Campaigns to promote countries, regions and cities have come under attack in recent years. Can you sell a place like a designer label or a tin of beans?

When Simon Anholt, a leading expert on country branding, wrote an article entitled "Nation Brands" in the Journal of Brand Management back in 1998, he sparked a media storm.

"They called me an evil man who needed to be stopped, charging me with having 'a depressingly narrow view of the world' that reduced it to the level of a giant supermarket or another bloody product with another target audience," he recalls.

But although this was probably the first time the word "brand" had been associated with a country, the concept of country and place branding goes back many hundreds of years, he points out. "Alexander the Great, for example, was a great place brander. He understood that places depend on their image for everything they do, and that a deliberate policy of managing that image pays dividends."

As Anholt says, "country of origin effect" is a critical determinant of a successful economy. "The 'Made in Japan' label implies a level of quality that allows Japanese organisations to charge a premium for their products, food, culture and tourism in a way that Guatemalan organisations, for example, would be unable to do," he says.

At its simplest, the word "brand", whether applied to products, corporations or countries, means "a promise kept". And the brand image of a place is determined by six factors, claims Anholt. These are: government policies; products; culture and heritage; the people (from football or rock stars to taxi drivers); the land and its tourism potential; and business opportunities.

But seeking to alter that image through communications is a complete waste of time and money, he argues. "This is one of the big differences between product branding and place branding. You can use advertising to sell, for example, a pair of Nike trainers, but when governments try to do the same thing it is seen, quite rightly, as propaganda."

He is disparaging about advertorials in national newspapers extolling the virtues of remote countries as inward investment locations, and about the one-page advertisements for Macedonia that appeared in The Economist recently. "And watching Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni declare in an advert on CNN, as I did recently, that Uganda is 'gifted by nature' just makes you think that that nation is even more troubled than you already believed."

It is possible to alter perceptions of a place, he says. "But you can't construct a place reputation artificially: you have to earn it. And you earn it by changing the substance of what you do.  If you want to position yourself as, say, 'the cultural heart of the Baltics', you invest in a new opera house."

Anholt admits that the word "brand" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the concept of brand is a very useful organising proposition for a place that wants to market itself more successfully to a range of  different stakeholders—for example, inward investors, tourists and citizens. On the other, it takes country, region and city leaders into the realm of "spin", "hype" and "gloss"—all things that the man and woman in the street distrust.

"In a country branding context, logos and straplines are utterly trivial and probably counter productive. They use money which could be far better spent building schools and hospitals—things that would arguably do much more for your reputation, too. And trying to package up beautiful places like eggs devalues them," believes Anholt. Wally Olins, chairman of branding consultancy Saffron and co-founder of brand consultancy Wolff Olins, is another leading place brand consultant.

Olins agrees with Anholt—to a point. "Of course actions count more than words, but you need to communicate those actions to make sure people know about them," he says. "The reality can change quite dramatically in many nations, and they need to expose that new reality. For example, some of the central and eastern European nations, and former Soviet countries either never existed before or they existed years ago in an entirely different form. They are using branding to try to find out who the hell they are, as much for themselves as for anybody else, and to establish themselves in a world where they feel profoundly threatened."

At home, Saffron is working for County Durham Tourism Partnership as part of an initiative to help the county and the city of Durham to attract and retain more skills, talent, inward investment and entrepreneurs, and instil a greater sense of identity and belonging among local people.

The first step has been to try to resolve confusion around the relationship between the city and the county. Astonishingly, says Melanie Sensicle, chief executive of the partnership, most travel and news editors of Britain's daily papers have no idea where Durham is, while many business investors think the county is in Northern Ireland. It has taken the partnership and Saffron eight months to decide that the way to end the confusion is to call both the city and the county "Durham". The decision is the result of extensive research among public and private sector organisations, students and a cross-section of residents. The next stage, says Sensicle, is "to establish themes and values and turn it into something visual."

Such exercises attract criticism for poor use of public funds, particularly when they appear to be in conflict with other bigger or smaller branding initiatives in the region. Sensicle admits that other districts within the county of Durham, such as Teesdale, like doing their own marketing, while the regional development agency One NorthEast is working to promote the whole region overseas.

