Oops...I did it again

By John Burton

The sudden announcement that Korea has a new national slogan ― Creative Korea ― shows once again the pitfalls of leaving international branding decisions to a bunch of insular bureaucrats. For a country that now proclaims it is "creative," the process reinforces the perception that Korea lacks creativity when it comes to branding itself. We have been down this road many times before with embarrassing results. "I.Seoul.U," anyone?

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism claimed it received nearly 1.3 million submissions from the public when it asked them for keywords that summed up "Koreanness." The main responses were "creativity, passion and harmony."

But asking Koreans to describe themselves and their country is not the best way to create a brand whose primary aim is to appeal to foreigners, whether they are tourists, businessmen or investors. Where was the foreign input in this process? Apparently there wasn't much.

The branding process appeared largely to be shrouded in secrecy, more so than the last branding effort under the previous government. This contradicted the promise of Chang Don-ryun, the chair of the culture ministry's Korea National Brand and Government Identity Development project, who told Arirang TV in an interview last year that the branding effort should be part of "a very transparent, open value system so everyone recognizes the value of participating."

He quickly added, however, that public participation should be "integrated" with expert opinion and suggested that such participation would be more useful in the implementation phase of making the brand known to the outside world. In other words, leave all the final decisions about what the brand should be to the local experts.

Chang, who is dean of the Graduate School of Advertising at Hongik University, clearly had the recent success of hallyu in mind in what would make a good brand. In his interview, he cited the popularity of K-pop and K-dramas, along with sports stars such as Olympic skater Kim Yu-na and Pittsburgh Pirates infielder Kang Jung-ho (now being investigated for alleged sexual assault), as examples of Korea's cultural soft power.

He explained that the brand should also reflect what makes Korea unique and the slogan should resonate with Koreans. No doubt in selecting "creative," the ministry knew that the word would resonate with its most important customer ― President Park Guen-hye, with her push for a "creative economy." But basing the brand on ephemeral popular culture is risky. Most pop stars come and go quickly.

Moreover, the word "creativity" is not particularly distinctive when it comes to describing Korea in comparison with other nations. But to be frank, K-pop is a derivative form of Canto-pop, Taiwanese pop and J-pop that first appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, while K-dramas have antecedents in the telenovelas of Latin America, which created the format.

This highlights the problem that Korea has in claiming that it is creative. The last time that Korea was truly innovative was in the early Joseon Kingdom when it created its own writing script, the world's first armored ships and the world's first moveable type. The first two inventions were mentioned in the culture ministry's press release announcing the new national brand, but officials were then hard put to come up with other examples. Besides K-pop, they also cited semiconductors and smartphones, which are the products of American ingenuity. And err…that was it.

Creativity, in fact, remains a challenge for Korea. The rigorous education and corporate management systems discourage innovation and "out of the box" thinking. It is one reason why Korea has so far failed to create world-beating innovative products or win a Nobel Prize in science, medicine or economics. Its most successful products have been copied from elsewhere. This may change since the country is one of the world's largest R&D spenders in terms of GDP, but it hasn't happened yet.

But in the meantime, by embracing the term "creativity," the culture ministry has created a dangerous perception gap between how local officials want Korea to be perceived and how it is actually seen abroad.

Moreover, the Park administration and the culture ministry are violating another key rule in national branding ― delivering a consistent message. Over the last 15 years, each administration has wanted to establish its own national brand identity for Korea in a game of political one-upmanship. So we already have had "Dynamic Korea," "Korea Sparkling," "Korea Be Inspired," and "Imagine Your Korea." These images are vague and the messages are mixed.

The government is reportedly spending around $3 million on the branding exercise, including advertising time on CNN and the BBC. If the government wanted to rely on proven expertise to help brand the country, then it should have used the budget to hire a leading international branding agency to come up with a decent slogan. Meanwhile, the Korean brand image continues to suffer.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.atimes.co.kr.