A little over a year ago, this slogan adorned a South African billboard for DaimlerChrysler's Smart car: "German engineering. Swiss innovation. American nothing."

New York ad executive Keith Reinhard recalls the slogan to make a point: When it comes to America's reputation, "it has never been this bad."

Mr. Reinhard is president of Business for Diplomatic Action, a private-sector group of advertising and academic professionals trying to improve America's image in the world. He met with a roomful of Dallas business representatives at Southern Methodist University last month to warn that this situation is cutting into bottom lines.

"Our plummeting popularity is a problem," Mr. Reinhard said. "Travel and tourism losses alone are more than $100 billion."

You might expect the world to resent a haughty hyperpower or a foreign policy that's relied heavily on military force. But Business for Diplomatic Action's sifting of various opinion polls and feedback from American businesspeople abroad suggest this is not just a government problem – and not one that government alone can solve.

Cari Guittard, a Dallas native and graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas who is executive director of Business for Diplomatic Action, sees work ahead for teachers as well.

"Growing up in Texas, we have so many classes in Texas history, but world history is optional," she said. "We have to learn about other cultures and languages. ... That's a fundamental aspect of the work, and that's going to take decades."

As Mr. Reinhard said: "How can you lead when you don't know anything about the world?"

American Airlines Inc. is one of the newer members of Business for Diplomatic Action.

"Tourism and international travel are critical to the success of our business," said Roger Frizzell, American's vice president of corporate communications and advertising. "Anything we can do to strengthen our country's reputation around the world is a step in the right direction."

SMU's Temerlin Advertising Institute helped get things started in 2003 by hosting two of the first meetings of Business for Diplomatic Action. Five students of SMU advertising professor Patricia Alvey then produced a World Citizens Guide for college students to take on their study-abroad programs. More than 130,000 of the guides have been handed out at more than 400 campuses. Among the suggestions: "Be proud of where you come from. Just try to be a little humble."

The issue resonates with Ms. Alvey's students.

"I took 50 students to London in the summer of the Tube [subway] bombings" in 2005, she said. "Some reported being spat upon, yelled at or thrown out of taxicabs because they were Americans. The year before, it was the same thing in Italy."

Business for Diplomatic Action then created a business brochure based on the World Citizens Guide that is distributed by several member companies to employees heading abroad.

Last month, the group handed over a film to the State Department called I Am America that visa applicants can watch while waiting at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. The film, which shows Americans of different races, ethnicities and religions, was created by GSDM's Idea City, a communications company based in Austin, to create a more welcoming impression of the United States.

The modest steps can't hurt but certainly leave much more to do to turn things around.

Polling across 47 countries released last June by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project found majorities in 25 countries still hold positive views of the United States. Since 2002, however, those favorable ratings have been declining.

"The U.S. image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and continues to decline among the publics of many of America's oldest allies," the Pew researchers reported. "Favorable views of the U.S. are in single digits in Turkey (9 percent) and have declined to 15 percent in Pakistan. Currently, just 30 percent of Germans have a positive view of the U.S. – down from 42 percent as recently as two years ago – and favorable ratings inch ever lower in Great Britain and Canada."

The same poll found broad support worldwide for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and found that America is the nation most often blamed for harming the environment.

To confront this negativity, Business for Diplomatic Action is lobbying for significant changes in U.S. government policy. Its members want the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to reduce the extraordinary hassles that tourists and businesspeople face in visiting the United States.

And it wants public diplomacy to take a much higher profile in the federal government.

Mr. Reinhard pointed out that the U.S. Army Band had a bigger budget than the State Department's public diplomacy section headed by former Undersecretary Karen Hughes.