Why Engelbert Strauss Is Not Germany.

A response to the FAZ interview with Henning Strauss.

Henning Strauss is right about almost everything except the analogy. Engelbert Strauss is a family-owned workwear manufacturer from Schlüchtern in Hesse — founded in 1948 as a door-to-door brush trade, today Europe's best-known supplier of trousers, jackets and safety boots for the building trades, and increasingly of outdoor clothing and fashion. In an interview published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 11 August 2026, he describes how the firm turned the banality of the work trouser into a genre: define the brand core, charge it with "emotion and aspiration", show resolve, have courage. This is good brand management, empirically backed by 1.4 billion euros in revenue. Then comes the sentence that gives one pause: "Germany must have the courage to see itself as a brand."

It sounds compelling. It isn't. And the reasons are not quibbles about detail — they are structural.

What Strauss argues.

Since the interview sits behind a paywall, here is the argument in its steps.

First, the diagnosis. Germany's external image is better than its self-image. "Germany has an incredibly positive image. The internal assessment is significantly worse than our global image." What the world perceives, he says, is reliability and dependability — and, seen from the United States, a working culture others envy.

Second, the underrated strength. The competitive advantage is not diligence but "structuring, thinking through and precisely formulating problems". In the age of AI, the quality of the question determines the quality of the answer. Hence his pointed formula: "Germany is the prompt."

Third, the recipe from his own house. Strauss describes how a brand core outgrows its functional purpose. The cargo pocket signals a maker mentality, workwear becomes a genre much as the SUV did in the car market, and the brand reaches customers "who fundamentally don't need work trousers". Brand creates longing; longing creates relevance beyond the product.

Fourth, the internal effect. As an employer brand, Strauss recruits "a community that identifies with the desire for change and a sense of departure". Brand here is not an external presentation but a self-image that generates a readiness to act.

Fifth, the transfer. Germany should see itself as a brand, become aware of its strengths and "charge them deliberately". This requires cross-party consensus, a shared vision, and a return to common experiences — reconciliation with France, the fall of the Wall, the 2006 World Cup. His counter-example is the redesigned Hessian lion coat of arms: reinvented, but without new meaning. His closing line: "A brand needs courage."

And this is exactly where the analogy breaks.

1. A brand has a sender. A nation does not.

At Strauss, two brothers decide. They can change the collection, let a nephew produce a small run of jeans, extend sponsorship from the European Football Championship to American baseball. Brand management presupposes precisely this: an authority with control over meaning.

Germany has no such authority. More to the point, it should not have one. Anyone claiming control over the meaning of "Germany" would have to claim interpretive sovereignty over an open society. Strauss senses this when he calls for "cross-party consensus and a shared vision". But that is not a precondition of brand management — it is its replacement by politics. And in democracies, consensus is not a starting point but, at best, a rare outcome.

What is called governance in a company is called conflict in a nation. You can read it in the comments beneath the FAZ article itself, where one reader puts the objection more bluntly than I do here: "A company derives its claim to leadership from ownership; a state cannot. In democratically constituted states, its 'employees' are the sovereign." Ten readers agree, seven disagree, and the first reply accuses him of playing the Nazi card. That comment thread is not the communication problem. It is the country.

2. Nations are sedimented, not positioned.

An objection is due here, and it initially rescues the analogy. Companies also carry their past with them: Bayer carries IG Farben, Hugo Boss the uniforms, Volkswagen the Strength Through Joy factory. And if we understand brand as an instrument of leadership — the formation of intent on the sender's side, the formation of opinion on the side of experience — then the model applies to nations too. So far the parallel holds.

It breaks in three places, and all three are fundamental.

Membership is involuntary. You can stop buying Strauss. You cannot stop being German. This is why the formation of intent inside a company is selection: those who don't fit leave, or are never hired. In a nation it is conflict. Those who don't fit stay. And vote.

Authorship is contested. Bayer's history belongs to Bayer. It is burdensome, but it is available; the company can process it, exhibit it, contextualise it. Germany's history also belongs to those against whom it was committed. No sender decides its interpretation — and that is not a communication weakness. It is the entire point.

There is no reset. Companies can merge, rename, be sold, disappear. Philips and Grundig are now names without the substance they once carried. Nations have no such exit.

This is precisely the thrust of Peter Reichel's findings, recently revived for this debate by Eric and Jürgen Häusler on The Business of Brand Management: national symbolism is the product of long historical sedimentation, conflict and overwriting — not a surface that can be positioned. Sedimented means deposited by many hands and at the disposal of none.

It also explains why Strauss's own Hessian example works against him. He is right that the new lion coat of arms was "reinvented, but has not thereby acquired new meaning". Only this is not an execution error by the state chancellery. It is the norm. Meaning cannot be decreed, because it does not originate with the sender.

And the German reticence that Strauss reads as a lack of resolve is historically something else: a political aesthetic of de-dramatisation. After 1945, national self-presentation was not merely difficult but morally contaminated. "Made in Germany" became more important than national myths; Herfried Münkler compressed this into the observation that in the West, the Mercedes star replaced the Iron Cross. Strauss himself stands squarely within that substitution logic: the red logo on German building sites is an inheritance of that constellation, not its overcoming.

