place marketing & branding 2015+

Poznan BestPlaceSummit

Place Marketing Manifesto

Interview• Juan Carlos Belloso• Martin Boisen• Joao R. Freire• Raquel Goulart• Robert Govers• Björn P. Jacobsen• Mihalis Kavaratzis• Manolis Psarros• Stefan Roesch• Gildo Seisdedos• Sebastian Zenker

Case study• The New Barcelona Brand Strategy — Juan Carlos Belloso• Cascais Brand Architecture — Joao R. Freire• Country Brand Colombia — Raquel Goulart• City of Peace and Justice — Robert Govers• Australia’s New World City? — Andrea Insch• X-Boarder Place Branding — Björn P. Jacobsen• »This is Athens« — Manolis Psarros• »Britain is GREAT« — Stefan Roesch• Oman National Spatial Strategy — Gildo Seisdedos• Hamburg Metropolitan Brand — Sebastian Zenker

Poznań Best Place Summit

BEST PLACE INSTITUTE--------

Poland

POZNAŃ BEST PLACE SUMMIT BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

In September 2014

the experts from the Best Place - European Place Marketing Institute met in Poznań to discuss the current challenges of place marketing and to pave the way for progress in this area. Although place marketing is a relatively well-established academic and practical discipline, it seems to have reached a hiatus and, in our opinion it needs new ideas and energy to move it forward.

Meanwhile, various experiences have demonstrated there is a need for systematization of the concept, and above all for presenting its usefulness and defining the challenges, together with setting directions for further research and analyses in the realm of place marketing.


Best PlaceEUROPEAN PLACE MARKETING INSTITUTE--------Poland


The Best Place - European Place Marketing Institute, as an interdisciplinary society of experts working actively for the development of places, took the opportunity to initiate and boost an intense discussion about the current state of place marketing and branding, both in theory and practice. The synergy of knowledge, practical experience and skills of Best Place and the invited experts have resulted in the publication we present here.

The experts have drawn up the ‘Place Marketing Manifesto’, which includes the Definition and Aims of Place Marketing and Place Branding, Elements and Process of Place Marketing, Contribution to Place Development, Skills Necessary for Effective Place Marketing and The Major Challenges and Research Agenda for Place Marketing.

The participants of the Poznań Best Place Summit also present here interesting case studies on particular places, as well as share their opinions in interviews.

We hope you find this report useful and inspiring.

Best Place Institute Board of Directors• Adam Mikołajczyk• Magdalena Florek• Jarosław Górski

Place MarketingManifesto

POLAND-----------Best Place

European Place Marketing Institute

Place marketing is extensively used by local authorities across the world because it contributes significantly to local development. It is, however, used in several different forms and under several different names, something that leads to confusion. It is essential to clarify the concept and provide

clear guidance for its implementation. A notable shift in contemporary practice and theory is the shift towards place branding. For effective implementation it is necessary to distinguish between the key concepts of place marketing and place branding.

Place Marketing Manifesto

Place Marketing is the scientific discipline and field of prac-tice responsible for developing and implementing a mana-gerial process that assists places achieve their objectives by adopting a market-oriented philosophy, particularly:

• by using marketing research methods to analyse the competitive environment and identify the needs, wants and preferences of stakeholders and selected target markets,

• by building and delivering benefits to fulfil these needs, wants and preferences,

• by creating, communicating, delivering and exchang-ing offerings that have value for the place stakehold-ers, target markets and its community at large,

• by efficiently co-ordinating the use of marketing tools that stimulate exchange relations and enhance the experience of the place’s stakeholders.

Place marketing as managerial process is initiated by local units and engages local leaders, local stakeholders and the local com-munity. The overall objective of place marketing is the wel-fare and satisfaction of the place’s residents and, to that end, it embraces both economic gains and social aims. As such it is also a social process that requires participation of local residents and stakeholders at every stage of its imple-mentation: analytical, strategic, participatory, monitoring. Place marketing needs, therefore, to integrate all place stakeholders. In order to achieve this general objective, par-ticular goals related to stakeholders and target markets are defined.

Definition and aims of Place Marketing

PLACE MARKETING MANIFESTO BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

Place branding is a process that enhances the image and reputation of the place by developing a comprehensive place brand identity based on the realities and features of the place and its marketing offerings. The aim of place branding is to differentiate the place experience provided to the place’s target groups and to build its competitiveness in an economic and social context. It consists of a set of tools and actions that consistently communicate this place brand identity and includes the processes of designing, govern-ance and modification of brand over time.

The overall aim of place branding is to contribute to the sus-tainable development of the place by engaging stakehold-ers in a common effort to enhance a differentiated reputa-

Several varied elements comprise a Place Marketing pro-gramme depending on specific place conditions and particu-lar local contexts. Most commonly the main elements include image management activities, governance and coordination systems, awareness raising activities, stakeholders’ analysis and engagement techniques, promotional and advertising tools, public and media relations management and more.

