Expert opinion: care for your image from the start

Origins of the image of the independent Belarus

At the time of the declaration of its independence Belarus had no self-image, due to the fact that it has never been independent before in history. Almost no one knew anything about Belarus, which appeared on the political map of Europe. Those few diplomats, intersecting with the BSSR within the United Nations as part of their duties, experts on Belarus who studied the Belarusian language and literature at university, friends and acquaintances of Belarusian emigrants could not have any significant impact on this ignorance. It is impossible to correlate the image of Belarus with those existing of the USSR, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or the pre-war Poland. This was clear even the most naive observer.

However with the declaration of the independence Belarus recognition in the world was growing rapidly and its image was being formed. It was not just that Belarus was one of the countries that emerged from the fragments of the Soviet Union, but also the decision to dismantle the Soviet Union was adopted in Belarus. It has not just become another UN member country, but soon found itself in a list among other dozen of states possessing nuclear weapons. It was the voluntary renunciation of the possession of nuclear weapons that brought attention to our country. Minsk was elected as the location of the headquarters of the CIS - an international organization, which at that time could be compared with the EU. Belarus had an excellent start in finding «its place under the sun», establishing and asserting itself. However the Belarusian leadership ahead enjoyed the visits and receptions at the highest level, while not doing anything to sustain these achievements or to develop and to enhance success. By 1994, all the initial gains were almost lost. The three-year absence of reforms, the absence of any articulate foreign policy returned the country in terms of image and reputation to its original state. Belarus has simply become one of the countries with economy in transition, without any distinctive features.

Some interest and related expectations were caused by the adoption of the first Constitution of the country, the change of government and the election of the first president. The policy was not to rush with the assessment of the newly elected president or the newly formed government. Based the American tradition, the new leaders and governments are given one hundred days to define and to present the world with their matured image. For a country with a young inexperienced leader and with not sophisticated political elite this period could have been longer. The new Belarusian regime gave the world a clear understanding of how it should be perceived by the Referendum held on 14 May, 1995. The day after the referendum the country lifted up the red-green flag of the BSSR, and that was a sign to the rest of the world that clarified how can and should the Belarusian State be treated.

In 1995, almost no one thought about the country's image in the mortgage market, but as a result of this action its image had suffered irreparable damage. When the author of this article raised the marketing implications of the change of state symbols on the Belarusian television broadcast just before the referendum, he estimated the total losses, including the lost credits and investment, as USD 5 billion. And it was a very conservative estimate. The actual amount of the damages is impossible to assess on principle. The Flag and the Emblem of the BSSR made it distinctly clear that the country phased out market reforms and took a course towards the restoration of the Soviet Union. This «message» was well received only by the revanchist political forces in Russia and in some other Eastern European countries. In the rest of the world it was perceived either negative or with caution. Even those who have not questioned for a moment the right of the Belarusian people for self-determination realized that, if the policies chosen by the Belarusian regime proved successful, they should not do business with this country as it could soon disappear from the world political map, and all business would have to be negotiated with the leadership a new alliance, which, no doubt, would be located in Moscow, not in Minsk. However those who did not believe in the success of the revanchist policy of the Belarusian regime, generally preferred not to deal with the official Minsk, which was frankly opposing to the core values and developments in the European and global politics.

Until 2000 the Belarusian regime was spending huge sums on building the image of Belarus in Russia, especially in the Russian regions and in some CIS countries, virtually ignoring Europe and the rest of the world. When the hopes for a restoration of the Soviet Union were abandoned, the Belarusian diplomats and international analysts of the regime drew their attention to the rest of the world, including the CIS. Then they discovered that the country found itself in the international isolation, and that in the perception of the Western Europe and North America Belarus formed the image of a pariah nation.

Ideology workers of the regime can not be accused of the lack of creativity. The first years of the new century was characterized by creative and original foreign policy of Belarus. Official Minsk attempted to profit from its negative image. When the West declared it as a pariah nation, Belarus has made an attempt to capture the leadership among the anti-American and anti-Western oriented countries. Belarus was in solidarity with other rogue nations, creating intense diplomatic contacts, economic and military relations with Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba, China and North Korea and other countries. Ideological accords and political statements in this segment of the international policy were easy to declare, which is not the case with regard to the economic relations. The results of several years of this policy are as follows: the plant to produce Iranian «Samands», which has little economic importance, paltry token credits, and promises of Venezuelan oil.

