The approach has a number of components which I’ve been developing in my practice and research since my book Competitive Identity was published in 2007. Several of them will be familiar to people who have been following my work, and now it feels like the right time to bring them together into a single system.

Ever since I’d first coined the term ‘nation brand’ in 1998, I had been concerned about the growing tendency of governments to spend larger and larger amounts of public funds on propaganda – in other words, paid messages telling the world about the assets and achievements of their countries and cities, in the hope that this would improve their image. The main message of my 2007 book, Competitive Identity, was that this simply doesn’t work.

Places are judged by what they do, not what they say about themselves. There is absolutely no correlation, and never has been, between a country’s image and the amount it spends on marketing, PR or “branding”.

There was, and is, serious confusion between traditional promotion of a country’s sectors and products (such as trade, investment and tourism), and the attempt to improve the country’s overall image. The first is indeed a matter of marketing and promotion: it’s basically informing potential customers about what’s on offer, and using media and messaging to do so makes perfect sense. It’s expensive but relatively straightforward, and demonstrably effective. The second is an approach to policy-making: it’s far harder, takes much longer, and isn’t so easy to measure directly.

The most important upgrade to my Competitive Identity approach was the observation that “world-friendly” policies are by far the most likely to produce an improved national image. This had been forming a more and more important part of my advice to governments over the years.

I began to examine this principle more systematically in 2012 with an analysis of more than one billion datapoints which my main survey, the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index (now the Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index), had accumulated since 2005.

This analysis suggested that the main driver of a positive national image was the perception that a country contributes in some substantial way to the world outside its own borders: that it is a principled and collaborative actor in the international community, one which improves the lives of many more people than its own citizens and benefits more of the planet than its own slice of territory.

Naturally, the basic principle of Competitive Identity still applied: this effect cannot be achieved by messaging, it needs to be consistently and substantially proved by real behaviour, over the long term. In other words, if you want to be admired, be admirable.

This is the idea of the Good Country, a concept which I introduced in a 2014 TED talk, and which underpins the Good Country Index.

Unlike the Nation Brands Index, the Good Country Index is not an opinion poll, but a study that attempts to measure what, in reality, each country on earth contributes to humanity and the planet, beyond its own borders.

The Good Country is the starting-point for “Place Branding 2.0” (a term I promised myself I wouldn’t use in public, since I’ve been trying to get rid of the awful word ‘branding’ for about twenty years – I’m open to suggestions for a better name!).

This principle has power well beyond national competitive advantage, a concept which I find increasingly unhelpful and outmoded, and which, like so many ideas from economic theory, has led us seriously astray during the last forty or fifty years.

I believe that the principle of the Good Country can provide the lever that humanity desperately needs in order to encourage countries and their governments to co-operate and collaborate more consistently and effectively, so that we can properly tackle the grand challenges facing us in the 21^st century (pandemics of course included). This is the main argument of my new book, The Good Country Equation, which will be published in August.

The other characteristics and principles of “Place Branding 2.0” are organised around this core principle,

The research that Robert Govers and I conducted in 2017 suggests that at least 10% of the world’s population – some 700 million people – naturally share the basic values and principles of the Good Country. We call these the ‘Natural Cosmopolitans’, and they are widely distributed around the planet (the fact that a great many of them live in the Nordic region is entirely predictable; the exceptionally high proportions of such people in Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Andorra, Trinidad and Tobago, Serbia and Malawi is more interesting).

With a cohort of that size, you simply don’t need to worry too much about the naysayers: it’s very hard to persuade people who genuinely have more attachment to their own nation than to humanity as a whole. For them to change their minds is tantamount to changing their character and that’s a very tall order.

I think that working with the 700 million Natural Cosmopolitans can keep me busy and productive for the next few years at least!

With every month that passes we see new demonstrations of the simple truth that increased globalization brings new problems, and with them the potential for new solutions.

We are incredibly lucky to be living in an age where we are surrounded by so many opportunities to contribute meaningfully to people and the natural world. From the smallest village to the most powerful nations, all of us can start to earn our place on the planet: we are spoiled for choice.

Humanity and nature need so much help. All we have to do is match our interests, our knowledge, and our ambitions to the right challenge; a better reputation is the almost incidental side-effect of this renewal of purpose.