US Reputation and Wikileaks. (I) US Vs Spain Media Reputation

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (III) The Impact of ugly brands

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (II) The Impact of Top American Brands

US Reputation and Wikileaks. (I) US Vs Spain Media Reputation

The main aim of this blog is to show how using the methodology and techniques developped by MRI Universidad de Navarra we can provide clear empirical insights of the direct impact of Wikileaks cables revealed on reputation. We have shown in precedent posts the impact of Wikileaks on the reputation of some companies, like Bank of America and Chevron. We have also analysed how Wikileaks portrays a specific media image of affected countries, like Pakistan, Tunisia or Egypt.

With this post we start the analyse of how Wikileaks affects internal and international reputation of the key player in all cables leaked: United States. It refers to US foreign policy through the actions, analyses and movements by US embassies and US State Department. t does not always refer directly to the US as a country, but many analysts consider that Wikileaks affaire may have asignfificative impact on the international image of the United States.

We are not yet able to estimate the mid and long term impact of this issue, but MRI Universidad de Navarra can provide a picture of how international media is actually covering the issue and how it relates to the United States. We will show in this and the following results the analysis of this question based in our date set and the analysis of the content of the printed news referring to the US and Wikileaks.

Before identifying how does Wikileaks affect United States image, we will present here how United States is perceived in the media using our approach. The results presented here refer all to the content analysis of articles published worldwide in English (including US media) referring in their articles explicitly to the United States. Period under analysis covers June 2010 to December 2010.

We show the US media reputation using the diamonds graphical analysis already used and explained in the case of Chevron and Bank of America. We just remember here that graphs indicate how similar are the news about the United States to news referring to each brand vector (like impressive, excellence, talented). The bigger the diamong, the higher the level of association of the US to a specific brand vector. In order to provide aterm of comparison, we show the results referring to the United States against those referring to Spain (again, based in articles worldwide written in English).

The following figures refer to some of the brand vectors, presented simply as example. According to our results, United States has a better 2010 media reputation than Spain concerning “Excellence”, “Acclaimed”, “Talented, Smart”, but Spain has a better position when considering “Impressive”.

One of the reasons why we have chosen Spain as example for comparison against United States of America media reputation is that we have estimated in another study how the FIFA Football World Cup 2010 won by the Spanish team did affected the international image of Spain. The global media impact of this sport event is so massive that is has definitively reputation implications by the organizing country (South Africa) and for the country winning hte competition. While in this blog we analyze the impact of a specific event like Wikileaks on the media reputation of countries, companies and personalities, we identified the reputation impact of a sport mega event in the mentioned study (Full report, freely available, is presently only in Spanish version).

In the mentioned study we identified a dramatical increase of Spanish media reputation in brand vectors related to emotional factors (like “Impressive”, “Acclaimed”, “Spectacular”). Those results referred to all international news about Spain, and not only those related to football or sports.

We shoe here the mid term reputational impact of this sportive success. We reproduce tow of the precedent figures, but we add in red colour the values reached by Spain in the first half of year 2010, before the sport competition took place. We clearly observe a substantial increase of media reputation for Spain for both the vector “Acclaimed” and “Talented, Smart”. Our results indicate that even if in these two vectors The United States outperform Spain in 2010, the gap was even bigger before the international sport success in South Africa benefited the international media image of Spain.

In line with this example, we will show in the following posts how different US brands affect international reputation of America, and later we will analyze the specific impact of Wikileaks