The PR campaign for Brand America

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1572122,00.html

In a barely reported incident last week, two bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the Karachi outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's. With no sign of an exit strategy from its war in Iraq and one of its major cities reduced to a swamp, things only seem to go from bad to worse for Brand America. Fear not, however, because some of America's brightest young graduates, toiling away in Madison Avenue advertising agencies, are working selflessly to stop the rot.

For the last 50 years, marketers of American brands were happy to ally themselves with the values of their home country - Coca-Cola, Marlboro and Levi's were paraded as affordable slices of Americana - and consumers everywhere in the world took them at their word. In turn, those brands became willing ambassadors for the values which America wanted to portray as its own: liberty, for example, and material prosperity.

Since the end of the cold war, however, most big US brands have concluded that their homeland is as much of a hindrance as a help. Maybe it was the launch of Mecca-Cola in 2003, a soft drink aimed at cashing in on anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, that finally put the breeze up Brand America. With the insulting tagline "No more drinking stupid, drink with contentment", the ads for Mecca-Cola not only offended the marketers at Coca-Cola but also ruffled a few feathers at the US state department.

Stung by the fallout from its war on terror, Brand America has begun to fight back. Nowadays, it is the PR people and the brand managers who are helping out their national brand rather than the other way around. Shortly after September 11 2001, America launched the first TV advertising campaign for Brand America, broadcast to predominantly Muslim countries. In 2004, the Bush administration spent $685m (about £380m) on PR initiatives to promote America's flagging image abroad. Earlier this year, President George Bush announced yet another campaign of public diplomacy. America, it seems, is to be a listening brand. "America's public diplomacy should be as much about listening and understanding as it is about speaking," said the PR woman appointed by Mr Bush to head the campaign. "I'm eager to listen and to learn."