International Place Branding Yearbook 2012

In a review of trends and conceptual models, Kavaratzis (2005) offers a reading of place branding as the application of marketing practices beyond physical goods and services, in the context of deindustrialization. Branding is conceived as a form of communication, in which brand identities mediate between the activities of brand owners and consumer perceptions. Considered as a form of place management, place branding is thus positioned as the attempt to alter the way that places are perceived by specific groups of people – to develop and disseminate a recognizable identity for a place in order to promote processes considered desirable, such as inward financial investment, tourism or the development of political capital (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005). These concerns inform Hankinson’s (2007) principles for destination brand management and Gnoth’s (2007) functional, experiential and symbolic dimensions of destination brands. While branding as place management might appeal to those charged with supporting regional growth and sustainability, the task is far from simple. Unlike product markets, notions of place exist in the minds of a wide variety of actors prior to attempts to brand them. Thus the branding of places – neighborhoods, cities, regions – as attractive and sustainable requires collaborative networking, entrepreneurship and innovation, knowledge sharing and cross-boundary learning. In short, the complexity and political dimensions of the task implies a need for leadership. While reconceptualizing “place” in this way has immediate consequences for the nature of leadership required, place leadership is itself a field which remains relatively under-theorized to date. Our intention in this chapter is to propose discourse as a fresh and theoretically informed way to explore the leadership of place branding. By offering four different “readings”, we begin to identify contested assumptions of what is required to lead effectively in complex, sometimes chaotic, policy environments, working across institutional, professional, territorial and community boundaries.

In spite of the long history of places promoting their virtues to visitors, commentators and investors, the concept of place branding is relatively new. In this context, the idea that there should already be a “beyond” might seem hasty. However, we will argue in this chapter that much place branding as it has been practiced has really been place marketing, concerned more with creating an image through external communication than developing the experience of a place. This has tended to make place branding seem superficial and short-termist – more concerned with visitor numbers, reputation indices and growth figures than connecting with the needs and wants of citizens. So here we will turn place branding inwards and focus on three trends that are creating the opportunity to promote citizen participation and to develop more sustainable approaches to brand building that can deliver well-being for all – the sort of benefits that Robert F. Kennedy observed in a 1968 speech and which tend to go unmeasured in statistics:

In the field of image restoration, it is customary to distinguish between two types of negative destination images. The first type is a negative image caused by an unexpected crisis, such as terror attack, natural disaster or sudden epidemic. The second is a prolonged negative image generated by long-lasting problems, such as economic hardship, high crime rates, continuous war or political instability. The question of how to restore a place’s positive image was dealt with in a number of academic and practical publications in the field of “crisis communication”. The variety of techniques and strategies proposed were important in creating a block of knowledge in image restoration; however, the same solutions were offered for places that differ greatly from one another. Moreover, the solutions proposed did not take into account the type of crisis experienced or the characteristics of the target audiences to be addressed. This is problematic, because clearly countries that are located on the margins of global tourism, such as Somalia, for example, cannot adopt the same image-restoration strategies as that of a country that is a major world tourism player, even if each experienced the same crisis, such as a terrorist event or an epidemic. Somalia’s location, its previous image, the availability of resources and its target audience are all very different elements from those characterizing that other country.

In this chapter, we argue that planning strategies sensitive for place branding could increase the appeal of smart growth projects by creating value for places and for things in those places. We develop a perspective on the potential synergy between smart growth and place branding that can be valuable in various contexts – in the US, the EU and communities elsewhere – since many encounter obstacles to comprehensive planning that could be reduced by paying closer attention to how value can be affected by planning.

The current global recession has created economic and social pressures on governments at national and local level. Currently regional and urban governments in England are under pressure from two directions – the national government’s rejection of regional development mechanisms in the form of regional development agencies and their replacement with ad hoc “local enterprise partnerships”, and the bottom-up dissatisfaction and unrest resulting from the consequences of severe austerity measures.

Traditionally, the reputation of a location is measured by considering how individuals, organizations and “external” stakeholders feel, think and make decisions. “Reputation of place” measurement, including country and city, is emerging as a domain for inter-disciplinary analysis. While all these have absolute merits and are an integral part of any place’s efforts to improve its global reputation, what is often overlooked is the importance of “domestic reputation management”, including “public mood”.

Today, more than half of the world’s population are urban dwellers, this number being forecast by the United Nations to increase to 69 percent by 2050. Cities are the biggest consumers of electricity, gas and heat (Urban Investment Network 2011). This, along with demographic change and the fact that 80 percent of world economic growth is powered by cities and that 75 percent of the emissions are coming from urban locations (Fox-Martin 2009), have made city leaders realize the importance of sustainable development and that the fate of our global climate lies in the future actions of cities (Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research 2008). As FrankLee (2011), Head of Holding Funds and Advisory, states: “cities ought to play a crucial role in accomplishing climate change objectives and energy efficiency, so the new trend is directed towards sustainability”.

In this chapter I will illustrate how quickly individual events or clichés can destroy reputation and have a major influence on further economic development. In other words, how tourism and investments can fail to materialize in the economy in the wake of highly negative headlines. The chapter contains examples from three countries with a relatively high degree of media perception (Italy, Greece and France), as well as three countries with a low level of media interest (Bahrain, Austria and Vietnam). First, I will portray the behavior patterns of our six examples and how they are connected. Then I will propose a way as to how countries can effectively free themselves from their dependency on headlines in the future.

As the field of nation branding and country reputation management evolves, so do the tools available to country brand managers for measuring and evaluating the success, or lack thereof, of their strategic and tactical efforts. Up to this point, measurement frameworks employed different methodologies to look at generalized conceptions of country “brands” or “reputations”. In this chapter I introduce the point of view, methodology and results related to the Global Green Economy Index (GGEI), a specialized product designed to assess both the perceptions and performance of 27 national green economies. I will argue that green reputations are an increasingly important factor defining overall country brands and, as a result, national and city leaders face a growing incentive to improve upon or consolidate their “green” reputations.

Large cities in Latin America may well have been the cradle of post-colonial national societies, but at least since the beginning of the 20th century they have also concentrated the direst effects of uneven development, becoming the living image of democratic deficit (De Oliveira and Roberts 1996; Hoffmann and Centeno 2003; Davis 2006). The progressive concentration of “urban problems” in those areas also meant that the crisis of the 1990s has hit these areas hardest, accelerating their decline and inducing in some cases a reaction by progressive city governments who started to elaborate strategies for revitalization and regeneration, though, for the most part, these projects remained on paper or gave results below expectations (see Sosa 2010, for the case of Buenos Aires; Segre 2004, for the case of Rio de Janeiro; and Alves 2008, for case of São Paulo).

In 2009, in order to understand the paradoxes, find answers to place brand puzzles and search for a paradigm, we embarked on a journey together with a set of contributors. They gracefully accepted our invitation to explore how “disruptive innovation”, reputation and sustainability are likely to cause both the deconstruction and the construction of the place branding process. Their ideas have been captured in the three volumes of this Yearbook series so far. The premise was that place brand managers require a more sophisticated grasp of how to grow, collectively, potential innovation through smart “coordination” of government, market and civil society to achieve a balanced-centric performance in terms of equity, efficiency and effectiveness (see Figure C.1). In an attempt to reflect the current status, we will conclude this series with three debates and a brief research agenda, linking effectiveness/reputation/consumption, efficiency/innovation/production and equity/sustainability/critical studies.