Germany’s public relations team will be popping bottles of Gewürztraminer following its biggest victory in branding since swapping white for gold on its flag.
The country’s marketing powers have catapulted the nation into the number one spot of a recent ‘Best Country in the World’ ranking conducted by ad agency WPP, the Wharton business school, and US News & World Report.
The ranking evaluated nations based on 65 metrics ranging from adventure to entrepreneurship, though its methodology is different than the hundreds of other sources that use data and statistical analysis to score countries in what is essentially a rhetorical exercise.
Taking a page from U.S. politics, the report forwent numbers and instead considered how people felt about issues.
“The 2016 Best Countries report and rankings are based on how global perceptions define countries in terms of a number of qualitative characteristics,” reads an explanation of the methodology.
“Each country was scored on each of the 65 country attributes based on a collection of individual survey responses. The more a country was perceived to exemplify a certain characteristic in relation to the average, the higher that country’s attribute score and vice versa.”
It’s kind of like asking 16,000 people which country they think is home to the best Pokemon without actually considering where Mewtwo really is.
Canada finished a very respectable second, scoring high in citizenship and quality of life while being dragged down by a lack of movers and heritage. Someone get us on the phone with whoever’s in charge of global marketing at Heritage Minutes.
We also did this yesterday:
#CanWNT Melissa Tancredi gives #CAN a 2-1 lead over #GER in the 2nd half. #Rio2016 https://t.co/TbdPDVWAaK https://t.co/UlwbmIrcT0
— CBC Olympics (@CBCOlympics) August 9, 2016
Our neighbours to the South, who couldn’t sell freedom to the Third World if $664 billion depended on it, mustered a fourth place finish.
The top 10 below:
And some individual honours, courtesy Quartz:
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