Does the USA Need a Branding Firm?

The issue of America’s image abroad was a campaign platform for Barack Obama, who said in a foreign policy speech in April, “We all know that these are not the best of times for America’s reputation in the world.”

That’s not to say that the last administration was unaware of the nation’s image problems.

According to New York Times writer Jim Arango, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a number of very senior media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials to discuss how the entertainment industry could help improve the image of the United States overseas. One of the best ideas to emerge, the participants agreed, was to distribute American TV shows and movies to foreign audiences — especially in the Muslim world.

It worked … sort of … but not the way they expected. “In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular, has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured,” Arango writes. The latest (2006) data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project shows that the image of the United States remained negative in the 24 countries in which Pew conducted its surveys.

Bryce Zabel, a TV producer and participant in the 2001 meetings with the White House, argued then that the United States needed to regard itself like a consumer brand.
“Products like Coca-Cola are far more effectively branded around the globe than the United States itself,” he wrote in a memo that was circulated around Hollywood.

Maybe the next administration should consider a pro bono partnership with an experienced branding firm or a public relations/marketing firm with expertise in corporate identity campaigns to do for the USA what has been done for other long-term quality brands that care about their image and reputation.