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Israel celebrated its 70th anniversary in May of 2018, but its brand image internationally was less than ideal. Market research revealed that many people associated Israel only with military conflict. Harvard Business School professor Elie Ofek discusses efforts to rebrand the country, and whether these efforts to shift perceptions are starting to show success, in his case: “Israel at 70: Is it Possible to (re)Brand a Country?”
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BRIAN KENNY: “Therefore, I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Jews who wished for a state will have it. We shall live at last free freemen on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes.” This prescient view of the future was written by Austro-Hungarian journalist and activist Theodor Herzl in February of 1896. 52 years later, his vision became a reality when the state of Israel declared its independence on the South Eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the ancient holy lands. Their claim was immediately rejected by the Arab leaders, sparking decades of tension and conflict between Israel and its neighbors that continues even today, but if you look beyond the headlines, you can see a different side of Israel. You see a country rich in diversity, a place steeped in history, yet on the cutting edge of innovation and science and technology, a thriving hub of entrepreneurship, arts and culture. Simply put, you see the essence of what Theodor Herzl described so long ago. Unfortunately, that’s not a version of Israel most people see. Today we’ll hear from professor Elie Ofek about his case entitled, “Israel at 70: Is it Possible to (re)Brand a Country?” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call, part of the HBR Presents network. Elie Ofek’s research focuses on new product strategies and technology driven business environments, as well as in consumer-oriented companies in general. He’s also the coauthor of the book, Innovation Equity: Assessing and Managing the Monetary Value of New Products and Services. Elie thanks for joining me today.
ELIE OFEK: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: I really, really enjoyed this case and I must say that Israel is now on my list of go-to places.
ELIE OFEK: Wonderful.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s a long, long list. I’m not sure when I’ll get there. But really, I think this is a really interesting look at a place that has been defined by news and headlines and not in a positive way for most of our lives, for most of our lifetimes. So I think people will come away with a very different understanding. And as a marketing person, I really appreciated this from a sort of branding perspective. It really is a huge branding challenge. And we’ve seen other areas deal with this even in Boston. I think the notion of Boston as a place of innovation and entrepreneurship has always taken second fiddle to a silicon valley. So in Boston we talk about it.
ELIE OFEK: Absolutely. Those are very good observations that you make, and I think that you kind of framed sort of the case and what it tries to look at and the sort of challenges that people have faced in this regard of this branding challenge … of branding a state very well.
BRIAN KENNY: So why don’t you start just by setting up the case for us, who’s the protagonist and what’s on their mind?
ELIE OFEK: This is a little bit of atypical case. First of all, it’s not about a company, it’s more about a country. And then there’s not really one protagonist per se, but there’s a bunch of actors that have been involved in this effort or have given thought to this idea of, how do we manage the brand of Israel? There is one person that might be a little above the others who kind of started some of the rebranding efforts that are more recent. But beyond that, it’s really about these various actors, all of which play a role, have tried to play a role in rebranding Israel.
BRIAN KENNY: And we’re going to focus in on those folks a little bit later in the case, but I’m just curious, what led you to write the case?
ELIE OFEK: You framed the birth of Israel from the sort of vision of Theodor Herzl and since that founding, in 2018 the country was celebrating its 70th birthday. And that was a big milestone. There was some buzz around that milestone that was reached the 70th birthday, and as I was talking to people or hearing from people reflect on that, I was hearing different views, different opinions, different perceptions of Israel, namely from Israelis versus non Israelis, people that had been there versus were not there and it got me thinking, how do these perceptions form? And has there ever been a conscious effort to brand the country? And so I really dug into that and that’s what led me to work on this case.
BRIAN KENNY: Not only was there a conscious effort, there were multiple efforts coming from public sector, private sector all over the place. So they’ve been working hard at this for a while.
