By Patricia Lee Sharpe
There’s been much talk of nation-branding recently. Brand America. Sell it! Franchise it! Export it! How does this sound to you? It bothers me, so I’d like to explore the matter of applying the business of branding to countries.Among those who care about America’s interactions with the rest of the world, this branding idea is just one aspect of the apparently irresistible urge to regard diplomacy as anything but a sui generis function. Above all, the metaphors for the public diplomacy function get frisbeed back and forth between military/strategic concepts and advertising/public relations concepts. Oddly enough, metaphors pertaining to journalism and the exchange of reliable information are largely ignored. It’s as if public diplomacy is conceivable only in relationship to some kind of manipulative calculating salesmanship. Does that say something about the product? Is America a product that can’t be “sold” straightforwardly?
Branding! It has so many connotations. The most recent are commercial, as in brands of toothpaste or beef patties encased in buns aka hamburgers. This kind of branding seems almost trivial or innocuous so long as the stuff is safe to put in your mouth—which, in the case of hamburger, isn’t always true.
Cows and Slaves
In fact, branding’s pedigree is not nice. Nor, for that matter, are all its current implications.In times past, what got branded? This is America, so let’s begin with our own history. Cattle got branded with a red hot iron. Every ranch had its own brand. That means cattle could browse unfenced, fattening up on free forage. If some human varmit was caught trying to rustle or steal cattle, the solution was quick and easy. String ‘im up! Frontier justice.Human slaves have also been branded from ancient times. It has never been legal for slaves to run away. That would be self-stealing, so to speak. If the thief of his own labor was caught trying to run away, he too was punished, severely, but usually lived to labor again. Harsh strokes for independent-minded folks.
The owners of cattle and slaves were entitled to sell them (and their offspring) at will, and the owners of modern brands are also looking to profit by selling their branded products. When a product is especially successful in one country, the owners of the brand often decide to maximize profits either by exporting it directly or by licensing commercial clones or franchises in other countries.
Reliable and Boring
The key to selling branded merchandise is predictability. The product is always the same. The franchise business carries the same guarantee: the product is exactly the same as its progenitor wherever it’s bought and from whomever. Reliable. Boring. When marketing types set out to brand a country they try to come up with a simple unique way of identifying a country, something that will make it easy to recognize. Uncle Sam, perhaps. The Stars and Bars—whoops! Stripes. The Statue of Liberty (thank you, France). The Grand Canyon. Golden Gate Bridge. To mention a few of the obvious. The words simple-minded and stereotypical immediately come to mind.How could anyone even wish to freeze the image of a country? Everything human evolves. We are not cultural clones of our ancestors, although we may admire much that they did. We certainly don’t want our lives to revolve around candles, outhouses and legalized wife-beating. Even today’s America—oh! the heresy!—is hardly perfect. And Republicans and Democrats would find it very difficult to agree on the qualities that should constitute the unique and official American brand.
Cultural Cloning
Nevertheless there are those among us today who are so enamored of our obvious achievements that they are dead set on exporting the American brand. Better yet, by hook, crook or war, they want us to set up franchises all around the globe. We have this really terrific unique brand of democracy, or capitalism or individualism or true grit or whatever, you see. Surely the world would be happier and richer if everyone we like us.
Other cultures, of course, have felt similar impulses over the years. Even today there are other ideologies competing to become the one universal brand of all humandom. Needless to say, we tend to resist such influences.
Meanwhile, it might be worthwhile to examine the results of past efforts to export the American brand. Always we have hoped that the objects of our efforts would understand that we have acted only for the greater good and benefit of all humanity and/or various underperforming sub-segments of the human race.
Don't Brand Us!
Instead, horrors! Our generosity is often seen abroad as a throwback to the old sort of branding, a forceful effort to Americanize the world, to round everyone up like cattle and put the Uncle Sam brand on everyone’s backside. We've come to be feared as some horrible combination of slave owners and rustlers.
Those marketing people, more carefully listened to, might have prevented this backlash. They’d have pointed out that everyone likes his or her own brand of toothpaste. Getting people to shift from Colgate to Crest takes monumental effort—and the cost is enormous. And yet we underfund diplomacy year after year. Perhaps, subconsciously, we realize that we can’t Americanize the world. We may have to learn to live happily with a globe full of people and cultures that are very very different, which means we will have to meet international challenges with respectful debate and diplomacy.There’s also this: the branding and franchising idea wouldn’t work anyway. Barely distinguishable clans within the same culture maintain feuds through the generations—and family life is not always a happy affair. Except for my family, of course!
As for the American fast food that’s supposedly taking over the world, those Big Macs in other countries don’t taste like ours. Nor does the Kentucky Fried Chicken. They’ve been adapted to appeal to local taste buds. The same thing happens with pizza, which—sorry!—isn’t exactly native American. In India you can have a tandoori pizza.
Sounds good to me!