I’m interested in what people do for a living. This no doubt explains why chefs and stockbrokers, antique dealers and counterfeiters, architects, athletes and software developers have all entered my fiction at one point or another. It’s because I believe that individual character is often revealed in a person’s work. But it’s also because I believe that the character of a particular place or era is revealed in the kinds of activities that people consume themselves with day to day.

This latter point makes the appearance of a whole new profession all the more interesting: place branding. If you haven’t heard of it, I want you to cast your mind back to the late 1990s and Cool Britannia. A progressive 43-year-old Prime Minister. London booming. Oasis and Blur on the charts. BritArt all the rage. Even Brit food, which seemed to go from fish and chips to Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson in a single incandescent flambé.

But who remembers a 1994 research paper called “Nations for Sale” written by Anneke Elwes, a planner at the advertising agency BMP? That was, arguably, the point from which the new place-branding career path branched off from the mainstream of communications, design and advertising. Because even though Elwes never used the phrase “Cool Britannia” (it was a media hook that followed), she did crack open the notion of Britain as commodity almost indistinguishable from a commercial brand. Where the flag was a logo and exported culture was an advertising campaign. Where success or failure at differentiating itself from competing national brands was directly linked to its economic survival. Elwes compared the international brand images of America, Britain and Japan in her paper and concluded that Britain was suffering badly in the comparison – that the brand needed work.

Nothing happened immediately. Place branding was still a radical idea outside academia in 1994, and no doubt a lot of people dismissed the concept as crass commercialism, anti-historical and maybe just a bit sacrilegious. Surely British national identity wasn’t something that could be packaged and positioned like beer or a line of clothing? Surely it was the organic product of geography and culture, the ineffable result of British people just being British?

Then the New Labor Party won a landslide victory in 1997, and the head of BMP, Chris Powell, found his brother selected as Chief of Staff at 10 Downing Street. Suddenly, “Nations for Sale” was being read by powerful people committed to shaking things up, to making an old nation young again. Studies were undertaken. Consultants were hired. The prestigious Panel 2000 of business and government leaders was assigned to the task. Time and Newsweek splashed London across their pages as the epicentre of cool. Hipster think-tank Demos released a paper called “Britain™ Renewing Our Identity.” And in the spirit of change sweeping the country, what was radical stopped being radical. The rebranding of the place called Britain had begun.

Less than a year later, Cool Britannia crashed and burned. The press turned sour. The Prime Minister was mocked for inviting rock stars over for tea. “Britain™” author Mark Leonard responded in the New Statesman to a special Uncool Britannia edition of Newsweek . (Oh, fickle press.) And by 2001, the Blair government was publicly distancing itself from the phrase. In so doing, Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, pointed out that “our national culture is something amorphous, something changing, and something complex.” Which seemed obvious all along and might lead you to conclude that professional place branding was a short and inconsequential flight of fancy.

But you’d be wrong.