Bryce Delyea
The Hegemony of Mexico’s Nation-Branding Campaign
With the discourse of promotionalism comes the idea of nation-branding. The term has been coined by Simon Anholt who has served as an expert on the branding of nations and who has advised the governments of many countries on questions of national identity, reputation, trade, tourism and foreign relations. He is also a key contributor to the Nation Brands Index (NBI) which ranks countries based on their global perceptions from respondents in over 20 different countries. For instance in 2010, Mexico was ranked number 31st out of 50 countries by public perception according to the NBI. This relatively low score, Anholt says, is due to the inability of the nation-state to emerge from under the United States and present themselves to the rest of the world. Mexico has a flawed reputation from a global perspective whose stakeholders view the country through a lens of intense corruption, drug cartels and kidnappings which have seriously affected the vitality of some of the country’s most depended on industries including travel and tourism, foreign investment and trade and commerce (Freeman). To revitalize these industries and to bring more capital into the corrupt nation, the Mexico Tourism Board has hired a new prospect who hopes to rebrand the nation. Gerardo Llanes plans to implement a campaign of international responsibility with Mexico as key stakeholder in various qualitative subsidies including climate change, poverty and inequality. This paper will provide an analysis of the campaign spearheaded by Llanes outlining the possible benefits this campaign will promote and also the shortcomings resulting in the simultaneous cost of recognizing internal differentiation, resistance or conflict, a primarily negative effect of nation-branding.
Gerardo Llanes is the executive director for the Tourism Board of Mexico and has a track record working with some of the world’s largest brands including Coca-Cola where he launched Diet Coke in Mexico. This of course sheds light to the capitalist nature of the industry of nation-branding in its direct cooperation with stakeholders whose interests lie in engaging the profit-based marketing techniques of private enterprise to create and communicate a particular version of national identity (Aronczyk). However, maybe it is his track record that will revitalize the economy and give a boost to many of the struggling industries including travel and tourism. Tourism in Mexico has gone down drastically as tourists are choosing different locations for their vacations. This supports the producer-consumer model proposed by Josh Greenburg and Graham Knight who believe that the relation between consumer and product/brand relies on the trust that in consuming it will bring a certain set of internal and external benefits. Obviously that trust has been jeopardized with all 23 crime rates normally used to measure organized crime - from murders to human trafficking, smuggling to counterfeiting - having gone up in Mexico over the past five years (Miglierini).To appeal to potential tourists the Mexico Tourism Board has implemented their “Mexico Taxi Project” which records conversations of tourists and their time in Mexico, unbeknownst that they are being documented. Ethical considerations of informed consent on the part of participants aside, the campaign gives an unedited view of Mexico from the perspective of honeymooners, college students and families. The videos are all aimed at attracting potential tourists by highlighting the relative successes of presumably similar target market consumers and their respective experiences in Mexico. However there is some questionable validity to this initiative: the Mexican Tourism Board website shows a montage of 6 videos all showing the same cab driver. An argument can be made as to whether the videos are subject to bias and misrepresentation because the same driver is asking the questions in a way that leads to customers responding in a certain manner. Anholt argues though that this form of promotionalism also called “sunshine journalism” fails to solve the internal problems which are counterbranding the country as a site of violence and disorder.
The crimes associated with Mexican drug cartels continue to be at the center of discrepancy when it comes to discourses of national social security and safety. In 2007 the government under the control of President Felipe Calderon poured 8000 troops and millions of dollars in aid to help purge the country of the extreme violence that had taken civilians to pursue unimaginable measures including drug trafficking and other crimes (Booth). Anholt argues why such tactics are ineffective. Military force only perpetuates the problem as powerful cartels fight back for control. Mexico’s problems are tied up with both the international demand for drugs and the need for social reform at home (Freeman) adding that more social equality is needed so that people who might be thinking of investing in crime might not think about it because they can have other opportunities. Since 2010 “the federal government built schools in poor barrios where there were none, as well as community centers, playgrounds and clinics. It has provided education scholarships and health insurance and given money and materiel — new pickups, bigger guns — to the municipal police, who a few years ago were not just employees of the criminal organizations but also the management” (Booth). These actions are part of the campaign to make citizens informed and educated. This campaign will likely result in success as it draws on the concept of a personally-embodied essence of nation-branding as described by Aroncsyk as one of the four distinct steps to a successful nation-branding campaign. The creation of schools and community centers also supports the long-term features of the nation-branding campaign which characteristically entails an extended temporal horizon of anywhere from 15-20 years, at which time a new generation of citizens will have emerged to challenge current socio-economic factors. Like any nation-branding campaign, success is directly linked with politicians in power; Mexico’s current President Enrique Peña Nieto took office on December 1, 2012. His term will run six years depending on re-election in 2018. This could pose problems for the campaign which requires both the cooperation of government officials and private corporations and an extended investment of time (Aroncsyk) if another political regime takes power. In what some might consider an extreme example although relative to this case, a study of Egypt’s political revolution surrounding the overthrow of the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shows how a change in the political sphere can have implications on both the public and media agendas.
Some would argue that the attendant affects nation-branding has on the public and media agendas are the inherent flaw in the practice of creating and disseminating a national identity. The nation-branding campaign that Mexico is using can be scrutinized from the perspective of Marxist neoliberal critics who argue that the campaign supports the capitalist ideals of the West because its application “makes room for policies to be shaped under the guise of capitalism which influences modes of culture including film, multimedia, design, fashion, advertising, architecture, and other elite managerial-professional categories” (Aronczyk, 44). Simultaneously the process of branding a nation and integrating all of the qualities associated with the brand essence infer that certain qualities be deemed unacceptable, also referred to as “hygiene factors” in the promotionalism industry. The argument here is that branding cannot account for the plurality of voices, legacies and competing visions of the nation-state.
This analysis has explored both foreign and domestic initiatives to rebrand Mexico away from the violent characteristics that dominate media coverage. Few would argue that the current socio-economic situation is more than prosperous for the nation-state. Although going about eradicating the negativity surrounding Mexico’s identity definitely brings up arguments that nation-branding, although good in its instrumentalist and economic sense, do not “map well onto ideas of the collective good in terms of our moral and ethical responsibilities and relationships to our territorial allegiances” (Aronczyk, 56). Nation-branding is an effective communications strategy to attract tourism, trade and talent in a stifling market of competition for limited resources, yet simultaneously it offers an effective means for stifling a rational-critical democratic discourse by means of limiting differentiation or resistance.
Works Cited or Consulted
Aronczyk, Melissa. (2008). “Living the brand”: Nationality, globality and the identity strategies of nation branding consultants. International Journal of Communication, 2, 41-65.
Booth, William. “In Mexico’s murder city, the war appears over” The Washington Post. 20 Aug. 2012. Web. 22 Jan. 2013.
Freeman, Len. “Can Mexico re-brand itself?” BBC News. 22 Feb. 2012. Web. 22 Jan. 2013.
Greenberg, Josh, and Knight, Graham. (2009). Editorial: Rethinking Public Relations. Canadian Journal of Communication, 34, 183-187.
Mexico Tourism Board. Our Stories. Web. 22 Feb. 2012
Miglierini, Julian. “Cartoons enlisted to tackle Mexico's drug war 'myths'” BBC News. 4 Aug. 2011. Web. 22 Jan. 2013.