Definition and aims of Place Branding

Elements and process of Place Marketing


tion that will attract target audiences and to create a sense of community that will improve quality of life. Particularly important is the ability of place branding to contribute to building trust, preference and connection through authen-tic stories, signature innovations, and inspiring experiences with a place.

A place brand is a combination of meanings, values, func-tional and emotional benefits and symbols that distinguish the place’s offering from competitors’ offerings and is cre-ated through relations with place target groups and social interactions. Effective place brands have a well-defined and well thought out value proposition composed by different functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits.

These are combined within the Place Marketing process, which includes the following essential stages: a. Analysis of internal and external environment; b. Definition of strategic vision and positioning;c. Strategy development;d. Implementation of actions;e. Monitoring and measurement.


Place marketing and place branding are multi- and cross-disciplinary fields of activity that incorporate knowledge and experience from several relevant disciplines including marketing, planning, geography, urbanism, graphic design,

Specialities necessary for effective Place Marketing

Place marketing and place branding contribute to the eco-nomic and social development of the place by providing a strategic link between the current realities of the place and the desired vision for the future. They provide a common vision for place stakeholders to join efforts in enhancing the place’s reputation and maintain the place’s relevance for the target audiences of residents, visitors and investors over time. Therefore, they are both strategically linked to place making and provide guidance for place development, fostering differentiation, continuity and relevance. Place

Contribution to place developmentmarketing develops and uses a set of practical tools and incorporates planning and executing a series of projects that contribute to the place’s strategic aims.

Place marketing contributes to several areas of a place’s development potential including tourism development, investment attraction, resident attraction, increase of civic pride and community feeling, enhancement of the place’s image and reputation, increase of political influence, pro-motion of local products, event organisation.

cultural planning, architecture, economics, tourism plan-ning and development, sustainable development, advertis-ing and media, sociology, anthropology, public administra-tion, design, media & communications.


• Politics – the place marketing process very often relates directly to politicians’ decisions and election cycle. There is a strong need to educate politicians and place managers what place marketing and branding stand for and to help them understand the importance of putting the place brand strategy at the highest level and not simply as a responsibility of the communica-tions department. This will turn place marketing into a true governance tool. Similarly, the challenge is to help stakeholders understand the complexity and inter-disciplinarity of the domain and to balance between political and private management approaches.

• Measurement – it is essential to develop tools for the measurement of the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of place marketing and branding actions.

• Concept clarity – a vital need is to understand the long-term character of a place brand that demands defining a common vision, setting up long term objec-tives and achieving clarity about the concept (do’s and don’ts). The success of Place Marketing programmes relies on having a long term strategy for the place instead of one-time events, such as a seasonal cam-paign.

The major challenges in place marketing• Implementation and coordination – it is of crucial

importance to maintain momentum and visionary leadership in order to sustain stakeholder involvement. There is a need for a brand manager to orchestrate the project from its inception to avoid fragmented decision-making and implementation.

• Social process – the fundamental role of the residents must be understood and place marketing should be approached as a social process that engages the local population and leads to brand ownership rather than the currently dominant top-down approaches that lead to limited community involvement and disen-gagement of locals.

• Low status – it is necessary to improve the status of place marketing as an academic discipline, gaining more credibility on professional and scientific grounds.

• Defining and measuring place marketing effectiveness and efficiency. There is a need to examine direct effects (sales/economic impact) and indirect effects (image/reputation/media impact) and clarify which part of the place marketing programme causes these effects (i.e. marketing versus branding effects). As such, there is a need to define relevant indicators to monitor marketing impact on a place.

• Relations to other domains. What are relations with areas such as place management, employer branding, social media etc.?

• Multiple stakeholder management. How can place marketing strategies and programmes cater simulta-neously for the needs and interests of tourism vs. eco-nomic development vs. residents?

• Cluster marketing and competition. How can place marketing programmes lead to effective branding and positioning of a cluster? What is the intensity of inter-place competition and what are the opportunities for inter-place cooperation? Does place co-branding work?

• Multiple case-studies. There is a need for research that extends beyond a single case analysis and provides wider, general lessons for place marketing.

• Place brand identity. How can authenticity/uniqueness be maintained in a globalized world where all places strive to be creative, smart, sustainable, innovative, etc.

• The effects of the virtual world. How can place images and reputations benefit from virtual presence that influences perceptions and place-related decisions?

Setting the directions for research and analy-ses in the realm of place marketing in Europe


Juan Carlos BellosoFUTUREPLACES-------Spain

I have been working for many years for the City of Barce-lona in many different aspects and areas, from the organi-zation of the Barcelona’92 Summer Olympic Games to City Brand Strategy and Communications to the development of the Strategic Metropolitan Plans to economic, sports and cultural projects and strategies. I believe my greatest achievement has been to contribute to make Barcelona one of the most admired and strongest global city brands. How-ever, having also worked as consultant to many other large and small regions and cities I also believe I have contributed to put in place Place Branding and Marketing strategies that have helped those places to be more competitive.