When the resources of a very modest economic recovery came to an end, Russia started reviewing the preferences given to Belarus in the re-export of energy it became obvious to the Belarusian regime that foreign policy and geo-economic orientation towards the third world, the Non-Aligned Movement and rogue had not perspectives. However, awareness of such unpromising foreign policy has not itself spurred the regime to change the foreign policy doctrine. The last straw was the rise on the horizon of the world economic crisis. While the crisis began in the richest and the most economically developed countries, spreading from them to the rest of the world, it was clear that only friendship and good political relations with these countries would contribute to receiving resources and assistance to overcome the crisis in Belarus. And it is precisely at this time period that Belarus regime accepts the proposal of Boris Berezovsky to hire Lord Bell as a consultant and expert on changing the country's image and formulating the marketing strategy of the country.

As we know, at the market both good and bad products are sold. This applies to the area of image-making and PR. However the worse the promoted product, the fewer opportunities for marketers and PR managers there are and the more effort they must make. Whether Lord Bell is the best expert of all times, he can not improve the image of Belarus in the eyes of the world community, without serious efforts to change the situation in the country. It is difficult to judge how far a word of this consultant may change the course of domestic policy and what is called a course of rapprochement with Europe. However, last year and the beginning of the year in Belarus can be considered a period of image-making and PR. There is still nothing seriously changed. There were no reforms held or articulated. However there was a lot of talking about it. Some experts and analysts are even inclined to attach some importance to those small changes that did occur in the country. Recently there were also talks about changing taking place that reflect changes in the country's image in the outside world. It seems that the time has not yet come to make a serious and final assessment of the emerging changes, therefore after a brief insight into the dynamics of changes in the image of Belarus in the past two decades, let’s consider the notion of the country's image per se. It is necessary to decide now on what it is so that later on we would not have to invent something about the image in the view of praising the achievements, failures, or justify vilification of modest achievements.

«Find approval»

In the most general form the image can be represented as a set of two components: framework and reputation. Framework is a simple quantitative measurement: one can be equally or more famous. In the easiest case, the more publicity the better it is. In the more complex cases, the degree of visibility needed to monitor and correlate with those who know this. Actors and politicians belong to the simplest cases, but for a tax inspector or an investigator for particularly important cases the publicity is nothing. The other component, business reputation, can be measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. It can be either good or bad, or very good or very bad. In accordance with this tactics and strategies PR and image-making is being built.

A set of events or an entire program to increase visibility may be elaborated. No matter how complex and sophisticated those activities and programs are, in any case, they consist of the production of events and information events, with subsequent dissemination of information about them. To achieve the opposite effect (decreasing popularity) there is no need to make special efforts. You need to simply disappear from the information space and to stop producing events. Today Belarus is a small country. A few of people know it because we are a non-eventful country. Almost nothing happens here. In the end, to become famous, it is not so important what developments are made, the country may be known if its representatives win at the contest «Eurovision» or occupy the top places in the Olympics. Contributions for achieving fame and influence of a country are also the production of quality goods, natural disasters or crime situation. To get on the front pages of newspapers and prime time news using diplomatic scandal is faster than through the nomination of a positive international initiative. You only need to understand that every occasion or an information event will be advertised, widely interpreted and understood in some way and will lead not only to improve the visibility, but also to the cumulative effect of reputation.

Reputation is much more difficult part of the image, it is difficult to win, but easy to lose. Popularity is necessarily accompanied by a certain reputation, but reputation is inert and conservative. It relates to a proverb «take care of the honor from young ages». Our country already has a stable reputation as a pariah nation. Our leaders and the Government has long tried to please the dictator, revanchists and fundamentalists of all stripes, have long deliberately and purposefully annoyed politicians and the inhabitants of Europe and America that, to date, we have a quite stable reputation, which is integrally called very briefly «the last dictatorship in Europe». Actually, that is the whole image of Belarus. Positive moment about this image is that only few know about us with such reputation. Yes, we are known as the last dictatorship in Europe, but, thank God, only few know about it. And now we can take advantage of being little known.