ELIE OFEK: Working hard at this for a while. Getting into branding of Israel also opened up this whole door for me to understand the whole topic of place branding. By place you can think of either a city, a region or a country, and in fact, you see that there are multiple stakeholders always involved in the branding of a place and that became evident when I was working on Israel rebranding effort in particular.
BRIAN KENNY: If you think about the science of branding or the practice of branding, it’s always about the promise that you’re making to your stakeholders. So that’s relatively easy to do with a product or a service. You can sort of articulate what the promise is. What are we going to give you? What are we delivering to you? A little harder, I guess, when you’re talking about a country filled, by the way, with people who are all independent thinkers and have their own perception of the place.
ELIE OFEK: Are you sure you haven’t been to Israel?
BRIAN KENNY: I’ve not.
ELIE OFEK: Very well put. When you have that level of pluralistic thinking and diverse thinking of the particular place from the actual people that even are there, you will get a lot of opinions about what is the best promise to make or what are the best associations, meanings, thought provocations that we want people to have when they hear the name Israel or when they think about this country.
BRIAN KENNY: Other places have tried this. The case mentions a couple of them. Can you describe who’s done it well and who has not so much?
ELIE OFEK: There were a bunch of examples of countries or cities that have tried to sort of affect the way their place is perceived and what are those meanings and associations that people have. A good example would be that people like to give is of a New York City, which for a long time in the ’70s and going even into the ’80s was facing challenges of being perceived as a crime riddled city, that there was a lot of financial distress, a lot of low income neighborhoods, it was starting to be perceived as a place that was scary to be in. And that drove the tourists away obviously and it also drove businesses away. So something had to be done to change that. Both local government as well as business folks there together came out with a plan of rebranding the city and trying to sort of establish the fact that, ‘hey, this is the big apple, this is a place that’s bigger and better than other places,’ and trying to sort of reclaim that glory and fame.
ELIE OFEK: Of course, you can’t just do messaging. You have to actually on the ground to make that promise real. And so that came about. And then the famous tagline of “I Love New York” came to be and trying to establish an emotional connection for people about love. It’s about this city that you should love because of what it has to offer and because it’s so interesting. So that’s a case that’s usually featured as a successful place branding example because tourism went up, businesses stayed in the city headquarters and so on, and so that worked. I love New York logo is still around today. So it’s an enduring element of what New York is. Not so successful, people sometimes like to bring the example of the shared values initiative that the U.S. State Department tried to propagate in the Muslim world.
ELIE OFEK: The idea was, we’re not perceived well in many Arab or Muslim countries. There is a negative perception and that led to even hate to the U.S. So, can we sort of find a way or find something to brand the U.S. around in those countries? And the idea was: let’s find a shared value, and since this value will be shared amongst U.S. and those Muslim countries, maybe we can bridge some of that gulf that exists in the perceptions and reality. But it didn’t work so well. There was an attempt to try to show that Muslim people in the U.S. are free to practice their religion, that there’s tolerance for religion in the U.S., but that didn’t fly well because, A, not all media outlets were willing to allow those ads to run, and secondly, people said, ‘That’s great that there’s religious freedom in the U.S., but how does that resolve the tension with the U.S. coming into foreign countries and sort of militarily and politically trying to influence those?’ It didn’t really sit well, and it didn’t really work.
BRIAN KENNY: The role that religion plays in a lot of these things, I think drives a lot of that to the tension that the difficulty in getting to a positive place. And that comes up a little bit too in the case of Israel.
ELIE OFEK: Oh, absolutely.
BRIAN KENNY: We’ll talk a little bit more about that. As I mentioned in the introduction, for most of my lifetime and yours and really since the founding of the independent state, tension and conflict has been swirling around Israel. How did they first set about trying to brand themselves as a different place, a vibrant place that people should come to?
