In testimony before the House Budget Committee on March 15, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced: "I’m going to be bringing people into the public diplomacy function of the department who are going to change from just selling us in the old…way to really branding foreign policy, branding the department, marketing the department, marketing American values to the world."

The person Powell chose to lead his branding effort was Charlotte Beers, a 66-year old Texas-born marketing magician without diplomatic, political, or policy experience, who was appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs soon after 9/11. Known as "the queen of branding," Beers announced that she had "the most sophisticated brand assignment I have ever had." Her goal was to sell "the brand of the United States."

SEVENTEEN MONTHS

She lasted 17 months, resigning for "health reasons." The general consensus is that she did little, if anything, to "move the needle" of world public opinion more favorably toward the United States, criticized in numerous countries because of Bush's militaristic, unilateral policies. Her projects -- including a widely dismissed magazine targeted at Muslim youth, a brochure on terrorism found to be simplistic, and much ridiculed videos showing Muslims the happy life of their co-religionists in America -- came under intense criticism. They won’t long be remembered. Beers’s most lasting achievement will be seen in the negative. Branding was never everybody’s favorite (it "suggests a huckster’s sales pitch," says Chris Reidy of The Boston Globe), but during the Madison Avenue diva’s brief appearance in Washington it became associated, much to its detriment, with her "ad" nauseam initiatives.

The anti-Beers-branding backlash comes from five sources.

FROM THE RIGHT

First, and recently, from the political right. There were criticisms of Beers’s methods early on in the pages of the conservative The Weekly Standard, but the loudest reactionary voices against her came after Bush got reelected, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

On November 16, a Journal editorial lambasted the State Department’s "misbegotten efforts to sell American values to the Middle East by way of a Madison-inspired ad campaign." "But the U.S.," it argues, "can’t be sold as a ‘brand,’ like Cheerios." It blamed Secretary Powell for this failure "to take control of his department."

In the November 17 WSJ, Eliot Cohen, the well-known neoconservative, stated that "Condoleezza Rice must reinvent our public diplomacy, articulating abroad the values for which the U.S. stands, using not the techniques of Madison Avenue executives (one of the failures of the first part of the administration) but speech rooted in America’s history and politics."

…AND THE LEFT

The second source of brand criticism is from the left, which had been after Ms. Beers from day-one, given her wealth, Republican connections, and Madison Avenue background. Its complaints about Beers’s legacy are endless, and underscore a point not made by the pro-Bush right -- that U.S. public diplomacy under the current administration has failed to take the consequences of unpopular policies into serious consideration. As Naomi Klein says in "Failure of Brand USA" (The Guardian, March 14, 2002): "America’s problem is not with its brand …but with its product."

Klein goes on to condemn branding, an enemy of "diversity and debate," which are "the lifeblood of liberty." Historically, she says, the "ugly flip side of politicians striving for brand consistency" are "centralized information, state-controlled media, re-education camps, purging of dissidents and much worse."

PENTAGON ADVISERS

A third source of skepticism about Beers-era branding comes in a report of the Defense Science Board Task Force to the Pentagon that first appeared in September 2004 but was covered by the media only after the presidential election. The 102-page report, which drew extensive commentary, notes that:

Through the peak of mass marketing in the latter part of the 20th century, th[e] domination of private sector mass communications resources literally developed the power of Western popular culture and the growth of global brands.

It goes on to say, however, that:

the same factors that added to the power of the incumbent leaders and brands also provided opportunity for insurgent movements and insurgent companies -- for fresh, cutting-edge and sharply differentiated competitors. Today, as a result of the global Information Revolution, private sector mass marketing is losing its relative power.

The report concludes that the U.S. must adopt the strategies and tactics of the insurgent, not the incumbent: waging a proactive, bold and effective U.S. strategic communication effort.

A conclusion that can be drawn from these observations is that twentieth-century branding a la Beers is an anachronism, an outdated method of dealing with the challenges American foreign policy faces in a new world of terror networks.

FOREIGN POLICY PROFESSIONALS

Criticisms of Ms. Beers’s methods, many of them uttered sotto voce, were rampant among foreign policy professionals at the State Department during her brief tenure, including from former officers of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which was consolidated into the Department in 1999. A recent voice of dissatisfaction with her branding techniques comes from Richard Haass, who was Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State during George W. Bush’s first term and is now President of the Council on Foreign Relations. In an article that just appeared in Newsweek online, he stresses that business methods cannot be necessarily applied in government -- or be useful for business itself. He cites as a example of misapplied business talent none other than Charlotte Beers, noting that:

Her attempts to improve America’s image in the Arab and Muslim worlds through media spots depicting happy American Muslims fell flat. It is one thing to sell Uncle Ben’s rice, another to sell Uncle Sam’s foreign policy.

Haass goes on to note:

Why do so many people coming out of business run into trouble? In business, success can be measured by profits. How does one measure the quality of a public service…

NO WAY TO RUN A BUSINESS

The business community itself is a final source of Beers criticism. From the very day she took office, savvy articles in Advertising Age and Brandweek cast doubts about use of her branding to advance U.S. interests abroad. A group of business people concerned about America’s declining overseas image -- Business for Diplomatic Action -- was incorporated in January 2004. Although the group doesn’t use the term, "Brand America," it’s not opposed to branding as such, which it feels U.S. government can’t handle properly. "Our experience is that when we try to do something with the government, it just turns into a pile of paper," the president of BDA, Keith Reinhard, says.

Yuri Radzievsky, CEO, GlobalWorks Group, in an "Open Letter to Charlotte Beers" (Brandweek, January 21, 2002), summarizes a viewpoint that many, no matter their political divergences or occupations, would not disagree with:

I believe in the power of communication. I was born in the Soviet Union, where the media, as in many Muslim parts of the world, was state-controlled. Our generation grew up questioning everything that purported, on TV or in print, to be factual. I remember commercials for a Western-made chocolate, branded as just the thing to have in your pocket when feeling hungry. To many truly hungry Russians, who couldn’t afford bread, no less sweets, the message sounded terribly cynical. I grew up to hate the brand for showing us what we couldn’t have. Let’s not have America make the same mistake.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review (PDPR) available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com. Aside from public diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, foreign public opinion and American popular culture abroad.