What was the most difficult project you had to deal with in your career?

How would you explain to the layman what place marketing is about?

BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015INTERVIEW

Why did you decide to choose place marketing as your interest?

Getting involved with Place Branding and Place Marketing was a great opportunity for me to put all my knowledge and experience in the corporate, institutional and place strategy, branding and promotion fields to the service of places and their economic and social development. My main area of specialization is Place Branding from a strategic and a holis-tic point of view, understanding Place Branding and Place Management as a combination of making innovative, inspir-ing and engaging place design and content combined with the use of creative strategic communications, marketing and promotion strategies and tools that effectively creates a strong and positive reputation (brand) for places. I believe that this field is not only an exciting professional specializa-tion to be involved in but also a great way to contribute to the development of territories in the benefit of its citizens. As a passionate for places, people and travel, it also provides you the opportunity to visit many fantastic places around the world. For me, a Place Brand is the image, perceptions or associa-

tions that people have of a certain place (being country, region, city, destination).

Branding a place is a about building and managing the image / reputation of a place so that it helps the place in its efforts and objectives with regards to attracting and retain-

In my opinion, some of the strongest city brands are of course New York City, London, Paris, Barcelona, Amster-dam, Vienna, Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Munich or Berlin, just to name a few. All these places provide innova-tive experiences to their citizens and visitors have inspiring design and public spaces and are vibrant and alive, with a dynamic and strong cultural offer all year round. They are also cities that are in permanent transformation and that

ing citizens, talent, professionals, companies, investors, events, clients for its products and services, etc. This done by all the place stakeholders jointly setting a future vision for the place and defining the desired positioning and image and then designing and implementing consistently over time the right set of strategies, actions, policies, investments and communications in line with this desired vision and image.

Place Marketing / Promotion would be promoting and sell-ing the place and its unique features to the different targets.It is common that all this concepts are used indistinctly and many times confusion is created.

According to your observations, which city, region or country is the most effective when it comes to marketing or which has the strongest brand. Why?

Based on your knowledge how would you evaluate the condition of place marketing in central-eastern Europe?

INTERVIEW BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

Place Branding and Marketing differ in each place and regions depending on the specific characteristics of the place. I believe there is an increasing interest in the Place Branding and Marketing fields all over Central and Eastern Europe and that many countries, regions and cities are developing some interesting initiatives in this field. Although they may lag behind more consolidated places in western Europe in terms of knowledge, experience and capabilities in the Place Marketing field they face the main challenges as other established place brands do regarding understanding what Place Branding and Marketing is, how to manage a place brand (image) and how to engage and coordinate all

are always able to surprise you, inviting you to visit them again and again. And they offer opportunities to every one. They are also places that tell emotional, compelling and engaging stories about themselves. The same with many countries like the US, Canada, Australia, France, New Zea-land, India, etc. or regions such as Tuscany, Patagonia, or Scandinavia for example, all places that are able to gener-ate a positive image and interest and offer attractive and unique experiences to residents and visitors.

Although places are much more complex entities that com-panies or products and branding a place is a much more difficult task since there are many different stakeholders and elements that have to be managed and understood, I believe places can and, in fact, generate the same emotional links and passions to people as corporate and consumer brands. Places tell compelling stories and provide unique and meaningful experiences to people, being citizens, visi-tors, investors and so on, the same as products do. And these places are not just brands in strict sense but they also represent a specific lifestyle and become cultural brands. This is the reason why places such as New York, London, Barcelona, Berlin, etc. keep attracting a growing number of people that want to live, visit, study or work in these places.

Consumers love commercial brands, do you think place brands may have the same important meaning as today have brands of cars, clothes or electronics?

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the different place stakeholders in the task of promoting and managing the place and its reputation. Initiatives such as the ones promoted by Best Place – European Place Mar-keting Institute definitely are helping to develop this disci-pline in Central and Eastern Europe.

BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

Martin BoisenUNIVERSITY OFGRONINGEN------------Netherland


It just happened somehow. I studied urban and regional planning at the University of Copenhagen, became involved with urban renewal programs and citizen participation and started realizing that good places to live was much more than the urban form or the urban economy. One thing let to the other, and through a focus on metropolitan governance and planning I ended up writing a number of papers on this issue, which immediately led to a lot of attention. From that attention I realized that I’d touched a topic with a lot of reso-nance in society and I decided to focus my attention on this topic. That was in 2005, almost ten years ago.

The most difficult project I had to deal with in my career was in a middle-sized city to the North of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It remained impossible to get the city council to agree to the focal points of the strategy, and a number of politicians used the project as a means of fighting a war. In the end, the project was terminated and a lot of stakehold-ers disappointed and demotivated. A shame. To this day, that city struggles with this topic.