ELIE OFEK: It starts with the sort of history of the conflict and the belief among many Israelis, especially in the foreign affairs department that it was almost like there was a trial going on in the media. So there was the conflict, there were wars, there were tensions, there were clashes, whatnot, and that was being covered by the media. And then there was a sort of maybe too much of an inward-looking perspective of, “I’m being accused of something.” And so a lot of times what Israel would employ with respect to branding of itself was more along the lines of explaining, and in fact that was what the office was called or what the goal was called in Hebrew. So we need to explain why we do what we do. We need to explain the situation. It’s a very rational, almost like going to trial or being put on trial and we’ll explain the situation, and people will find that our arguments are compelling, and once they find that our arguments are compelling, they will be on Israel’s side, Israel will be on the right.
BRIAN KENNY: So, this is the court of public opinion. They’re appealing to the court of public opinion.
ELIE OFEK: Exactly. We’re trying to appeal to that court of public opinion. This was going on for a while and there was a belief that it was at least working to varying degrees. But then when people started doing some research into, well, how do people in the West and particularly in the U.S. perceive Israel? And that’s when some light bulbs went on. They realized that whilst many people kind of on the margin or very superficially said, “Sure, I support Israel on the whole, maybe they’re doing some things that are wrong, but Israel is okay.” That was on the political front. But anything nonpolitical, people either had no opinion of Israel at all, or it was all colored and framed by the fact that it was a conflict. All I see on the media is clashes, tensions, wars and fighting. That’s where the light bulb went on that people may know about Israel. It might have some views on the political situation, but they really don’t like this place. They don’t think this is a place they want to go. They don’t think this is a set of people they want to necessarily be associated with, and that led to that idea that maybe we are shortchanging ourselves by only talking about the conflict itself and trying to convince people that we’re right. Maybe we’re shortchanging ourselves because we’re not letting people see the other sides of Israel.
BRIAN KENNY: Who was it that was doing this investigating? Because this is interesting. It’s a state sponsored effort.
ELIE OFEK: Effectively what happened was there was this Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomat and his name is Aharoni, and he was in New York City at the time at the consulate. And he was being approached by many Jewish organizations that were starting to worry about Israel’s image globally and why is it that Israel is only perceived in a certain light. And then several people from all kinds of branding strategy agencies offered him the ability to do this research, and not just gauge, do people support or not support Israel, because that’s the only thing that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was measuring because that’s all they cared about. But let’s try to measure what people think or feel about Israel in general. And that’s when they started seeing that in fact Israel was better known than liked and that the conflict was the only thing people thought about. And one of the seminal studies that they did at the time, which they then called the “house study,” was to bring people in and ask them to describe houses in a neighborhood and each house represented a different country.
ELIE OFEK: When they described a house like the Italian house, it was in a very green setting, it was a very well-lit house, there’s laughter going on, very welcoming.
BRIAN KENNY: You want to hang out there.
ELIE OFEK: You totally want to hang out there. And when they got to asking people to describe the Israeli house, well, almost invariably, it was made of concrete, it was very dark, there were descriptions of barbed wire. The idea here was that the conflict, which had been such a major component of what was covered about Israel and even how Israel itself was branding itself, think about us as right in the conflict, got people to have that one dimensional view of the place and that colored everything that they thought about the place.
BRIAN KENNY: How far off was perception from reality?
ELIE OFEK: So, to those that began or thought about the efforts to rebrand Israel, that was huge because Israel itself was this much more modern place, much more secular place that people believed. While there were terrorist attacks on occasion, and wars had occurred in certain frequency, the day to day lives of most Israelis, especially in the big cities, in the metropolitans of Tel Aviv and Haifa and even Jerusalem, these were people leading their lives much like people in the west and people that wanted to enjoy life and people that were very vibrant. There was a restaurant scene, and there was a cultural scene, and obviously there was also a, starting from the ’90s, a very strong entrepreneurial scene. All of that was lost. And so people that were thinking about that, both from the government side as well as individuals, to them, that was what was preventing people from connecting with Israel, that they didn’t know the real true Israelis and they didn’t know what Israel was all about. For them, that gap was huge.
