Despite having more than a passing interest in such things, I'm not sure I could give our readers a definition of NATO's brand.
One famous statement of purpose can be found on NATO's website [emphasis in original]:
Lord Ismay
Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay was NATO’s first Secretary General, a position he was initially reluctant to accept. By the end of his tenure however, Ismay had become the biggest advocate of the organisation he had famously said earlier on in his political career, was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”....
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From The Intercept, April 27:
The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the “NATO brand,” according to a 2022 webinar recording reviewed by The Intercept.
The disclosure, made a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, follows years of international debate over online free expression and the influence of governmental security agencies over the web. The Army’s Cyber Command is tasked with both defending the country’s military networks as well as offensive operations, including propaganda campaigns.
The remarks came during a closed-door conference call hosted by the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, a Pentagon-sponsored nonprofit that helps with military tech procurement, and provided an informal question-and-answer session for private-sector contractors interested in selling data to Army Cyber Command, commonly referred to as ARCYBER.
Though the office has many responsibilities, one of ARCYBER’s key roles is to detect and thwart foreign “influence operations,” a military euphemism for propaganda and deception campaigns, while engaging in the practice itself. The March 24, 2022, webinar was organized to bring together vendors that might be able to help ARCYBER “attack, defend, influence, and operate,” in the words of co-host Lt. Col. David Beskow of the ARCYBER Technical Warfare Center.
While the event was light on specifics — the ARCYBER hosts emphasized that they were keen to learn whatever the private sector thought was “in the realm of possible” — a recurring topic was how the Army can more quickly funnel vast volumes of social media posts from around the world for rapid analysis.
At one point in the recording, a contractor who did not identify themselves asked if ARCYBER could share specific topics they plan to track across the web. “NATO is one of our key brands that we are pushing, as far as our national security alliance,” Beskow explained. “That’s important to us. We should understand all conversations around NATO that has happened on social media.”
He added, “We would want to do that long term to understand how — what is the NATO, for lack of a better word, what’s the NATO brand, and how does the world view that brand across different places of the world?”
Beskow said that ARCYBER wanted to track social media on various platforms used in places where the U.S. had an interest.....
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One of the oddities of NATO's early history is the story of German Generals Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger:
Just an oddity, not anything nefarious but not front and center on the branding front either.
