What are they saying about us?

Intro:
This is “What are they saying about us?” and I’m your host, Jessica Brando.
If you’ve caught any of my previous episodes, you know this podcast explores what happens when Canadian news events get covered outside our borders.
It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head since 2006…
That’s when I first heard that Canada was ranked one of the top three countries in the world…in a new global survey called the Anholt Nation Brands Index.
I’m a journalist, and I thought there must be some connection between the perceptions people have of Canada, and what they see and hear about us in the international media.
Simon Anholt is the brain behind the Nation Brands Index…the people who run countries seek him out to hear how they can improve, or leverage, their nation’s reputation.
I reached out to see if he’d be interested in joining me for a feature interview.
And he agreed.
But as you’re going to hear, he warned me that I might be putting too much stock in how much influence domestic news has on Canada’s international image.
SA: Well, maybe it's poetic justice if after being the guy who stimulated the thought 19 years ago,
I'm the one to kill it.
JB: It's possible, yeah. I don't know if they'll kill it, but...
SA: I doubt I'll be able to, because to be honest, although these kinds of questions are ones I've
been asking myself for an awfully long time, I'd be lying if I said I knew the answers.
I really don't. The mystery becomes deeper with every year that passes.
JB: Okay, we're going to have to get into that, I think, because it's a really intriguing way to start things out.
Simon Anholt, thanks so much for joining the podcast here. What are they saying about us?
SA: It's a pleasure.
At least I think it's going to be a pleasure.
It's a good premise to start with that it'll be a pleasure.
Maybe tell me what the genesis for the nation brands index was on your side of things.
SA: Yeah, if my memory will go back that far, because we're talking about 2005, 19 years ago,
I was very interested in the images of countries, and I had been already for quite a few years.
And I'd written some very opinionated pieces on the subject without knowing anything about it.
And a few people challenged me on it.
And they said, how do you know what people think about other countries? And I realized I didn't have an answer for that question. So, I started, I started looking for research, and I couldn't find any.
And since my job at that time already was advising governments on questions relating to how their country was perceived by foreign publics, I thought, probably it's time to start measuring this. It started out four times a year.
Little did we know how boring it was going to be, because I kind of assumed that people changed their minds about countries on a fairly regular basis.
And unless we were measuring it quarterly, we'd miss things. But by the end of quarter three, 2005, I realized that I had engendered the most boring social survey ever.
And it just doesn't seem to make any difference who you speak to, or to an extent, even what you ask them.
People just never want to change their minds about countries. Having said that, yeah, well, so we did it four times a year for two years, and then we surrendered and started it doing yearly.
And we've been doing it yearly ever since. But having said that, the extreme stability of people's perceptions of other countries is something I'm revisiting at the moment. Because if I'm not very much mistaken, the index is suddenly becoming more volatile, and maybe we can come back to that.
JB: I would love to come back to that. Just a little bit on the methodology. So, what are the metrics that you're asking people to weigh in on?
SA: Right. Well, this is an opinion poll. And the main questionnaire is about 40 questions based on a model which I call the hexagon.
It was something I invented way back in the late 1990s, which basically argues that all countries, indeed all places, pervade their images accidentally or deliberately through six natural channels.
And those six natural channels are things like their culture, their people, their style of governance, their products and services and their landscape and their tourism and so forth. So, the questions are saying things like, for example, I would like to have a friend from this country.
JB: Oh, interesting. Yeah.
SA: So that's one of the people ones.
In the governance area, it might be this country's government has a responsible stance on global challenges like climate change and poverty. And so forth. So, that way we never ask anybody, do you admire this country? Do you like this country? Do you think it's got a good image?
Because people don't know the answer to questions like that. They've never asked themselves that. So, we come at it slightly stealthily. And by the end of those 40 questions, we can show a pretty clear picture of overall what they think about that country. And the interesting thing is that it's often quite different from what they think they think about that country.
JB: Oh, how interesting. So, what your inferences then reveal something that maybe is not even known to the people answering the questions.
SA: Right. The best example of that is that everybody thinks they like Canada much more than they do.
JB: Oh, tell me more about that. I can't leave that comment to dangle there and not address it right away. They think they like Canada more than they do. OK, parse that out for me, please.
SA: I thought that one might tempt you. Well, at the beginning of the survey, as a sort of tester, before people start getting stuck into things or thinking about them too deeply, we say, how would you rate your general favorability towards this country on a scale of one to seven? And people generally rank Canada extremely highly.
They think they think they think that Canada is wonderful. And that's not because they know very much about it. Most people around the world, the only thing they know about Canada is that it's not the United States. And because the United States is evil, Canada must therefore be good. So they think it's wonderful.