BRIAN KENNY: So, what did they do? How did they address this?
ELIE OFEK: The initial efforts were to try a coordinated effort from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And it started well, but then didn’t go as well or as hoped. They came up with a nice set of ideas and a guiding brand position for Israel was this idea of “creative energy.” So the thinking was, what if we made the sort of brand meaning of Israel and its promise to be that Israelis are set up, they’re very creative, both on the innovation front, the startup front, and also on culture as an arts and food and lifestyle issues? And it’s a very energetic place. People are very vibrant, very dynamic and very emotional in everything that they do, unlike the perception that they’re just behind these closed, cold barbed wire concrete facilities. But once they tried to implement that, there wasn’t a lot of political will and there’s various finger pointing as to why that happened, but at the end of the day, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and especially this diplomat that we mentioned, Aharoni will say that what they were able to do though was create a little bit of a movement or get other people and other entities to become more proactive in following that direction of thinking about how do we brand Israel beyond the conflict, or starting a broader conversation about Israel as some like to put it.
BRIAN KENNY: Right. And there were some folks, some players who you mentioned in the case who actually sort of stepped up to the plate and started their own efforts to do this. Just grab a couple of those.
ELIE OFEK: Exactly right. So one woman who had heard Aharoni speak and his ideas very much resonated with her. So, what she decided to do is set up an organization which she called Vibe Israel with the idea of let’s expose the real vibe. I should start by saying there is this realization that when you bring people to Israel, when they do actually come to visit and they see that reality, it immediately shatters all the preconceptions because they do see the day to day life. They meet Israeli people, they see the various places, they interact with all of these components and they realize that this country is very different from their perception and it has so much more to offer.
BRIAN KENNY: So, they experience the promise.
ELIE OFEK: Exactly. But you can’t bring everybody to Israel. Tourism to Israel hovers around, they’ve hovered for many years around the 3 million mark, three million visitors a year. Some of these are repeat visitors obviously, and so it’s very limited. So her idea was to say, what if I leverage the emerging world of digital and social media? What happens there is that you have these macro influencers, people that blog or upload videos or posts, and then they have these followers that follow them. And so what if we brought these kinds of influencers to Israel on their areas of interest because if it doesn’t interest them, they’re not going to blog about it and that’s not what their followers want. Their followers want the stuff that interests them. So if you’re a fashion blogger, I’ll want to expose you to the fashion scene in Israel. If you’re a foodie blogger, you’re going to get exposed to the food scene. Every trip is maybe three or four up to five of these macro influencers and let’s customize a tour for them to reveal the true Israel on those fronts. Obviously, they’ll also meet some Israelis then and expose them to the diversity in the place and some innovation in that place. And not restrict, not control anything that they say, but ask them, make at least one post a day about your experience here, whatever you feel like you were experiencing. And the idea was that if they bring enough of these influencers and if the followers, which are in the millions, for each one of these trips, there are millions of followers following those four or five influencers that are coming, you could slowly get people to get exposed to this idea that Israel has so much more to offer and there’s so much vibrancy and creativity.
BRIAN KENNY: And it’s coming from people that they trust. We talk about social media, the idea of an influencer, is that somebody whose opinion you actually trust.
ELIE OFEK: Exactly. They follow them for a while, they trust them and they’re saying these things. So I should pay attention and maybe I should go to Israel or maybe I should read more about Israel. And while there’s supposedly no hidden agenda here for Vibe Israel, like Vibe Israel’s not saying, “I’m not trying to influence anybody’s opinion about Israel and the conflict, they can think whatever they want. I just want them to know this other side.”
