Learning from brand ‘America’

It dawned on me today that America was very clever with its marketing of brand America.

OK, yes I know, over the past few years they haven’t done themselves a lot of favours, but just putting that aspect aside for the moment (if it’s at all possible) I was just considering a term that is widely used worldwide and initiated and propagated by Americans. And that’s the simple use of adding American to other nationalities.

2nd and 3rd generation settlers in America have and always will be, I would guess, been known as African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans etc etc and even American Indians, you know those guys that were there originally. Does this happen anywhere else in the world? In the UK we have 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th generation nationalities that we just refer to as Italian, Chinese, Indian etc.

It’s just a very small point but just how clever is that by the Americans? Just by adding that one word onto the end of every other nationality present in the USA, no matter how long their families have lived there, they project America and the pride of being American. We talk in the UK about an integrated, multi-cultural, society but no British identity – not saying that is wrong because we all need a separate identity and to treasure our cultural roots. But how much more promotion for British/UK identity would we/could we have had by using British-Italians or UK-Italians. Everyone then has pride for where they are and where they live and retain their identity, pride and culture.

No matter what you say about our overseas cousins, they did a great job on brand America, worldwide. A marketing lesson to be learnt there.