I would start by explaining that we tend to focus on the built environment, housing, offices, infrastructure and architec-ture when we aspire to create better places for their inhab-itants and users. Then I would suggest that although these things remain important - safety, ambition, motivation, pleasure and pride are just as important. A sense of belong-ing and a sense of place connect the built environment with meanings and stories that belong to the sociological and psychological realms. We’ve learned a lot from how market-ing and branding has been attributed to products and ser-vices, and we’re trying to translate these frameworks to help create better places for inhabitants, entrepreneurs and visitors - for all the users of a city.

What is your biggest achievement you had to deal with in your career?

How would you explain what place marketing and place branding is about to a layman?

INTERVIEW BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

In terms of my biggest achievement, I think that other people should be the judge of that. I honestly wouldn’t know. There are a lot of projects that I’m proud of, but they all involve a lot of different people. This discipline is a team effort if there ever was one.

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“Being effective" is about achieving the right results. “Effi-ciency” is about achieving the set goals using optimal resources and within a given time-frame.

To my mind, it is impossible to deem a specific city the most effective in terms of marketing - so I’m not going to try. However, in terms of ‘efficiency’, I think that we can rule out a lot of the traditional ‘best practice’ cities like Glasgow and Barcelona. Smaller places, cooperating with each other or organizing themselves around a larger, well-known city - tend to be able to achieve a larger return-on-investment than the big cities. In terms of ‘efficiency’ of marketing, I gen-erally think that smaller cities have a larger potential.

Talking about a “strong” generic brand, I think that London has the strongest city brand on the planet. But other cities have stronger brands when we narrow the focus. The notion of “strong” should not be seen outside of a specific context. After all, having a strong brand is not always a positive thing.

According to your observations, which city, region or country is the most effective when it comes to marketing and which has the strongest brand and why?

Based on your knowledge, how would you evaluate the condition of place marketing and place branding in central-eastern Europe?


I see many cities still in the process of emerging from the Cold War period. Cities aspiring to position themselves, and assume their rightful place amongst Europe's other cities. A lot of effort is being made, but it tend to lack sophistication and isn’t exactly state-of-the-art. I've seen many t-shirts and promotional videos, as if place marketing and branding was similar to the way we promote energy drinks. The focus on campaigns and advertisement can easily be explained - this kind of effort is highly visible and it's relatively easy to approach. However, in most cases it's a waste of time, money and stakeholder-involvement. Some cities are catching up fast though, realizing that its possible to learn from the mis-takes made in other cities, instead of imitating them.

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Definitely. In fact, the way I see place brands they already have. I would even argue that the emotional attachment to places is much stronger than to commercial products or services. In my understanding, every place is a brand, and people identify themselves and each other with places. That’s also why I work with place marketing and place branding: for the love of place. But if you truly love a place, you also realize that it's not going to be enough to print that on a t-shirt. Actions speak louder than words.

Consumers love commercial brands, do you think place brands may have the same important meaning as the brands of cars, clothes or electronics has today?


Joao R. FreireIPAM – MARKETING SCHOOL---------Portugal


My background is in economics but my interest is in mar-keting. There’s no topic more challenging or complex than marketing or branding a place. My preference is working on destination branding projects and developing brands within a tourism context. Tourism is the biggest industry in the world and it has been researched from many different angles - sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, etc. It is also an industry which witnesses the success of modern societies. Tourism only exists because people have spare money and time to spend.

objectives, were promoting themselves instead of the mu-nicipality. There was a lot of waste in the communication and Cascais, which is both the name of the municipality and a village, was not getting any recognition. An additional challenge was that within the municipality there were strong local brands, such as Estoril, which is a very old and prestigious destination brand. The challenge was to develop a model accommodating all the different organizations and stakeholders while improving Cascais’s communication with its internal and external audience. The solution was the development of a new brand architecture for Cascais.




My most challenging project was Cascais, a municipality close to Lisbon, Portugal. There were many different stake-holders who all had different sets of needs and motivations. At the time, Cascais Municipality owned several municipality companies, each with its own board of directors and own communication department. Each individual company liked to communicate with the market; however, there were no rules concerning this communication. So the different mu-nicipality companies, with its different names and distinct

I would have to start with a definition for Place Branding and then go to the definition of Place Marketing.

A Place Brand is about defining who we are and what ben-efits we can provide to the market.

Place marketing is about building and delivering those ben-efits in an efficient way to our selected target markets.

Place Branding is an exercise of identifying, organizing and coordinating marketing variables in order to deliver benefits that are relevant to the target markets. Marketing variables

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are all of those that have relevance and impact on the internal or external customer.