BRIAN KENNY: So, it’s very unlike some of these planned visits that we see to places like North Korea or China where they schedule everything very tightly, they’re being accompanied by somebody from the state each stop along the way, and that feels like a very manicured-
ELIE OFEK: Exactly. In fact, the organization early on did take some funding from the government to help it out, but it then issued all that kind of funding because it didn’t want any of the strings attached, you don’t have any of that controlled visits and sort of, which would undermine the credibility. One other effort I’d mentioned is again, trying to leverage the new world of digital media and this person is also mentioned in the case, Ostroff, and he basically came to the idea through one of his colleagues that what if we could get people to read things online that had some relationship to Israel, wasn’t necessarily the major thing, but they could see an Israeli connection in there on content that was of interest to them. So let’s say you’re interested in nature, or you’re interested in photography, or you’re interested in food, and you’re on some website reading about it. What if I could also get you to then hop over to this other website to read an article but it’s going to have some Israel connection to it?
ELIE OFEK: That required creating a lot of content of this nature. It required thinking about tools to get people to come to your website by paid links or search engine optimization. That was another effort that was intended to get people to expose people to Israel and show them that Israel does stuff on things that you care about. It’s related to what you care about. So suddenly you think of Israel in a different light.
BRIAN KENNY: They did some other things that were interesting too. Talk a little bit about the country ambassador, the brand ambassador.
ELIE OFEK: Another initiative that they came up with was to have this sort of brand ambassador and they chose this Israeli basketball star called Tal Brody. And they had him go abroad four or five times a year, each time for several weeks, and he’d speak at universities, at all kinds of events, African-American and-
BRIAN KENNY: He’s American born, right?
ELIE OFEK: He’s American born. He was a college player. He was ranked highly in the, I think it was 1965 draft and he was planning to play in the NBA. He basically … he’d already been drafted. And one thing led to another. He came to Israel over a summer to play in some kind of Israeli sponsored pseudo Olympic Games that are called the Maccabiah Games. And people convinced him to come for one year to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv. That was the only thing that they was asking him to do so that Maccabi Tel Aviv could sort of elevate its prominence in the European League and uplift the spirits of people to see that Israel can manage something in sports. And he came for that one year thinking he’s going to go play for the NBA the following year, and he loved it so much and he saw what it did for the people and how much the success of the team sort of meant both in Israel and abroad and he ended up staying, and he became sort of this big basketball star.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s remarkable.
ELIE OFEK: It is remarkable. And so then he goes and talks and he really focuses not anything related to the conflict but about the sports in Israel. He sort of half-jokingly, but seriously brands Israel: Israel is the sports center of the Middle East.
BRIAN KENNY: There you go.
ELIE OFEK: There you go. And he wants people to think of Israel as a place that cares a lot about sports. Sports is a common denominator. And again, you see the thread here, the more you show people that Israelis care and are successful in the stuff that you care about, that you deal with in your daily lives, you start shedding the perception of just this military oriented country that is sort of steeped in conflict and that’s the only thing you think about. You start developing a connection along the sort of things that you care about as well with the state of Israel.
BRIAN KENNY: Another thing, the case gets into that, I’ve actually personally known several people whose children have done this, but the birthright program, really interesting way to bring people from America to Israel so they can experience it firsthand.
ELIE OFEK: Part of what the discovery of the research was that even amongst American Jews, there was a sliding perception of Israel and there was a sliding perception of even how they felt about their connection to the religion. And starting in the late 1990s into the 2000s, there was this program to bring young Jewish people from abroad for a 10-day visit to Israel. And the idea was not to just focus on religion or not to focus specifically on explaining to them the political situation. Almost to the contrary. It’s more adventure driven. It’s more about bringing the like-minded people to Israel, but then meeting with Israelis and seeing that Israel can be this vibrant, fun place. At the same time, reconnecting a little bit with your identity as a Jew or letting you develop that on your own from what you’re seeing. And because it shows that other side of it, a lot of these other sides of Israel, when these folks go back, the idea is not to get them to come and say, “Oh, I want to live in Israel the rest of my life,” maybe some of them do. But the idea is that then they go back and they feel much more connected and they serve as ambassadors themselves because the case mentions, and it was interesting to learn, they go back and talk to their families and then people from their family decide to come to Israel to visit and then they might go back and speak to other people. And so it’s like a ripple effect that can sort of have a broader impact than just the people that come to visit.
