Brand India

Can a country "re-brand" itself? More to the point, should a government focus on building a national brand image? With the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of Independence, and with India now the cynosure of global attention as an emerging economic power-house, is a government brand-building exercise of the kind that the commerce ministry sponsors in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) worth the crores being spent?

Given the many competing pressures on the exchequer, many would say a resounding "no". But the impact of the "India Everywhere" campaign at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos a couple of years ago and the success of the follow-up "Incredible India" campaign suggest that the answer is less unequivocal. There is evidence that well-crafted campaigns""and both were world-class in execution""can play a significant role in changing perceptions about a nation. Witness how Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" campaign re-oriented Britain's image from dull and stodgy to young and hip. In that sense, "India Everywhere" and "Incredible India" certainly fulfilled their brief.

The point to note, however, is the timing: two years ago, both campaigns were, in a sense, preaching to the semi-converted. India has been "in the zone", as Americans like to say, for some years now. A decade and a half of economic reforms unleashed the potential of Indian entrepreneurship and pushed the economy on to a higher growth trajectory. India's back-office revolution saved global corporations billions and, with the barriers to foreign investment lowered, the world started to discover an India beyond the traditional troika of backwardness, heat/dust and superstition, or maharajahs, ghats and ruined monuments. So yes, India is everywhere and there are""like in any other large and diverse country""plenty of incredible stories to be told.

In that sense, the branding exercise escapes the charge of being a waste of money. But like any brand-building exercise, commercial or national, the problem lies in matching the promise with performance. Officially talking up the country is a great way to build awareness, but it is important that the government underwrites the credibility of the message with policy interventions. After all, there is no better advertisement or public relations exercise than when global investors have good stories to tell. In that sense China, despite being a giant, disguised licence raj, still enjoys a significant advantage over India. It is telling that Japan rarely sold itself in its heyday in the seventies and eighties""there were enough acolytes of its Just-In-Time system of logistics management and of manufacturing excellence to do the job. Readers will recall similar strenuous marketing campaigns by Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh and Jyoti Basu of West Bengal in the late nineties. Mr Naidu first enjoyed success because he backed up the hard-sell with enabling policies. Mr Basu failed because he could not do the same""and his successor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is suffering from the same problem. Finally, there was "India Shining", one of the most eye-catching examples of national brand-building in recent years and aimed essentially at a domestic audience. Unfortunately for its sponsors, the National Democratic Alliance government, the audience didn't buy it. India Shining, as far as the Indian electorate was concerned, was not a credible story.