Place brands should have a well-defined and well thought out value proposition composed of different functional, emo-tional and self-expressive benefits. The benefits that com-pose the value proposition should take into account motiva-tions for consumption. Potential consumers will choose a place that better satisfies their needs. It is therefore the task of the brand management team to come up with a position-ing statement, with a clear defined marketing strategy, including market segmentation and a communication plan for the internal and external audiences of the place brand. This also implies that we should clearly define the objectives of the place. Attract investors, attract tourists or attract students? What type of investment? What type of tourists? Are we able to attract all these segments? How can we develop a strategy that is compatible with the selected target segments? Are the investors relevant to develop the infra-structures for tourists? Or at the investors relevant for the creation of jobs which will attract new workers and students?

Of course, most important is asking why invest in marketing and branding? Investments should be done to improve the lives of the brand owners, i.e., the residents living in that par-ticular place.

It’s a very difficult question since there are many different places around the world that have effective marketing strat-egies and a strong brand. One that comes to mind is Australia. It’s quite far from Europe and the USA yet it is still one of on the top tourism earners. Australia is an interesting mix between the sophistication of Sidney and the roughness and the challenging nature of the rest of the territory. The fact that the country does not have many residents, does not have a long history, and is quite far from Europe and the USA yet continues to be a place that people are willing to travel to and to spend money on speaks highly for the country’s brand.




My impression is that central-eastern Europe is dedicating a great deal of attention and resources to the study and imple-mentation of projects in place marketing. There’s definitely a high interest in the field. It is a quite interesting and a smart

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However, it is much more complex branding a place then branding a product or a service. For example one of chal-lenges associated with place-branding is ownership. Prod-ucts or service brands normally belong to an organisation, which manages them in a specific manner in order to fulfil certain objectives. Furthermore, those branded products, services, or concepts are protected by legal mechanisms that give exclusive ownership to the organisations. While a prod-uct or service has clear ownership, a place does not. A place is composed of a number of different and independent organi-sations. There are the local and state agencies that have con-crete planning objectives. There is also a plethora of organisa-tions, which are privately owned, and pursue their own indi-vidual objectives. Adding to this complexity it cannot be forgotten that the people living in each particular place have the freedom to act as they wish. This is in contrast with organisations where brand managers have direct control over their employees, recruiting only the ones that share the same values as the brand.



thing to do. I would risk saying that central-eastern Europe is a huge area that still enjoys a low level of awareness as com-pared to Western Europe. Its territory covers about half of the continent and is competing with countries such as UK, France, Spain and Italy. That is tough competition. So, yes, those loca-tions should invest in Place Marketing and develop their brands in order to compete in the European market.

Yes, definitely. People consume places much in the same way they consume service or product brands. Within a tourism context, the models for choosing a destination for traveling are similar to the ones of choosing a product or service. People usually have limited time to study all available options. Nonetheless decisions about where to travel for vacations are typically regarded as high risk. It involves a huge investment of limited time and money. So consumers will want to reduce risks and will evaluate places much in the same way they do it for services and products. Moreover certain destinations have a social meaning, much in the same way product brand have. So consumers might choose a place for vacationing in part because of its social meaning.

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Raquel Goulart SztejnbergSARAVAH_CITY ID-------Brazil


I have been working with marketing, design, communica-tions, and consumption projects for more than 15 years and since 2005 I am focused on developing branding strategies, both in Brazil and abroad. While researching about mobility trends and places positioning themselves as slow territories in 2010, I started investigating possible applications of traditional branding tools to place brands. Over the past four years I have been approaching the public and private spheres in talks, seminars and classes to disseminate the discipline, promote a wider exchange of ideas – coming mainly from Europe, where the field is more mature – and integrate place branding with different areas such as creative economy and design.

In October 2014 I organized the first international seminar of Place Branding in Brazil, bringing specialists from Rio de Janeiro and from abroad (Poland, The Netherlands, Colom-bia, Italy and UK) to present and discuss different point of views and experiences of planning, branding, marketing and managing places. This event was followed by a closed work-shop with representatives of local and regional government and by an open talk during Rio Design Week on November 2014, attracting people, institutions and the press.

What is your biggest achievement/what was the most difficult project you had to deal with in your career?


Despite the fact that those events and other initiatives certainly have broadened the interest of specific audiences, in Brazil the fields of Place Branding / Marketing are still under construction, both in consultancy side and in academy: defi-nition of concepts, understanding of possible applications, a clear identification of challenges, common goals, and future research. There are plenty opportunities to develop the disci-pline while consolidating the idea of building and managing strategically a place (in its various dimensions), engaging as much stakeholders as possible with a shared and long term vision. It is a special moment to build knowledge by involving different kinds of managers, students, teachers, influencers, university and civil society in general to explore models that may fit into local dynamics and into a plural culture.

One of the most challenging projects was the creation of a brand strategy for Maracana, the iconic football stadium located in Rio de Janeiro. Considered by sports lovers “a second house”, the stadium remained closed during four years for works of infrastructure and modernization. Reo-pened in 2013, it needed to re-communicate with its publics

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and position itself as a place where the experience of follow-ing a game still had the same energy, collective vibration and emotion, but now in a more safe, technological, comfortable and complete environment for the whole family. When market researches were ready (both qualitative and quanti-tative), it was clear that the stadium was seen with distrust by its main fans, the football supporters, being considered an elitist place, cold, “made for whites”, “an European arena” and not the popular venue called by many as a true temple.