But then they get to the end of the survey and they've answered all of these other questions about specific aspects of Canada's life, landscape, history, culture, heritage, business, and all the rest of it, and people.
And although a lot of those scores are very, very high, people love Canadians. They want to be friends with a Canadian. They want to hire a Canadian. The overall score is actually slightly less than the one they gave at the beginning. So encourage people to think a little bit harder and they will generally modify their view. And in the case of Canada, I guess it's because it starts off so high it couldn't really go any higher.
JB: Okay. And what do you think it is about the more sort of in-detail questions that causes Canada to slip? Is it that when we ask them precisely what it is, they just don't know?
SA: I think there's a big element of that. So to answer this question properly, I need to dive into the data and have a look because it's a question I've never actually asked myself. Thank you for that.
My suspicion is it's probably just as much to do with the fact that countries are kind of complicated things. And day to day, we carry around very simplified shortcuts for what those countries stand for.
And this incidentally is the reason why I invented this terrible phrase, nation brand in the first place, because I was actually being a little bit, not exactly ironic, but wry about the fact that we in our minds reduce countries to the level of a mere brand, despite their massive complexity, long history and all the rest of it.
And so I thought, yeah, it's just like the brand of Nike. We reduce it down to a childish stereotype. But the first time that anybody actually starts thinking deeply and seriously and systematically about a distant country, which is what we're getting them to do with this questionnaire, they may actually begin to realize that it's actually quite complicated.
And I say I love Canada, but I'm actually really only thinking about Neil Young riding on a buffalo on a mountain. You know, I'm not thinking about the fact that they have big cities, which may have big problems like any other big city anywhere else in the world. And once you start breaking it down, you begin to realize, hell, maybe it's not 100% perfect. Maybe it's a good 87.6%.
JB: Here’s what you need to know about how Canada has stacked up over the years.
There are 50 countries in the Nation Brands Index.
In the past 12 years, Canada has consistently been rated in the top five.
The other usual suspects in that bracket are Japan, the UK, Italy and France.
Did I mention Germany?
It held the top spot from 2017 until 2022…until it got knocked to second place by Japan in 2023.
In 2009, Canada dipped to its lowest rank on the index, at seventh…down from fourth in 2008.
Are you able to look at that and say, well, Canada did something wrong that previous year, or is it just that other countries were doing it better?
SA: First of all, one of the things I always advise people and especially the governments that subscribe to this index, and God save us all, they use it to help decide on their policies. You should never only look at the rankings, because as you rightly observed, the rankings can be affected by what other countries do, not by anything that you do. So, you have to look at the scores. And the likelihood is that if you looked at the scores, you'll find that it wasn't such a big change.
JB: I would imagine occasionally some countries make a much more market pitch downwards. And I'm wondering, what are the types of things that are happening in those countries that actually does move the needle in terms of that global feeling towards the country?
SA: So this is a great question. It's my favorite topic. I am the world's leading expert on how to destroy the image of your country. I know at least seven different ways, which are almost fail safe.
JB: Okay, let's hear some.
SA: Unfortunately, I don't know how you improve it. Or at least my views on that are somewhat generic. And they're mostly negative.
JB: Let's hear them.
SA: I'll tell you all the things that don't work for improving a country's image. Start with what will damage it infallibly. Start a pandemic. If you are considered to be responsible for having started a global pandemic, as China was at the beginning of COVID, that will damage your image quite severely.
How long it will last, it's uncertain. It depends on so many other factors. It depends on how strong your image was beforehand. China's image is pretty robust. It's not universally loved, of course, but increasingly in the great divide between the Old West and the New East or between the G7 and the BRICS-plus or what have you, you find that China is massively and increasingly admired, despite or perhaps because of its quite assertive stance in international relations.
But whichever side of the line you go on, you will find that starting a pandemic is not a good idea.
The most effective way of all is to reach out and harm people, either in their beliefs or in their physical being. So, invading another country, and here we step suddenly and dramatically beyond joking, if you invade a country, you destroy your image. International public opinion will not tolerate conflict. It just doesn't want there to be conflict anywhere. And they dislike it so much that they will often penalize both sides in the conflict, no matter which one they happen to believe is the victim and which is the aggressor.
So, the big tragedy we see at the moment is that, yes, of course, after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia's image has plummeted further than any country's image has ever fallen. I mean, it makes you dizzy just looking at it. And it's one of the reasons, although not the only reason, why Russia is literally the only single country we've ever measured whose image today is worse than it was in 2008. The only one, every other one is better. So that has happened. And Lord only knows how long it's going to last; forever, as far as I can see. It's certainly generations. But Ukraine's image has fallen as well.
JB: Interesting.
