It is difficult for countries to address their branding and communications problems if they don't know where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Until now, it has been possible to make only an educated guess as to how your country is viewed by the world, based on news clippings, surveys, focus groups and the like.

That is why East West Communications has teamed up with Perception Metrics to create a scientific basis for analyzing international perceptions of a country's brand. Through this technology we can now rank countries according to how they are described in leading international media, and we can create tailored reports that identify the specific strengths and weaknesses of a brand.

With this analysis, we have the tools needed to help you achieve and project your optimal positioning through scientifically-based branding and communications.

The East West Nation Branding Index is based on analysizing millions of mentions of countries in hundreds of thousands of news articles, every quarter. For the first indexes (2008/Q2), 38 prominent global media sources were surveyed between April 1, 2008 and June 30, 2008. This collection contained almost 5 million references to the 242 countries or regions identified for the study. Of these references, which were grammatically connected to the countries in question, almost 1.5 million were defined as positive while over 1.7 million were defined as negative. The Nation Branding Index (NBI) score relies both on the overall quality of the media and the prominence of the country, determined by the number of country references or mentions. NBI scores are distributed around a mean 50 with a standard deviation of 10. For the second quarter of 2008 the scores ranged from 17.2569 to 91.3769.

The East West Nation Branding Indexes use a proprietary Natural Language Processing text analysis system, developed by Perception Metrics. This rule-based system is comprised of dictionaries that include almost 16,000 words and phrases indicating either a positive or a negative message. From the analysis of these positive and negative messages and country mentions, a score is calculated and compared to other entities in the study.

Distribution of the Nation Branding Index in a typical quarter (2008/Q2):