The slippery territory of branding a country: Spain

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• Imagine you are a CMO at a large company with multiple customer touchpoints.
• A big retail bank, for instance.
• You develop a great brand narrative, a visually stunning corporate id, an awesome customer experience.
• You get the unanimous blessing of the board of directors.
• You validate it all with market research: the public will love your value proposition.
• In theory, that is.
• It just so happens that your bank’s staff, the thousands of folks who will interact daily with your myriad customers in person and over the phone, do not quite buy your idea.
• In fact, a small fraction of your personnel actually hates it and will even sabotage it.
• In a day and age when every soul out there has an opinion, a mobile device and various social media outlets to vent, the picture described above can get out of hand.
• Big time.
• Now extrapolate this conundrum to an entire country.
• Welcome to Spain.
• A few months back an American friend of mine visited Spain for the first time.
• He loved the food, the booze and the springtime weather.
• But he felt a bit… wronged.
• Service in Spain errs on the neglectful side, or so he felt.
• “They treat you like they’re doing you a favor” were his words.
• Which is code for “they treated me like shit.”
• I can’t say I was surprised.
• I’m used to being treated like shit and reciprocating onto others accordingly.
• It comes naturally.
• I am so accustomed to it that I don’t even notice it anymore.
• The three cities I’ve called home throughout my life have been my hometown of Buenos Aires, New York and Miami.
• Plus, my wife is from Spain.
• Born and raised.
• Go figure.
• To her credit, she went to college in Iowa and lived a few years in Chicago so she’s imbibed a bit of them Midwest manners.
• Anyhoo.
• The thought lingered in the back of my mind.
• If you don’t understand Spaniards, their traits and their culture, they certainly come across like they have a politesse problem.
• More so than the French or the Italians.
• Cut to the week before last.
• Just landed from a lengthy vacay in Spain.
• Lengthy by American standards, that is: 19 days.
• In Europe 19 days is called a long weekend.
• I stayed mostly in Catalunya which, depending on who you ask, might soon become an independent nation state.
• To my amazement, Spain is undergoing a national frenzy of “turismofobia”.
• That’d be “tourism phobia”.
• Or something like it.
• See, Spain has become the #1 tourist destination in Europe (#2 worldwide after the US).
• Yup, higher than its French neighbor (whose brand has supposedly been hit harder by terrorism yet, after the recent terrorist attack in Barcelona and Cambrils, this perception will probably change).
• In fact, a lot of people claim that “Spain is the new France.”
• The influx of vacationers has shown annual double-digit growth for the last decade or so.
• Year-to-date growth could fetch 15% in 2017 (from 74 million folks to north of 80).
• Industry experts believe this will dump close to 40 billion euros onto the Spanish economy.
• These projections were made before the terrorist attacks but, still, it’s a nice load of gravy.
• Problem is, after 60 years of branding and promoting itself as “affordable sun, fun, food & freedom” the Spanish people seem to be having a bit of a hangover. *
• They’ve had it with the hordes of tourists cramming their streets, their airports, their museums, their hotels, their hostels, their camping sites, their beaches, their restaurants, their bars, their casinos, their landmarks.
• What used to be Europe’s playground seems to want none of it no more.
• Nuff is nuff.
• I kid you not: after a brutal economic downturn that still keeps one third of the population with dicey perspectives of access to employment, activists and graffiti artists across the country are gracing various visible walls with “Tourists go home” and other cuddly calls2action.
• What seems to be the problem?
• Many Spaniards are concerned that their lifestyle is being endangered by these waves of thrifty, selfie stick-wielding tourists.
• Did I say waves?
• I meant tsunamis.
• The arguments are diverse, most of them tinged with a certain hue of left-leaning politics.**
• To be sure, the activists who are spearheading the movement are a bit fringe.
• To say the least.
• Yet they’ve managed to obtain considerable press coverage (until the terror attack last week, that is).
• As usual, the left claims that big business is reaping all the benefits of the tourism bonanza and the working class is getting the short end of the stick, while assorted sites of “national heritage” are being defaced by flocks of fanny pack-wearing foreigners.
• That and the puddles of vomit that noisy revelers leave in the adjacencies of nightclubs and bars.
• For instance, they claim that short term tourist rentals in Barcelona (namely, Airbnb) are to blame for the 9% hike in citywide residential rents during 2016.
• Never mind tourism represents 12% of said metropolitan area’s GRP.
• Can this brand perception -both inward and outward- be fixed somehow?
• Hardly, if you ask me.
• At least in the short term.
• This is not something an ad campaign can fix, regardless of budget, strategic vision or creative brilliance.
• Let me rephrase, rebranding Spain would take massive marketing efforts throughout at least a decade of economic and political tailwinds.
• Plus it would require industrial amounts of PR to shift public sentiment.
• Spain is the land of Ibiza, mega nightclubs and after after parties that open their doors at noon.
• It has become the land of some of the most flamboyant gay pride parades in the world.
• Spain has the highest index of bars and coffeeshops per capita of the entire European Union (1 every 169 inhabitants, according to the Spanish edition of Esquire magazine).
• Most cities in the country have casinos and legal gambling of various sorts.
• Last but not least, Spain (together with Portugal) is the main European gateway for an awful lot of drugs from Latin America & Africa.
• Correlation? Causality? Consequence? Symptom?
• Who knows.
• Please don’t get me wrong but, given these circumstances, what kind of tourism did they expect?
• In many aspects, Spain is to Europeans what Las Vegas or Cancún is to Americans.
• What happens in Spain stays in Spain.
• An opportunity to go wild for a week.
• Even Spanish cinema plays right into the stereotypes with Almodóvar’s melodrama and Torrente’s satire.***
• It’s only natural that folks from Northern & Eastern Europe will flock to the peninsula year after year.
• They come from places where you can get reported to the police and duly fined for taking a shower after 10pm (Germany, I kid you not).
• They come from countries where the cost of living tends to be considerably steeper, food tastes like a bathroom sponge and summer lasts for all of three weeks.
• To be continued next week.

*Strictly speaking, Spain began branding itself as a tourist haven in the early 60s, under the tight rule of that most unlikely of military and ultra Catholic strongmen: generalísimo Francisco Franco, caudillo por la gracia de Dios. Yes, even in the ultra repressed Franco era, Spain was the place where you could have a two hour-long dinner starting at 10:30pm or toss a cigarette butt on the floor of a bar with total abandon. Can you fathom how liberating this is for someone hailing from an anal-retentive Protestant country?

** Some radical and, mostly, separatist groups have resorted to vandalizing yachts and fancy restaurants. Then again, never underestimate the ability of the media to create a storm in a teapot. Particularly during soccer’s off season, when politicians are on vacay and there isn’t much to report other than Neymar’s astronomical contract with Paris St. Germain. Another conspiracy theory claims this is an intel op carefully crafted by the Madrid central government to paint leftist separatists in a bad light and erode their support in various regions. The terror attack, naturally, will change this dynamic from now on.

***Torrente is a comedy saga already in its 5th sequel, a creation of comedian Santiago Segura, who embodies a corrupt, inept, filthy and dissolute police officer turned private investigator, bodyguard and swindler. In doing so, Segura lampoons every single stereotype of Spanish culture with nuclear levels of political incorrectness.