The brand strategy and tools (brand voice, brand experience, brand identity, brand management) were designed to rein-force the new rational benefits while promoting mainly a fun-damental emotional reconnection with the stakeholders, consolidating the untouched soul of the stadium. All cultural aspects – local/national identity, nostalgia for the old times, pride, heritage, leisure consumption, involved symbolism and relational traits – were considered fundamental parts of the strategic puzzle to position the Maracana in the world and reposition it in local people’s heart. During internal workshops for different types of teams (IT, Public Relations, managers, guards, tour guides, service providers, and partners in gen-eral), we have been working as curators of all content deliv-ered by the stadium, online and offline, giving clear guidelines for every communication, including less known aspects such as sustainability and corporate uses. The official launch of the branding project is foreseen to early 2015.

It is about building identity and sense of belonging. About being important to people while inspiring people to be part of a shared vision for the place. It is about using common values and cultural codes able to make the place more authentic and desirable: a place where people want to be, to live, to work, to share experiences, to invest, to visit, to raise children, to be part of. It is about developing mutual com-mitment and transforming territories from geographical spaces into places full of stories.


The UK has a very strong brand and the campaign "GREAT" has been reinforcing it. It is simple, straight to the point, multi-ple and easily / globally understood. But, beyond its verbal adherence, it is to me a good case of strong marketing built to promote different aspects of the country that have a particu-lar character and a special value to the world.

According to your observations, which city, region or country is the most effective when it comes to marketing or which has the strongest brand and why?



Definitely. But it may vary according to the place and to the abil-ity it has to communicate itself and develop significant relation-ships over time. Maybe the biggest challenges in this process are: 1) to avoid placelessness and 2) to acknowledge the fact that a brand will never be everything to everybody, so choices must be made when defining a positioning or reviewing it.



Maybe a bit shy – please note that this is a non-European per-spective and means that some places are still unknown or misperceived for many potential consumers / entrepreneurs / visitors / brand ambassadors. I believe that some identities still need to invest in visibility. I like to show unknown aspects of central-eastern European countries in my classes and talks and there is a clear gap. People are always positively surprised

by their cultural, natural, technological, economical and / or architectonic attractions. But stereotypes are still very strong when defining a mental image and a specific reputation of a place located in central-eastern Europe. Sometimes the difference between countries’ offers and personalities is not clear as well. I also believe that some places have become quickly hubs of tourism (let’ consider the example of Prague and Budapest) while others have the same potential but do not fully take advantage of. On the other hand, tourism is the first “mental link” that people try to find when asked about central-eastern European countries. The blank sheets must be filled because there is still so much originality, creativity and magnetism to be communicated, with no need to adopt the “me too” strategy in comparison to other western Euro-pean countries.

Colombia is also a benchmark in my opinion, especially for Latin American developing countries. In less than two years after the rebranding campaign was launched, the country was able not only to change perceptions about its image and reputation, but also achieved significant results in various areas as a consequence of a clear commitment of the gov-ernment and civil society. These results – from increasing national pride to new trade agreements, education, culture or tourism, just to mention a few – were also linked to a series of internal investments that were already repositioning Colom-bia in the regional and global scenery. The consistency of the brand is reinforced daily, confirming that the country is not just a promise, and delivers clear evidences that it is a strong player: "a country solution", as the brand strategy announces.

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Robert GoversPLACE BRANDING AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY JOURNAL------------Belgium

Why did you decide to choose place branding as your interest?

Since my graduate studies I have been interested in the way that people perceive places and how cities, regions and countries create image. Reputation management for places has been around for a while, but over the last decade or so, it has been popularized by referring to place branding. How-ever, the practice of place branding often leaves to be desired and hence it deserves continued attention.

Proper place branding projects are always demanding, because they require consensus among many stakeholders and touch on essential questions about identity, long term direction and investments. What I am proud of most is the extensive research work I’ve done on “Brand Dubai”, which is published in our 2009 book on Place Branding (Palgrave Macmillan).

The common assumption that place image can be studied, managed and designed in the same way as commercial brands is a mistake. Places do not sufficiently resemble commercial products for this to work. Place images are comparatively complex, interlinked, political, and contested. By their nature, place images cannot be enforced or con-trolled by a management team. To be dealt with at all effec-tively, place images require a different, dedicated multi-disciplinary approach. Simon Anholt’s Competitive Identity is such a conceptual paradigm specifically dealing with places as “brands”. In summary, the Competitive Identity approach aims to:• Increase international engagement and awareness• Enhance reputation• Provide renewed sense of purpose and direction

amongst citizens and public servants• Increase coordination and cost-effective partnerships

between state agencies and public and private sectors• Devise the systems, strategies and structures to put

places firmly and permanently in control of their own international image.