We can manufacture events and information events, which are linked to other information about the dynamic modernizing country. And when the number of those who heard about us for the first time in this new capacity will exceed the number of those who knew about us as the last dictatorship in Europe, we may assume that we have changed the image, but there are a lot of difficulties on the way. Here I would like to touch upon one of them. For consistency, I will use terms that are proposed by Umberto Eco «finding dislike» (captatio malevolentiae (Latin)), and the reverse, «finding approval» (captatio benevolentiae (Lat.)).

Fame is achieved through simple reporting about events, but the goodwill is determined, including, sympathies or antipathy, approval or dislike by the people representing the country. And what they say and how they behave, is either approved or disliked. Or, in more complex cases, approved by some and disliked by others. In order not to go far into examples and not recalling the quotes of the Belarusian leader that refer to Hitler in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, let’s recall the last proposal made by the Foreign Minister S. Martynov to regard the young people hanging out near McDonald’s in the center of Minsk, as the basis for the conclusion that Belarus is a European country. How is that possible that a person who has made such a proposal could win the position of the Minister and to win approval by the other countries? Maybe by globalists? Or anti-globalists? For globalists McDonald's is a sign of the third world countries, especially when it appears as a «trippingly» and «modern» place. For anti-globalists, McDonald's in the same context - the symbol of Westernization and expansion. Such reasoning is only provoking dislike of Martinov. And one can only imagine the depth of misunderstanding of the modern Western world, which demonstrates that the Foreign Minister of Belarus thus «busting myths» about Belarus being a non-European country.

But the image is formed not only by the officials but also by the opposition and civil society leaders, and guest shuttle traders, athletes, actors, etc. Belarus yet does not have enough of these figures to talk about any significant effects, and the work on changing the image, first of all, involves building the intensity of contacts. However this intensity is fraught with the fall of reputation, i.e., will create a negative image, if the reputation is not cared after. Those who are interested in the process of the EU enlargement, can still remember how frightened inhabitants of the Western Europe of the Polish plumber. How many of the Poles had to spend on correction of the image? Just now in our time, the image of Romania is very damaged in the eyes of Spaniards and Italians due to individual criminals among the Romanian guest workers who managed to create a lot of information events, committing thefts and petty crimes.

Now, against the backdrop of a small representation of Belarus in Europe, a notable contribution to the overall image of the country, make representatives of the Belarusian opposition. The EU institutions are inviting the public opposition figures, while the initial arrangement with them was as with fighters with the last dictatorship in Europe. However approval is replaced with dislike fast enough following uninformed statements and declarations of archaic, which in modern Europe are considered to be politically unacceptable.

The image of the country is integral, it is won, and with the joint efforts of many, many people. We can as long as we want complain that in Europe they do not know or know very little, but to ensure that they know more, we need to think firstly about how we will promote each one of us and the whole country as a whole. Will those who know us like us? In order to ingratiate ourselves with the Europeans and to improve marketing rating the country as a whole, we should not only seek for approval, but for deeper and better knowledge about Europe. Otherwise, we will win dislike only and with the increase of the knowledge about us we will worsen our reputation.

Now there are no investments into our country because they do not know about us or not know who we are and what's happening in our country. However it may happen that we will be known very well and they will know exactly why they should not invest into our country. So far the last year can not be regarded as successful in the process of image-making. There is little hope for the Lord Bell’s group of country marketing. The issue requires a serious attitude by ourselves, profound design, and programme development. However  perhaps to start with it would be worth correcting the grossest errors of the marketing, done in May 1995: there is a need for our country to be marked in all the world maps, on sports pedestals, Internet banners not with the flag that is a symbol of revenge and return to the Soviet past, but a symbol of goodwill, freedom, democracy and willingness to market changes. It is not even a question of victory by other political forces within the country however a matter of understanding the general European situation, the main trends in its development and integration into pan-European processes.

Vladimir Matskevich

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