BRIAN KENNY: I think it’s brilliant. Something else has happened obviously in the decades since Israel became a nation state. The conflict and terrorism that plagued the Middle East for a long time has found its way to other parts of the world. So you see major tourist destinations like Paris or Munich or the United States, many cities in the US experiencing their own violence and conflict. And you wonder in some way, I think the case even mentioned something about this, is there a residual benefits the wrong word, but does Israel in some way gain from that? Because people will say, “You know what, I’m really not safe anywhere. It’s my responsibility to make sure I take care of myself wherever I go.”
ELIE OFEK: No, totally. I think another way to frame that is that the perception that Israel was a non-secure place, that violence was the only thing going on there was a negative differentiator, at least from the tourist standpoint. Now, if now there’s terror attacks in other tourist destinations like in France and Paris and like in Britain when there was stuff going on in London, and even to some extent in the US, we’ve had some terror attacks, those start eroding the negative differentiator arguments. Suddenly Israel is on the table because people still will go to France and people still will want to go to Britain, and they’re overcoming the fact that there might be a terror attack there. Well, the same now applies to Israel. I should be willing to go there and in fact maybe the Israelis are better equipped.
BRIAN KENNY: I was going to say.
ELIE OFEK: They have so much experience in it.
BRIAN KENNY: They have this reputation for being buttoned up on that front. So you might feel better actually.
ELIE OFEK: That’s right.
BRIAN KENNY: So how is all of this going for Israel? There are several years into this effort.
ELIE OFEK: That’s the great question. And then the case tries to provide that reflection piece because part of the case is saying these actors that have started trying to brand Israel and change perceptions, they are a little bit taking stock of what they’ve done now that Israel reached the 70th milestone and they’ve been engaged in these efforts for several years now. And the results are a bit mixed. It’s still the case that many people perceive Israel as military conflict, war and the conflict dominates everything they think about the place. Some metrics are showing a bit of movement along a few dimensions. So for example, some of these people that have acted say, well, I can show you that people that have gone to the website and read an article about Israel, their perceptions about Israel now are slightly improved. One of the first words that comes to mind when they think Israel, it might be startup or innovation. So those messages and that kind of branding has helped, but to some people’s dismay, they have not diffused or they’ve not negated some of those other components. So that’s one element to saying there’s mixed success, but it’s not like it’s changed people’s perceptions entirely. The other piece to this is that the problem in some sense has shifted or it’s evolved from what it was when they began their efforts, these rebranding efforts. And that’s to say the conflict has taken another piece to it, one element of the conflict is clashes, military war, but another element to this conflict is humanity, social justice, and morality, and those pieces have taken over especially among millennials, generation z that care about this. They don’t care about the actual political conflict. They don’t care about who’s right or wrong. But they don’t like seeing people that are oppressed. They don’t like seeing people that in the name of security for one country and maybe those security claims are legit, they have to trample the human rights of others. And so the problem has a little bit morphed itself into now having to say, how do we combat that problem? And so when you ask have their efforts been successful? Some would argue yes, some would argue not as much. And the question is now that the problem of the conflict has morphed into that, what needs to be done going forward?
BRIAN KENNY: The challenge continues.
ELIE OFEK: The challenge continues.
BRIAN KENNY: Well, hopefully the next time we talk, I will have been there. Actually, I could use some good restaurant recommendations.
ELIE OFEK: Gladly.
BRIAN KENNY: Elie, thank you for joining me today.
ELIE OFEK: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you should check out Managing the Future of Work, a podcast that looks at how to survive and thrive in the age of artificial intelligence and learning machines hosted by Harvard Business School professors Joe Fuller and Bill Kerr. Thanks again for listening. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and this is Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School.