Brand U.S.A.
Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks intensified discussions about America’s image in the world, the State Department was looking to Madison Avenue for ways to "re-brand" the United States. In fact, on September 5, Steve Hayden, a branding expert of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, lectured hundreds of the department’s diplomats on how ...
Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks intensified discussions about America's image in the world, the State Department was looking to Madison Avenue for ways to "re-brand" the United States. In fact, on September 5, Steve Hayden, a branding expert of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, lectured hundreds of the department's diplomats on how corporations (and countries) can shed their reputations as hegemons.
Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks intensified discussions about America’s image in the world, the State Department was looking to Madison Avenue for ways to "re-brand" the United States. In fact, on September 5, Steve Hayden, a branding expert of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, lectured hundreds of the department’s diplomats on how corporations (and countries) can shed their reputations as hegemons.
Most famous for creating the ad for Apple Computer in which a running athlete hurls a hammer at a giant visage of Big Brother, Hayden urged his audience to take a page from the corporate handbook in presenting America to the world. He recalled Nike’s crisis in the late 1990s, when the corporate superpower’s visibility made it a target for antisweatshop and anticapitalist activists, and its market share dropped. In response, Nike lowered and altered its advertising profile, instituted a full-time crisis-oriented public relations department, and boosted its market share to 30 percent. "People like leadership, not dominance," said Hayden. "If you had to deal with the world’s only superpower, what would you want it to be like? Fair? Reasonable? Participatory?"
While acknowledging in a post-September 11 interview with FP that corporate analogies are "lightweight" compared to the current image problems the United States faces, Hayden thinks the United States should take cues from advertising and "approach it more as an emotional campaign rather than a rational campaign. I think we have failed abysmally in addressing the issues of radical Islamic youth…. It’s not going to do any good to start dropping leaflets. It has to be done delicately. You need the support of the thought leadership community — intellectuals, writers, and leaders." Hayden also asserted that the United States should have made it more clear that "we have no territorial, cultural, or imperial ambitions." If U.S. officials had paid more attention to negative attitudes, he said, "we wouldn’t have used words like ‘crusade’ or ‘infinite justice.’"
Hayden was invited to the State Department by Charlotte Beers, the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Beers came to the position after more than 30 years in the advertising world. An unusual appointee, perhaps. But as Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked at the same conference where Hayden spoke, "What are we doing? We’re selling a product. That product we are selling is democracy."
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