Jonathan Hall, chief executive of the French arm of branding consultancy Added Value, believes that the risks of the multi-layered approach are most obvious in Spain. The destructive civil war of the 1930s, followed by fascist rule, saw Spain degenerate into an isolated, poverty-stricken anachronism.
But after Franco's death in 1975 it transformed itself into a modern, wealthy democracy. "Spain became very focused and tourism-led, to the extent that the tourist board was essentially the marketing department for the whole country," says Hall. "There was a single global positioning, summed up in Joan Miró's famous sun symbol. But now individual tourist boards are pushing their own brands, and the over-arching campaign has become diluted."

What you are left with in such situations, agrees Graham Hales, chief marketing officer at Interbrand, is "a nation in competition with its regions and cities, resulting in a logo-fest that communicates nothing."
Such confusion is a side-effect of the indiscriminate growth of place branding, according to Anholt. "Countries need a clear international image, which is not confused by lots of different regions," he says. "So, it makes more sense to promote London as a tourist destination abroad, rather than, say, Swansea, because most people fly in to London. It may look undemocratic, but it's a way of growing the cake for everyone."

Anholt is sympathetic to the concept of city branding, which is easier than marketing countries, because cities are smaller and tend to have their own discrete marketing arms and budgets. But he believes branding below that level "should be illegal." He dismisses the recently announced programme for Didcot by brand and design agency Lloyd Northover as "a waste of taxpayers' money."

Didcot has been designated an area of development by the government, and expects to double its population over the next 20 years. South Oxfordshire District Council understandably wants to try to ensure that the town grows in a planned way, culturally, socially, economically and in infrastructure terms. But the need for "a rallying and unifying brand to guide and inspire this future growth", to use the words of Lloyd Northover chairman Jim Northover, might seem a bit overblown.

Anholt says: "This exercise will cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds, which would be better spent on, for example, converting the town's buses to eco-fuel—something that would be far more effective in persuading people that Didcot is a forward-looking and attractive place to live and work." According to Hugh Davidson, visiting professor of marketing at Cranfield School of Management, stakeholders are at the heart of any successful place branding exercise. Author of The Committed Enterprise and Even More Offensive Marketing, and a former marketer at Procter and Gamble and United Biscuits, Davidson says he's become a "country branding nerd". In the past five years, he's spent 350 volunteer days helping the Isle of Man, where he lives, re-brand itself.

What makes place branding so difficult is the number of different constituencies involved—including tourism, culture and education authorities, businesses, civil servants and politicians, and the residents themselves—all with slightly different objectives and over whom you have no real authority, explains Davidson.

"You have to establish a coalition of all these stakeholders, and seek to influence through persuasion. But because these things are very long term—we are five years into a 10-year programme, for example—people leave and join; so you also have to constantly re-educate people. You can't manage a country brand like you would Pampers." According to Davidson, it is to the credit of the Isle of Man chief minister and council of ministers that they committed £10m to a marketing initiative, £8m to an e-commerce development initiative and a further £8m to a new town and village regeneration fund.

"They understood very well that we will be able to buy a lot more doctors and teachers and build more roads if we can attract more investment into the country. But we learned early on that to win the hearts and minds of the population as a whole we had to avoid the words branding and marketing completely."

One of the most successful examples of country branding is Ireland—though it doesn't describe itself as such. Over the past 30 years it has transformed itself from a very poor country with high unemployment and a high rate of outward migration into one of the fastest growing economies in the OECD and EU, with full employment, burgeoning high-tech industries, over 1,200 foreign investors, strong public finances and increased inward immigration.

IDA Ireland, Ireland's foreign direct investment promotion agency, has played a major role in this achievement. Kieran Donoghue, head of international financial services at IDA Ireland, says: "We feel that to reduce a nation to a brand is not appropriate. Ireland is far more complex than Coca-Cola. We are more comfortable, though, with the idea of marketing."

Instead of "nation branding", Anholt now tries to talk about "competitive identity", a deliberately dull phrase that he uses "to stop people getting too excited about it, because, done properly, it is boring and difficult and slow and not very funky or media friendly."

But it is important, because, in a globalised world, nations are increasingly competing for skilled people, companies, factories and tourists.

Creenagh Lodge, former chairman of branding consultancy Corporate Edge, is another place branding expert. She has helped a number of countries successfully reposition themselves, including New Zealand, which used to be seen as a remote, cold, inhospitable place populated largely by sheep, and is now a major exporter to the rest of the world and a highly popular tourist destination. She concludes: "Place branding has to be rooted in the place's long-term economic and strategic imperatives and be measured against that all the way down the line. Treated as such it can be a hugely powerful tool, which gives enormous confidence back to a country."