3. The inventor of nation branding no longer believes in it.

The strongest objection comes not from historians but from Simon Anholt — the man who coined the term in the 1990s. He has spent the years since distancing himself from what governments and agencies made of it. His position today: slogans, logos and campaigns do not durably change a country's image; a state's standing rests on what it actually does, not on what its advertising claims; and expensive image campaigns are largely a waste of public money.

Anholt did not merely criticise, he replaced his own instruments. First he dropped "branding" as too commercial in favour of Competitive Identity, which is about coordinating policy, culture, tourism and trade rather than about advertising. Then came the Good Country Index, built on the proposition that countries earn standing by contributing to humanity as a whole — through climate policy, peacekeeping, science. The Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index still measures how countries are perceived; what changed is the advice attached to the measurement. Anholt no longer counsels governments to communicate better. He counsels them to govern better.

This is not academic hair-splitting. It strikes Strauss's proposal at its core. "Charging deliberately" is precisely the operation Anholt spent his career learning does not work for countries.

Jessica Gienow-Hecht supplies the historical evidence that the problem is not a lack of trying. Marketing the state is no invention of location policy — it begins at the latest with Thomas Jefferson, who as envoy had a stuffed moose shipped to Paris to demonstrate American scale. Two of her findings matter here. One supports Strauss: the gap between self-perception and outside perception is real, and unusually wide in Germany. The other is a warning: autocracies use the same toolkit at least as professionally as democracies, often through Western PR firms. A technique that works as well for Qatar as it does for Denmark measures nothing but budget.

Her own appeal is therefore not "more campaigns". Liberal states should take their brand core — freedom, the rule of law, self-determination — and "honestly, advantageously, jointly and above all convincingly live it and present it". The order of those last two verbs is the whole point.

4. What Strauss gets right anyway.

Two observations are too good to lose to the flawed analogy.

First, the discrepancy. Germany's internal image is markedly worse than its external one — Gienow-Hecht confirms this explicitly. This is not a matter of sentiment. Anyone concluding that the country underestimates itself is correct.

Second, the internal effect. Strauss describes brand as an employer brand, a mechanism of identification turned inwards. This is the more interesting part of his argument and the part he develops least. Because here brand management genuinely touches what nations need: a shared self-description that makes action possible.

But that does not yield "Germany needs branding". It yields: Germany needs occasions on which it becomes visible what it stands for. Strauss names them himself — reconciliation with France, the fall of the Wall, the summer fairy tale of 2006. None of these was a campaign. All three were actions whose symbolic force arrived afterwards.

The real objection.

For a company, a brand is a promise that a sender fulfils. For a nation, it is a reputation that others award. The sociologist Tobias Werron has described what nation states actually compete for: scarce soft goods such as attention, legitimacy and prestige. Their decisive property is that they are not produced but allocated — by audiences and third parties. Confuse the two and you end up with "Du bist Deutschland" and "Land of Ideas": technocratically moderated visibility that means nothing to anyone because nothing backs it.

Strauss's closing line is "a brand needs courage". For a company, true. For a country, the more precise formulation would be: reputation needs conduct.

What that means concretely can be read off Anholt's criterion — what counts is what a country does for others, not what it says about itself. For Germany the test cases are in plain view. The security of Europe, which no one now guarantees on its behalf. An infrastructure whose decay has become an international spectacle. An immigration policy that either attracts skilled workers or doesn't. An administration that either accelerates procedures or goes on administering them. In each case, meaning arises not from formulation but from a commitment that costs something and cannot be withdrawn.

Germany's next step is therefore not a positioning but a decision — visible, risky, expensive, unpopular if need be. The reputation comes afterwards. It always comes afterwards.

Incidentally, what Strauss identifies as the German strength is already contained in exactly that: structuring, thinking through and precisely formulating problems. A country that can do this need not see itself as a brand. It need only stop apologising for its own thoroughness — and start applying it where it hurts.

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Written in dialogue with AI. The prose comes from the model; the sources and the judgements are mine. Responsibility cannot be outsourced.

Sources:

Henning Strauss, interviewed by Tobias Piller: “Germany Must Have the Courage to See Itself as a Brand,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 August 2026.

Eric Häusler / Jürgen Häusler: “The Damaged Brand: Germany and the Problem of Self-Presentation,” The Business of Brand Management, 7 July 2026.

Jessica Gienow-Hecht: From State to Brand: The History of Nation Branding, Reclam, Ditzingen, 2025.

Peter Reichel: The Glory and Misery of German Self-Presentation: National Symbols in Empire and Republic, Wallstein, Göttingen, 2012.

Herfried Münkler: The Germans and Their Myths, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2009.

Simon Anholt: Competitive Identity: The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Simon Anholt: Good Country Index, established in 2014.

Tobias Werron: “What Do Nation-States Compete For? On the Concept and History of Competition for ‘Soft’ Global Goods,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 41, No. 5, 2012, pp. 338–355.