/ 18 October 2013

It’s a brand new day for sunny Mzansi

Brand SA's Simon Barber and John Battersby have honed their public relations technique for more than a decade in Washington and London in the service of the country.
Brand SA's Simon Barber and John Battersby have honed their public relations technique for more than a decade in Washington and London in the service of the country. (Oupa Nkosi)

Torture, the kind involving electrodes and sharp implements put to malevolently creative use, would almost certainly do it. They say that everyone breaks eventually.

An extended application of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques beloved by a euphemistically minded interrogator may also do it; men with that combination of grey hair and soft hands are typically ill-equipped to withstand sleep deprivation and days of nonstop annoying music at high volume.

But short of extraordinary rendition coupled with extremely uncivilised treatment, there appears to be no way to make Simon Barber and John Battersby say a single unqualified bad thing about South Africa. After a decade of running Brand South Africa's Washington and London offices respectively, pointed questions about the state of the country won't achieve it, and verbal abuse about its future only widens the smiles on Barber's and Battersby's faces. They seem to positively relish the challenge of turning any ­conversation about the country to the positive.

It would get annoying to the point of making water-boarding seem like a good idea, but for three important distinctions between Barber and Battersby and the typical overly optimistic cheerleader: they back up their attitudes with solid arguments, they push their rose-tinted glasses almost exclusively on foreign audiences (targets arguably deserving of such treatment), and they get paid to do it. And after years of doing it professionally, their method is polished to a dazzling sheen.

Step 1: Acknowledge the problem, bluntly.
"[The] Marikana [massacre] was an earthquake event in terms of investor sentiment," says Battersby, whose posting in London means that he deals with more than his fair share of mine shareholders and high-finance players.

Step 2: Embrace and extend the negative argument.
"It is not as if everything was hunky-dory before [Marikana]," says Battersby. "There were the issues of nationalisation and [Julius] Malema's speeches, there were bureaucratic delays … Investors had already started backing off new investment. The earthquake confirmed everything they had been doing already."

Step 3: Contextualise.
"We need to keep reminding South Africa that the troubles down here are not that unique," says Barber, who tends to deal with American lack of interest in South Africa in his posting rather than London's tabloid coverage of blood and guts. "Even Marikana. Ultimately, Marikana is about the splitting of a mineworkers' union. The United States had that in the 70s. People even got murdered."

Step 4: Recast.
"We're not going to turn around the damage done by Marikana in a short space of time," says Battersby. "What we can do is show that government is dealing with it in a fundamental and structured way. There has been and will be more labour unrest, but, ultimately, we are looking at the creation of a social compact between government, labour and business."

The "sunshine four-step" is neither that contrived nor that sequential. After a collective lifetime as journalists for local and foreign outlets before long stints as brand ambassadors, Barber and Battersby are a lot slicker than that. Instead of hammering home the point, they weave the narrative, and the result is all the more compelling for it.

"First and foremost, we are ­storytellers," Barber says of his job.

Which sometimes means telling the story of the South African miracle through personal experience, disguising the moral – and the moral is always a variation on "South Africa is a great place to visit, invest in, and trade with" – in a compelling anecdote. "I remember going out to Mafikeng when the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging had gone to try and rescue Bophuthatswana ruler Lucas Mangope, and those AWB guys were shot down, and all the journalists said, 'This is it'," recounts Barber without provocation.

"The OK Bazaars was being looted, it was just chaos. The following day, I decided I wanted a big-picture view of what was happening, so my photographer and I broke into the soccer stadium and climbed up. We sat there and we watched, and we saw life completely returned to the ordinary, people just going about their business. There was smoke, but it was from braais."

The point, of course, is that South Africa has overcome serious problems in the past, and the implication is that past performance speaks to future trends – and that investors should be getting in while the getting in is good.

So on Marikana, the message is that short-term upheavals notwithstanding, South Africa is "one of the most stable countries on the planet".

On the problems in the education sector: "We have the capability to fix it."

On warnings that South Africa is steering towards a political or economic crash, or both: "It gives us a sufficient sense of crisis to act."

And on mutterings in 2009, in Brand SA itself and from some government officials that having two middle-aged white men represent the country abroad is not ideal: "Race is no longer a determining factor in South Africa."

As positive as they are about South Africa and its future, Barber and Battersby are even more optimistic about the ability of Brand SA to further its ambitious goal of creating unity at home while simultaneously drawing trade, tourists and investment from abroad, all through the power of a positive brand.

Not even marketing budgets of only about R1-million a year – down by more than half from previous years amid belt-tightening, though still up from the zero money made available in their first years of operation – to cover big and complex markets dampens their spirits. Promoting South African wine at high-end US stores costs money, but rallying expat South African communities to the cause is close to free. Bringing influential natives to South Africa for a first-hand look costs, but making sure the right minister is a speaker at the right conference does not.

And those small interventions are what will make South Africa into the kind of brand people with money to spend and invest will not be able to resist, the two men say. Increasingly. Probably. Eventually.

"Attitudes about South Africans and by South Africans have changed, and we have helped with that," says Battersby. "We're getting there. This is an exciting story. All we have to do is tell it."