How would you explain to the layman what place branding is about?



If we’re talking about the link between name and symbol (e.g. flag) and perceptions in peoples’ minds then yes and this has always been the case. The problem is that place branding doesn’t work in the same way as commercial branding; meaning that it is not so much about design and marketing communication, but about policy and reality.



This is obviously the United States of America. It consist-ently ranks highest on the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index. The reason is that it has consistently and for a long time branded itself as the Land of Freedom and Opportu-nity; not through logos, slogans or advertising campaigns, but through its international relations, business conduct, investments, culture and exports.

It does this by:• Appreciating that the reputations and images of places

can and should incorporate the sense of place.• Formulating shared purpose and values based on the

regional identity and an aspirational strategic vision.• Operationalising such a vision into a strategy that influ-

ences (and sometimes outright determines) policies, part-nerships and symbolic actions that will enable the region to project an unbroken stream of dramatic evidence that will deliver the desired and deserved reputation.

• Emphasising that such a strategy will facilitate marketing at the product level, i.e. for exports, tourism, investment promotion, attracting talented new residents, cultural diplomacy and political influence (Anholt’s Hexagon), by providing strategic guidance and synergy.

• Understanding the current image and reputation of the city, region or country and how it can be influenced by improving the way a place interacts with the outside world at the points of the hexagon (i.e., reckoning with perceived image).

• Understanding and influencing the way in which such a programme of action sways the mainstream and social media agenda and therefore affects the way in which a place is being talked about (i.e., reckoning with projected image).

INTERVIEW

Björn P. JacobsenLUEBECK BUSINESSDEVELOPMENT CORP.----------Germany

Well, my biggest challenge was (and is) to convince my stakeholders that place branding is not about creating a new logo, inventing a new slogan or simply participating in an exhibition distributing glossy brochures. Place branding is about positively changing the perception of the target group and align this perception with the reality of the place.

There are so many cities, regions and countries branding themselves today that it is difficult to pick one favourite. Looking at countries I like the Liechtenstein approach - very clear, straight to the point. In terms of regions Südtirol (Alto Adige) is my favourite - not because it is very well made, but because it is very consistent and implemented with a long-term commitment. I think that is what most place brands need: a sustainable approach. In terms of cities I like Aaal-borg in Denmark - again a clear approach incorporating many facets of the place. But this is very subjective.






My professional background is in economic development, specifically in inward investment promotion. Competition for investments and jobs among places is fierce. The infra-structure properties - roads, communication links, availabil-ity of workforce - are more or less the same among com-peting places. Place branding can make the difference in reaching the decision for an investment at a certain place. That's is what attracted me first.

However, place branding requires substantial resources and therefore needs to show its efficiency. Here comes my con-trolling background into the game. So, I'm particularly inter-ested in establishing the efficiency of place branding efforts.

It is about creating a favourable perception of the place attributes and - most importantly - delivering on this place brand promise.

INTERVIEW


Yes - and even more. Place brands are about the perception (or image) of foreigners - but most importantly it is about the identity of a place. How do the inhabitants feel and com-municate about the place. Think about demographic change, the battle for the talented people and all that - and you will easily recognize the importance of place brands.


Let me argue from my background in economic develop-ment. I believe CEE is now where Western Europe probably was ten years ago. The "simple" arguments in inward invest-ment promotion like cheap labour, cheap land, low taxes, high subsidies do not work any longer. Places need to differ-entiate - and here comes place branding into the game. So I believe the more progressive CEE cities, regions and coun-tries have realized this and act accordingly.


Mihalis KavaratzisUNIVERSITY OFLEICESTER------------Great Britain


I chose place marketing as my main field of research because of my desire to apply marketing knowledge for the purpose of place development and making cities better places to live. I wanted to see the extent to which marketing principles and techniques would be useful for purposes that seemed to me much worthier that making rich companies richer! The focus on place branding came later when I developed an understanding that the place brand is what provides guidance for strategy development and is what all marketing activities aim at establishing and supporting.

that the place brand is not about devising a new logo and a catchy tagline but depends on much wider strategic and inspirational input. This is quite tough because it usually means that local authorities do not call me back for a second meeting to talk to them about strategy but prefer to call someone that can sell them a nice slogan…

For me marketing is about improving the relationship between a marketing offering and its audiences. It helps bring the producer of something closer to the people who use it. In this sense, place marketing is about improving the relationship between a place (i.e. the site of peoples’ lives, work or leisure) and the people who are related to that place, influence its fate and in any way feel attached to it (i.e. the place’s stakeholders).

What is your biggest achievement you had to deal with in your career?



