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By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff Reporter
Korea's plan to upgrade its national brand has been lauded but also evaluated as too ambitious.
Experts made these remarks after the Presidential Council on Nation Branding unveiled a 10-point action plan aimed to lift its global brand ranking to 15th by 2013 from the current 33rd.
British government advisor Simon Anholt said that national brand is not something that can be suddenly elevated over a short period of time as promised.
``No country has ever moved by more than one or two places in the national brand index, and in any case this isn't the proper way of using the index,'' Anholt said in an interview with The Korea Times.
Instead of overall score, Anholt, who coined the term of nation branding back in 1996, advised Korea to look in much more detail at Korea's performance in certain individual sectors of the Nation Brands index such as people, culture or governance.
Under Korea's action program to improve its global image, Korea will provide underdeveloped countries with technical assistance to help their economies move forward based on its past achievement of double-digit economic growth during the industrialization period, and send more aid workers to meet the global humanitarian needs.
Unveiling the action plan, Chairman Euh Yoon-dae of the presidential council declared a caring and respected Korea as a vision, stressing its brand value will be improved if the country is viewed as attractive by other nations.
Earlier, President Lee Myung-bak prioritized upgrading the national brand as one of his major strategies, adding Made-in-Korea products are undervalued overseas due to Korea's current `lower' standing among the global brand rankings.
Anholt, in collaboration with New York-based GfK Custom Research North America, measures the power and quality of 50 countries' brand images by combining exports, governance, culture and heritage, people, tourism and investment and immigration.
Korea ranked 33rd in the nation branding index released last year which conducted 20,157 interviews with approximately 1,000 interviews per country.
Brand experts shared the view that there is no doubt that the initiative would help Korea get more respect from the international community if effectively pursued over the next years.
``If implemented, this plan will certainly raise Korea's international standing,'' said Michael Breen, chairman of Insight Communications Consultants based in Seoul.
``There is a huge amount of generosity in this country. Koreans will find themselves being held in much higher regard in the international community,'' Breen added.
Anholt said most of the initiatives listed were good and solid, but he was skeptical on whether the plan would lift Korea's ranking from 33rd to 15th place by 2013 as the government intends.
``Whether or not they will really lift Korea's ranking in the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index by 18 places in four years is quite another matter,'' he said.
As for the plan, the largest opposition Democratic Party commented that South Korea's mending fences with North Korea and human rights are two core tasks that the government needs to work on to make the country respected.
The presidential council, in collaboration with World Research, conducted a survey of 1,000 foreigners living in Seoul about the way the country is viewed.
In the poll, 48.4 percent answered security tension between South and North Korea was a major stumbling block prompting the country to be placed in a relatively poor standing in national brand, followed by Korea's limited contribution to the international community (44.1 percent) and socio-political instability (41.5 percent).
Rep. Kim Hyo-seuk of the DP accused the government of sending what he called confusing signals by pledging to upgrade its image on the one hand, while on the other it planned to downsize the National Human Rights Commission.
Kim contended that the downsizing plan would be no help at all in nation branding.
hkang@koreatimes.co.kr
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