We got involved because Simon Anholt produced a report every year which was a market research study of perceptions of nation brands. He was very keen to see whether or not he could apply it to economic values and to demonstrate the value of having a nation brand. So, he asked Brand Finance to produce the first league table of nation brand values, which we did about 15 years ago.

"Many countries – particularly developing countries – are using nation branding as a means of strengthening their economic performance."

Well, where it comes to nation brand valuation, I think it’s fair to say that Brand Finance is the only firm that is doing it and has been doing it consistently for the last 15 years. Within our long track record, we have adopted the approaches that have been pioneered by Simon, where we look at the 4 key areas: Tourism, Products & Services, Foreign Direct Investment, and Individual Perceptions of nation brands.

For example, Singapore has invested heavily in the reputation of its citizens – they are very well educated, speak excellent English, and have high ethical standards. Worldwide, there is a very strong preference for Singaporeans, who are known as being excellent employees and model citizens. Furthermore, Singapore is an excellent place for foreign direct investment, tourism, and people buy products and services from Singapore because they believe they can trust them.

We have always looked at those 4 dimensions when measuring the performance of economies, and we then segment the brand value according to primary, secondary, and tertiary elements.

• Primary is things like agricultural products, where both product and nation branding on those products tends to be quite low.
• Secondary economic activity refers to a specific industry, like car manufacturing.
• Tertiary is service-based, such as education services and so on.

The truth is, I think this is the one that adds the most value – if your economy relies on services such as accountancy, law, or strategy consulting, a very high added value arises, and the further up that chain you go, the more important branding becomes.

For individual companies, branding is the company’s branding and also the country’s branding.

This is one of the challenges that China has had – they have been the workshop of the world for 20 years, with most things being made there, but they’ve always been very reluctant to put “Made in China” on products. And yet, many of the world’s best technological products, such as Apple devices, are made in China.

When we are looking at individual countries, we look at 3 dimensions of their power – economic power, hard (or military) power, and thirdly, soft power. The definition of soft power is a country’s ability to persuade others to do things in their favour rather than using hard force.

If you take a country like the US, which is extremely strong in both economic and hard power, this does not translate into soft power. While it used to be extremely strong in this area, it has gradually declined as a result of policy errors, and in the current election, we see some of the Democrats, such as Barack Obama, suggesting that its soft power has declined under President Donald Trump because it has not been a good global citizen.

In China, which has been rapidly developing its economic and hard power as part of its foreign policy, soft power has historically lagged, but the country is now becoming very conscious that it needs to catch up in that area.

Having strong soft power can be very helpful for a nation, as small countries like New Zealand and Ireland have demonstrated.

While our measures of soft power are pretty comprehensive, we would like all countries in the world to buy into our research so that we are able to increase our sample size – last year our study spanned 55,000 people, which will increase to 75,000 this year, but we are researching in over 100 countries.

If we want a wholly comprehensive view into what people think about countries – which can then be fed back to them to help with their policy-making – the bigger and more robust the study is, the better.

New Zealand definitely stands out as the star of improving its soft power. The international viewpoint on their Prime Minister is extremely positive, and this will undoubtedly increase further with the manner in which the country has dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ireland has also done extremely well and punches way above its weight. Now that the UK has left the EU, Ireland is the only English-speaking country in Europe, it is not militaristic, it’s very well represented in all international bodies, and there is a huge diaspora.

I think it’s also fair to say that soft power in China is much stronger than it used to be and that some in the developed world would think. There may still be some suspicion about China in the West, but in a lot of other countries, people are just grateful for the good things China does for them.

I would also say that in the Middle East, the UAE is strong and is consistently getting stronger with things like the mission to Mars and its engagement with many other institutions such as the World Government Conference.

While I don’t particularly want to talk about the ones that are doing quite badly, I think it’s quite widely trailed that, due to Donald Trump’s extremely isolationist view of the US, their soft power is declining.

I think the biggest issue for destination marketers and branders continues to be figuring out a way to justify the return on investment to politicians and policy makers.

The equation used to be relatively simple: x media spend = y visitors or investment. It’s no longer that simple.

However, there has been some excellent work done by our friends at Tourism Economics to demonstrate that destination marketing is not only linked to but actually helps stimulate economic growth. It’s work like this that will help educate policymakers as to the value and importance of destination marketing initiatives.