Upgrade to Brand America

If you haven't lived overseas and integrated into another culture, it's hard to understand what the US looks like to the world. Your perceptions of their perceptions come mainly from TV. On CNN you might see angry mobs burning our flag, or a man on the street with a funny accent talking about us as if we're strange creatures from another planet. It can make you feel oddly detached, misunderstood, maybe even defensive. Particularly since we've heard our own politicians tell us over an over that we're the last great hope for humanity.

When you live abroad your consciousness of the US brand is greatly heightened. I spent four years in Warsaw (1992 - 1996) and was astonished at the overwhelmingly positive views of America. Still reeling from the communist hangover, Poles liked everything about us. Our cars, our food, our politics, our business, our culture. We were like the Apple brand. Not just a trademark, but a lovemark.

Ten years later, living in Sofia, Bulgaria, I experienced similar love in 2002. But that changed to ambivalence and then even occasional disdain over the five years that I was there. I knew how people felt about us/US from personal interactions with international friends, from the experiences of my children and from actual data that our embassy was receiving from a local polling organization. The number of Bulgarians who liked, appreciated and understood us went from moderately high to disturbingly low over the five years that I lived there... and you can't blam it all on me. The war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib and fear of NATO based in their country get a lot of the credit.

Concrete actions, pictures and stories take on a symbolic significance that is suprisingly powerful in terms of the effect on our brand. Abu Ghraib is perhaps the best negative example. Landing on the moon was pretty powerful on the plus side. In Africa, I saw a tremendous boost first-hand in October of 1989. My wife and I were Peace Corps Volunteers living in a small village in Mali, West Africa. Neither we nor our neighbors had running water, electricity or indoor toilets. No newspapers ever made it to us, but we stayed in touch with the international news on short-wave via the BBC.

One October morning there was knock at our door at 6 a.m. Nobody had ever come to call at that early hour, so I feared that something was wrong. Opening the door, I saw the bright, smiling face of Madou, one of the young brothers who ran the village store. After hand-shakes and greetings he asked me, "Baala, have you heard the news?" He couldn't wipe the huge smile off of his face.

"No, I don't think so, Madou. We are still in bed and haven't switched on our Radio."

"Ah bon," he said with obvious great pleasure. "Baala, (the local name I'd been given) a black man is the new chief of the American army. A black man named Colin Powell."

I invited Madou in for coffee and we talked for almost an hour about this great event that he'd heard about early that morning on Voice of America. He was generally not the happy-go-lucky type, but he was just bursting with pride and pleasure that morning... mixed with a bit of doubt that it might not actually be true.

I've thought about that morning many times during the presidential campaign. If the elevation of a person of color to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could have such an impact in a remote village in Mali, just imagine the impact of Barack Obama's election has been.

Regardless of how you feel about economic or social policies, regardless of your party preference, regardless of your tax rate, the election of a person of color will have a huge, positive impact on how we are perceived by people around the world. Our brand, so badly tarnished over the last five years, is about to get a huge boost. And that makes a difference, politically, socially and economically.