People power = brand power?

Tuesday 29 July 2008 - Filed under Life Outside Work

Brand and publicity.

I had known about it for a while but the recollection of the saga around Microsoft codenaming their product “Fiji” led me to some random follow-up thoughts. Country names sure are brands. Does good publicity, then, contribute towards a good brand? Or does “more” publicity, good or bad, help build a more powerful, influential brand? Because regardless of the intent or the resultant effect, the Fiji episode at the end of the day did insert the “Fiji” brand name into a couple more international news headlines. That probably attracted quite a number of mouse clicks by computer geeks around the world. It helped put Fiji on the map.

The Fiji Islands Visitors’ Bureau should therefore thank Microsoft for considering Fiji for a product name albeit a codename with a strictly limited life span (it has “expired” and not many people know “Windows Vista Media Center Edition” was once called “Fiji” internally). Or… maybe the whole Attorney-General-of-Fiji-complaining-to-Microsoft act was all a part of a clever marketing campaign orchestrated by Saatchi & Saatchi who might have been consulting for the Fiji government? The truth is out there but I’m happy just speculating.

OK, I’m trying to establish (for fun) what lies beneath country brands and publicity, and I’m doing this without any qualified expertise, of course. First, think of The Australian, Australia’s only nation-wide general-category daily newspaper. Now hypothetically ask 1,000 people on the street: On average, which state name (as in Queensland, Tasmania, etc.) would appear most frequently in the “National” section of The Australian? My guess is that an absolute majority of the responses would say New South Wales, perhaps closely followed by Victoria. Why? Not because NewsCorp is headquartered in Sydney, NSW (their new headquarters is actually in the U.S.), and not because NSW has the highest crime rate in the country, but simply because there are far more people living in New South Wales than, say, Tasmania. More people, more businesses, more troubles, more criminals, more fun, more everything.

So, there we have our simplistic trail of thoughts: More people create more news; more news is more publicity; and more publicity equals greater brand power…?

Now, let’s move on to a more global setting: Suppose, on average over any given period, that the names “Australia” and “Singapore” appear approximately equal number of times in international news items (articles) reported by well-known TV news networks and newspapers in the United States that are often quoted globally. All right, those two countries get about the same amount of publicity. But can the two country brands be said to share the same brand power? Logically no, because one is created by 21 million people and the other by 4 million. In other words, proportionately speaking, the Singapore brand is about five times stronger than the Australia brand. In the context of countries, it would mean that Singaporeans are a bunch that is five times more newsworthy than Australians. Whether Singapore is indeed five times stronger in brand power than Australia in reality is totally irrelevant. I don’t know. I couldn’t care less.

What does make me wonder from time to time is whether Korea as a country, North and South combined, has a stronger brand power than those of their neighbours in East Asia, namely Japan and China. Partly because of my unseverable emotional ties with the country, I have written about Korea before and I have had this feeling that they as a country are put on the spot on an international scale considerably more than the other two. There is indeed so much to read and write about the divided nation, one side of which is particularly famous for its Axes of Evil tag and all that. Besides, Koreans are a very interesting bunch in general, one that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reason with. Anyway, I decided to put my years-old hunch to test by asking Google.

First, I got the population data of the three East Asian countries from the United Nations statistics for 2005. Then I went to advanced search of Google news archive to run a series of keyword searches under “Korea”, “Korean”, “Japan”, “Japanese”, “China”, and “Chinese” for English-language news articles published in the last five years (28 July 2003 to 27 July 2008) by these sources:

• “BBC News”
• “CNN”
• “FOX News”
• “New York Times”
• “USA Today”
• “Washington Post”

The raw numbers of news items by each source were adjusted to get “news items per million people per year” and were subsequently represented in proportions for easy comparison. The final averages, which allegedly indicate each country’s relative “newsworthiness” and hence brand power, came out to be rather interesting.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim my logic and methodology to fall under the category of empirical research by any standard, so all you scholars and academics can relax. Feel free to regard it as a trivial example of back-filling data and shaping numbers in an attempt to give credibility to a hunch or hype.

Then I thought about all that I had done and how hard I had worked doing it, and I realised that it didn’t mean a thing. It was like chasing the wind – of no use at all.

- Ecclesiates 2.11, Good News Bible

2008-07-29  »  JK