SA: And that's so unfair. But it's just because people don't like the association with conflict. We see the same thing with Israel-Palestine. Depending on which tribe you belong to, it doesn't really seem to make an awful lot of difference. Both get penalized and the image of both is damaged. So that's another failsafe way.
Acts of what I call cultural terrorism. In other words, burning people's holy books in public. Having competitions to find the funniest cartoon lampooning their most revered prophet. Those are generally speaking both acts of cultural terrorism against Islam, but they don't have to be.
Anything like that will cause offence that's powerful enough to damage the country's global image overall and remain damaged. After the so-called cartoons crisis, where you'll remember a Danish newspaper published cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad. This was back in 2006. Today, after all those years, Denmark's image is at least 10 places below where you would expect it to be for a Scandinavian country amongst the Muslim majority countries where we measure it.
It depends also on your definition of divinity. If you're Argentinian, then Lionel Messi, the footballer, is a god. And what we've seen interestingly recently is that the supporters of Paris Saint-Germain, the French football team who acquired him, weren't very satisfied with his performance and the fans were very unhappy and burned Argentinian flags and stomped on Lionel Messi's shirt.
And that caused the Argentinians who'd previously been amongst the most devoted lovers of France and the French throughout the history of the index, suddenly became France's worst enemy. And they started ranking France so low en masse as a nation that it actually caused France's overall position in the NBI to drop by about five places.
JB: You can call that cultural terrorism almost as well, but I hear what you're saying.
SA: So this is part of a general pattern of increasing volatility. In the last five to 10 years, more five than 10, to be honest with you, we've suddenly noticed that these huge cultural constructs called national images, which seem to be rusted into place, are actually much more mobile than I ever thought and they can be shifted still only downwards.
As far as I can tell, I don't know how you push one up.
JB: Interesting. So, what would you attribute that volatility to? Do you think that we are just a more interconnected world and when something offensive happens in one area, it travels around the world at the speed of pushing send on an app? Is that perhaps what's at play?
SA: My hypothesis is that it's an unfortunate combination of a wicked problem at a wicked moment.
And the wicked moment is the extreme turbulence of global events at the moment, which may not be only causal. It may also be a consequence. And at the same time, we have a wicked problem, which is the influence of social media on public opinion, especially younger public opinion.
And those two things occurring together have basically stoked up the fires driving cultural and social volatility to a tremendous degree. But one of the things that social media does is it requires people to have opinions on every single damn subject, whether they know anything about it or not.
And because I think they're a little bit anxious deep down inside about the fact that those opinions are not rigorously come by, they tend to hold onto them all the more aggressively because they don't feel very confident about them. And that's a witch's brew.
JB: Simon says people rarely want to change their opinion of a country, unless we’re talking about wars and pandemics. But to my mind, that increasing volatility he’s talking about must be fed, in part at least, by the stories that people read in the news.
Over the past 12 months, a couple of Canadian news events have grabbed international headlines…and stirred some bad feelings in other countries.
I’m thinking about our out-of-control wildfires that blew smoke all over the northern US…you can hear more about that in my “Good neighbours, bad air” episode.
Or the Canadian government accusing India of assassinating a Sikh-Canadian in B.C. That one is featured in the “Arrests and allegations of extrajudicial killings” episode.
And last fall in the House of Commons, when Volodymyr Zelensky was speaking to MPs, the government brought in a Ukrainian who fought in the Second World War and he got a standing ovation. Turns out he was actually enlisted with the SS…and that sparked a weeks-long bad news cycle at home and abroad.
And when these headlines get weaponized by public figures in other countries, I have to think that there is some influence on global public opinion.
SA: It certainly gets weaponized. People certainly do their best to use it. We live in a never-ending info war at the moment. We're caught in the crossfire constantly between these factions and their proxies.
And almost everything we hear these days, whether it's on Israel-Palestine or whether it's on Russia-Ukraine or any other topic, has been generated by one side or another or promoted or pushed or what have you. And it's toxic. It poisons the atmosphere. It fills our heads with vicious nonsense.
And the sooner we can figure out how to mitigate the situation, the better for humanity.
Otherwise, I really don't know where things are going. If we do end up in a situation where nobody trusts anything anymore and we're heading in that direction, it's difficult to see how society can continue because society without trust is not society.
I can't really put it any more simply than that.
To your point, wildfires, no, certainly not. I would say with some confidence, because everything that's ever occurred to a country that I've measured in the NBI over the last 20 years has not had any impact on its image. People are not stupid in this respect. They realize that the wildfires are not your fault.
They may be the fault of an individual, but that's classed as a thing that happens to a country and therefore doesn't affect its image.
