I was in charge of marketing and branding London for eight years from 2000 to 2008. During that period, international surveys frequently ranked London as the world's number one city. A practical demonstration came in 2005 when London won one of the toughest ever contests to stage the 2012 Olympic Games – London's competitors were New York, Madrid, Moscow and Paris. Therefore I follow China's discussion on "soft power" with great interest.

In marketing it is never possible to separate the "product" from its promotion and branding. Naturally a city or a country is a very complex "product" – not a "product" at all in the normal sense. But the same principle applies. If the intimate relation between the "product" and branding and marketing is not understood, "soft power" can be misunderstood as advertising techniques or gimmicks – which won't work over any significant period of time. An example of that misunderstanding was when I was interviewed on Shanghai TV about promoting cities. The presenter wanted to concentrate on whether I thought a video should be produced by a Chinese pop star and whether London had done this (it hadn't). Such technical questions are the wrong place to start.

In good promotion and marketing, including "soft power" projection, the starting point is the nature of the product itself. Certainly a very good product can fail because it is promoted too little – China for example?underestimated the importance of promotion and marketing in a way that India did not. India's "Incredible India" campaign is one of the world's most successful in promoting a country. China now devotes increased resources to promotion – the rapid overseas expansion of CCTV is one example. But resources will not be effective unless they are integrated with the product.

To use an analogy, sometimes I am asked a somewhat confused question on a course I teach in Shanghai's Jiao Tong University "how can we establish a luxury brand". My answer is "first have a luxury product" – that is, no marketing will firmly establish a brand if the product doesn't fundamentally correspond to what is projected. China, evidently, is not projecting itself as "luxury" – some countries, for example Italy, do! But the same principle applies. The first discussion has to be about the character of the product being projected.

A superb example of how to do this came when I was lucky enough to be in the Birds Nest stadium for the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Throughout the ceremony I received constant emails and texts from people abroad watching it on TV. "Incredible", "wow", "amazing," were typical messages. Naturally I cannot judge how that Opening Ceremony appeared in China. But Zhang Yimou, the ceremony's director, judged the international audience perfectly. He presented a clear image of China to the world, which showcased China's tremendous historical depth while portraying the country as part of and interacting with the world. Zhang Yimou's technical means were brilliant, but as a great film director he understood technique had to project a single overarching idea. He brilliantly illustrated that technique has to follow from content, and that technique without the right content won't work. Some people may not want to discuss countries in these terms but the principle is the same in any good promotion. The "brand" has to be totally integrated with and flow from the product.

Examining the "product" from an international point of view in this case means accurately identifying China's position in the global community. That is the "hard" base from which "soft" power must be built. A key aspect of China's key changing position can be seen in the above chart. This shows the percentage of the world's population living in countries with GDP's per capita higher or lower than China. GDP per capita is one of the best proxies for living standards. This shows changes in China's living standards compared to the rest of the world.

China has become a "middle income" country in very real terms. In 1978 countries containing only 0.5 percent of the world's population had a GDP per capita below China's, while 73.5 percent had a higher one – China was 25.9 percent of the world's population for which data was available at that time. By 2010 the percentage of the world's population living in countries with a higher GDP per capita than China was 31.3 percent, while the figure for those living in countries with a lower GDP than China was 48.3 percent. Given the speed of increase it is clear that when 2011's data is published it will show that less than 30 percent of the world's population lives in countries with a higher GDP per capita than China.

In only slightly over thirty years China has therefore moved from being one of the world's least economically developed countries to a position where less than one third of the world's population lives in countries with higher GDPs per capita. This drastically affects how China is perceived and therefore what forms its "soft power" can take.

Most foreigners' perceptions of a country are chiefly affected by its living standards, so they will invariably compare China's position relative to their own through reports and images. Advanced economies' living standards are still considerably above China's and this negatively affects their perceptions. But half of the world's population now lives in countries with a GDP per capita below China.

I came across a vivid illustration of this effect in my job. I often teach "doing business in China courses" for foreign students. On successive days these classes included students from France and from Nigeria. Apart from those working in the telecoms industry, almost none of the French students had heard of Huawei, an important Chinese company. In contrast, every Nigerian student had heard of Huawei, Haier, ZTE and leading Chinese companies, which they regarded as high quality brands. My trips to Latin America also have showed rapidly expanding awareness of China's brands.

Sometimes China's media is too obsessed with the U.S. and Europe – even if this is understandable as China's population would like to have these countries' standard of living today and don't sufficiently appreciate the historical reality of the tremendous progress China has made in thirty years. But Chinese people on average are now richer than half of the world's population. This is a key hard fact that China's soft power has to base itself on.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.ccgp-fushun.com/opinion/johnross.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.