these combination scores from each countrys overall NBISM ranking is then calculated. The smaller the number, the more strongly each MARSS component performs as a predictor of overall national image: MORALITY SOPHISTICATION STRENGTH AESTHETICS RELEVANCE 6.85 7.02 7.33 8.25 8.26

The perception of morality is therefore the strongest driver of overall national image, and this effect is even more pronounced when the analysis is repeated for survey respondents under 45 years of age.

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simon anholt
One of the reasons why the perception of morality is so significant may be because younger people tend to be influenced substantially by their moral sense, and are less inclined to cynicism and the corrosive influence of realpolitik; and the older people who form the elites and the individually powerful are in turn influenced by younger public opinion. Thus, one of the most effective drivers of positive acceptance (in other words, effective soft power) for any country is a clearly marked moral position, and, of course, sustained and dramatic evidence that it continues to deserve this position. This finding strongly corroborates a remark I published back in 2006: if the worlds governments placed even half the value which most wise corporations have learned to place on their good names, the world would be a safer and quieter place than it is today. To this observation, I can now add that if governments do so, they also stand to improve their own national prospects more rapidly, more effectively and more comprehensively than good governance and successful trade can ever do on their own. The message is simple: if a country wants to do well, it had better do good.

2013 Simon Anholt. All rights reserved.

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