THR's opinion

The “Good Country Index”: Relevant for Destination Marketers?

Since 2014, the Good Country Index has offered a different lens for looking at the world: by measuring how countries provide for our global society through analyses of their contributions to humanity and the planet.

The Index, developed by British political scientist Simon Anholt, doesn’t measure what countries do at home. Rather, the Index only examines each country’s external impact on the world we all share. The Index applies a series of categorizations and scorings to areas such as International Peace and Security, World Order, Planet and Climate, and Science and Technology, among others, analysing quantifiable contributions that result in an overall ranking.

So how might the Index be relevant for destination marketers looking for data points to support their destination’s brand, or for the broader tourism industry? Could the Index be useful as a proxy for the brand perception of a country, which could be incorporated into a destination’s positioning and messaging?

These are questions that THR’s tourism marketing experts recently debated, and we share here the opinions and outputs from our conversations:

Top THR takeaways regarding the Index:

• While the index is relatively new there is relevance for the destination marketing sector, especially given that qualifying categories are often characteristics important to tourists such as Culture, Health and Wellbeing, etc.


• While individual tourists will most likely remain unfamiliar with the Index itself, its findings could prove useful for destination marketers and brand strategists.


• If destination marketers do choose to extract data points from the Index to support their positioning and messaging, which points should those be and how high should the country rank in a particular category to be relevant?


• Before applying any findings from any type of index, the quality, consistency, and reliability of the underlying data must first be affirmed.

Positive perceptions of the Index:

• As a more recently-developed index, the categories are more innovative and relevant to the modern traveler, with data points on Sustainability, Health & Wellbeing, etc.


• Such a newly-developed index is more likely to be based on substantial quantitative proxies that show sources of data and calculation methods to validate the soundness of the index, rather than more subjective criteria.


• The Index could serve as a low-cost external marketing support option.


• The Index could support a positive feedback loop whereby local promoters and ordinary citizens can be proud to figure highly in any given category.


• Likewise, the Index could serve as a motivational tool to identify and improve underperforming categories.

Negative perceptions of the Index:

• As with any Index, the underlying goals and motivations of the groups and individuals involved in the index development must be considered, to discard concerns of bias.


• The relevance of selected criteria to evaluate a country´s performance might be subjective, even if the data itself is objective. For example: if the number of patents produced by a country contributes to its ranking for the category of Science and Technology, how can the Index user qualify whether the included patents are actually meaningful contributions to Science and Technology?


• Evaluating a category such as Science and Technology may be less challenging than evaluating abstract concepts such as “Culture” or “World Order” and their contributions to a better world.

In sum:

THR’s overall impression is that the Index can serve as a valuable tool to extract positioning and messaging points that present a country’s best facets as part of a broader destination branding strategy.

However, certain precautions should be applied when it comes to the methodologies used, sample data, category relevance, and political and social motivation, among other considerations.

Finally, while the Good Country Index is unlikely to be an influencing factor for individual end consumers (tourists) it can prove useful to B2B organizations such as tour operators, investors, DMOs, and others whose jobs depend on positioning destinations.