Anti-Americanism To Hurt Global Corporate Profits?
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. - Advertising executive Keith Reinhard has a message for U.S. companies: America's tarnished image may soon hurt your bottom lines.
Reinhard says growing anti-American sentiments and their impact on international sales aren't subjects corporations like to discuss publicly. But he says more executives are paying attention to warnings about shifting attitudes abroad.
"Sooner or later, anti-Americanism has got to be bad for business," said Reinhard, president of Business for Diplomatic Action and chairman of the New York ad agency DDB Worldwide. "In marketing, we know that changes in behavior inevitably follow changes in attitude."
Speaking Thursday at the Virginia Conference on World Trade, Reinhard encouraged businesses to practice diplomacy overseas and to take other actions, such as recruiting more foreign interns, to help change the way people view Americans.
Reinhard says the rising resentment has its roots in U.S. foreign policy, globalization's effects, pervasiveness of American popular culture and the "collective personality" of Americans.
"Americans are widely viewed as arrogant, loud, ignorant of other cultures and totally self-absorbed," he said in an interview earlier this week. "We think that's an attitude and behavior that can be changed."
This guy is full of it.
For one thing, Americans have been "widely viewed" as arrogant, loud and ignorant by some in the international community for decades. Long before President Bush and the war in Iraq came along.
Anybody remember EuroDisney?
For another, it is closing in on three years since President Bush made his most controversial foreign policy decision (invading Iraq) yet American companies seem to be doing just fine in the foreign markets. If there was going to be some economic fallout from international opposition to the war then I'm sure American companies would have felt it by now. And, given that the press is always eager to hype any negative story connected to the war effort, we would have heard about it.
This is yet another effort to fulfill the media's anti-Bush, anti-war agenda. Anybody with some common sense can see that what Mr. Reinhard is saying has no merit and no evidence to back it up.
I hold extreme views on most issues, but they are never all held by the same party. Most are held by neither party.
Rodney Graves
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