Most of the rest of the stuff, people might just notice it because Canada is a prominent country, which a lot of people have quite nice feelings about. A few people even have strong feelings about, and so they might read it, and they're most likely to say, well, okay, the thing they are least likely to say is, goodness me, Canada really messed up there. I will immediately change my mind about it.
It'll be the anomaly that proves your opinion. It'll be the exception that justifies the rule. You will have forgotten it within 15 seconds because it's anomalous because Canada, of all countries, doesn't do stuff like that normally. The idea that we could pick up anything, any measurable seismic activity in the NBI as a result of one tiny event, I think that, forgive me, this may sound personal, but it's not meant to.
It's such a common misconception. It suggests that people are imagining that the size of a boo-boo in parliament is somehow equivalent to the size of the country's image. How can I explain it?
The size of Canada's image is the size of Malta, right? It's an object that large.
JB: Okay, large, large island.
SA: The size, and Canada has quite a small image for such a large country, very good, but not so huge. The size of a second world war, Ukrainian accidentally being asked to speak in the House of Parliament, is the size of a baked bean.
JB: Okay, so that's quite hard for a baked bean to have an influence on a largish island nation. Okay, so I take your point. We would need to do something quite bad, start a pandemic or invade…
SA: Lots of things, very bad, very consistently, on strategy for a really long time. And that's the bottom line because last time I checked, there were just about 200 countries on the planet. If we changed our minds about those countries, every time they did something weird or anomalous, we would have no time left to sleep or eat or drink. We would spend our whole time reviewing our opinions about countries. So what we do is we make those into norms. We hang on to those stereotypes and cliches, those brands, if you like, in the ironic sense of the term, for dear life. And we will not let go of them unless we absolutely have no choice. And we only have a choice. We only have, sorry, we only have no choice. This is a convoluted sentence. When a country literally and visibly and frighteningly changes its behavior, consistently, systematically, over a very long period, then we have to change our mind. But otherwise, we just don't.
JB: So being in the top three for the last five years, as Canada has been in the nation brands index, I think people should feel like it's hold steady on this. Do you have any advice for the Canadian government in terms of improving brand Canada?
SA: My advice to the Canadian government on this topic is don't even think about trying to improve your brand. A, because you can't. B, because you don't need to. C, because it's already better than the reality.
So be careful what you wish for. I think D, most importantly, rule. Better than the reality.
Well, yeah, because the country that you don't know and you think it's wonderful, as we were saying before, it can never ever live up to the fantasy. And you're lucky.
Canada is a fantasy for lots of people. People need to feel that there's a perfect country out there. And there are five or six of them. Canada is one of them that fills that role. It's the opposite of a scapegoat, whatever the opposite of a scapegoat is. It's that little heaven on earth.
JB: That unicorn of a country.
SA: Right. Which people just really, for their own happiness, want to believe exists.
And that's another reason why it's particularly difficult to damage the image of a country when it's got a good one. Because it's the last thing people want is to have that fantasy bubble pricked.
But my message to the Canadian government, after saying don't even try, is the interesting question for countries like Canada, which have got such good images, is not how can you improve them or even maintain them, but what can you use it to do?
Because what it means it means that you have influence. All of that positive feeling, those positive perceptions about Canada translate into trust. They translate into a position of automatic leadership for Canada. They translate into the fact that what you say, people will listen to and very likely believe. And we happen to live in a majorly screwed up world at this particular point in history.
And we need good countries that provide direction on the great splits that are occurring between the G7 and the BRICS, between the believers and the non-believers in climate change, between those who want to help refugees and those who want to force them to stay in war zones or whatever it is. And Canada could be and should be using its soft power, its good image, to work on those problems.
It's a risk because a lot of people might be put off Canada if it starts preaching. So, you don't preach, but you do and you show and you demonstrate and you lead. And most of all, you collaborate and cooperate with other like-minded countries. So that would be my question to the Canadian government.
What are you going to do with that image?
JB: That's a lot of food for thought. And we have in Canada traditionally punched above our weight.
A lot of it is being the next-door neighbour to the United States, the superpower.
But I think that's a really interesting place to leave our conversation on today.
Thank you so much, Simon, for joining me to talk on What are they saying about us?
SA: And it was a pleasure. I was right.
JB: I think you're pretty good at predicting things. It might be like you're a social scientist or something.
SA: Super. OK, I really did enjoy it. Thank you.
JB: Thank you.
SA: Let's talk again.
JB: Simon Anholt is the creator of the Nation Brands Index. He’s an expert on what influences a country’s reputation, and I hope I do get to speak with him again.
Thank you for listening to this feature interview…be sure to subscribe so you can catch more episodes as they come out.
I’m Jessica Brando…I’ll be back here soon with more answers to the question… “What are they saying about us?”