I like to think that the biggest achievement is yet to come! As an academic researcher, I have had the luck to publish arti-cles that were well accepted and particularly a City Brand Communication Model that is frequently cited. I guess the main difficulty (which can also be seen as a very interesting and pleasant challenge) is trying to get across the message

INTERVIEW

The strongest place brands are the cities that everybody knows and wants to visit: New York, Paris, London etc… Of course this has not been the result of conscious branding efforts but a long-term development of the reputation of these places. There are several places that have succeeded in partial or short-term marketing projects and goals but, in my view, a single case of overall successful holistic market-ing strategy has yet to emerge…



Consumers can only love in the same way destination brands, which are directly related to consumption and can have the same significance for the way in which people like to construct and project their own identity through their consumption practices. Place brands are more profound than that – they actually operate at a much deeper level – and I don’t think that they can be used for this function in the same way.



Place marketing in CEE suffers from the same illnesses as Western Europe or other parts of the world, and particularly the misunderstanding of the significance of promotion at the expense of real product development. I don’t think that CEE countries should be looking for good examples any-where else but they should be focusing on developing a locally-informed marketing activity considering the political, economic and policy-related realities of their region.

INTERVIEW

Manolis PsarrosTOPOSOPHY---------Greece


Academic background along with professional experience in tourism planning and development helped me under-stand how important is to plan for a tourism destination’s future by looking at the whole place. In order to be part of the place-making process, place branding for tourism pur-poses requires a holistic perspective on various issues such as industry conditions, public policies & legal frameworks, the potential of partners and the local community to engage and reveal the unique elements of each place, and the forms to reach new audiences and markets through online and offline channels.




Every single project has its own challenges and difficulties. I have no doubt that strengthening the brand of Athens and bringing back actual results via integrated destination man-agement & marketing efforts has been probably the most difficult project that I have been involved with. In this case, the key challenge was that the uncertainty associated with the different phases of the project was fuelled by the avail-ability of a limited budget along with the effects of social

Place marketing is about ensuring that the brand message and the story of an area are strategically and methodically delivered to the right audiences through the appropriate channels, to successfully reach set targets and compete for a place in target visitors’ hearts. For that to happen, while marketing priorities might change over time, the brand must be true and enduring.

turmoil & political uncertainty. Building up a commonly acceptable regional marketing partnership framework for the municipal authorities of Helsinki Region was also chal-lenging in many different terms.

What I definitely take away from these two projects and the rest of professional experience is that providing consulting advise in various countries with different cultures & opera-tional frameworks, from Mexico to Siberia, and being able to come up with appropriate strategies, tailor-made solutions and practical recommendations is always a tough goal to achieve and at the same time the most interesting and intriguing part of our job.

INTERVIEW

In considering the international character of challenges associated with place marketing, we should be more con-cerned with learning from brands which achieve to attract the interest of markets under different conditions, over time, rather than trying to identify the strongest brand at a certain period of time. I would think that it is equally inter-esting, though in different ways to monitor the recent efforts of brands in Eastern Europe to establish themselves at the same time that brands in Western Europe endeavor to reinvent their messages.





subject to delays due to the inheritance of centralized plan-ning, but of course there are encouraging examples, which demonstrate progress in building up place marketing expertise.

They won’t and they shouldn’t. Although both types of brands appear to transmit their values and meaning to con-sumers, it is essential to distinguish commercial from place brands, because the latter emerge and evolve under the influence of numerous and quite often heterogeneous factors and interest groups that cannot be controlled or manipulated in a certain way.

Similarly to the case of south-eastern Europe, the brands of cities, regions or countries in central-eastern Europe have not yet sufficiently adapted to the contemporary require-ments of place marketing. Their path to maturity has been

INTERVIEW

Stefan RoeschFILM TOURISM-------Germany

Why did you decide to choose place marketing/branding as your interest?

My special focus in terms of place marketing is (fictional) film-based destination marketing. Having a background in Tourism Geography, I decided to write my PhD thesis on film tourism. This was back in 2003 when I heard about tourists literally spending thousands of dollars to travel all the way to New Zealand because they wanted to visit locations from The Lord of the Rings. I was captivated by this and the fascination for the deeply interconnected relationship between film and tourism has never left me.

The term place marketing stands for the process of brand-ing and subsequently selling a country, state, region or city as an asset to specific target groups, such as tourists or new residents in order to increase business.

Fictional film productions (both movies and TV productions) are an ideal vehicle to market places because they are not perceived as sales instruments. In addition, they reach a wide audience and communicate place-specific attributes via an emotional story.



In my opinion, the most effective country branding both in terms of sustainability as well as in terms of its inherent emotional component would be Tourism New Zealand’s branding strategy “100 % PURE NEW ZEALAND”. Introduced in 1999, this brand quickly established itself the world over, much to the envy of its many competitors. I think that the key to its success is the powerful combination between peoples associations with the country and its promise of clean and green tourism experiences which I believe in most cases is indeed delivered.

According to your observations, which city, region or country is the most effective when it comes to marketing or which has the strongest brand and why?


Given the recent history of Eastern Europe I believe that there is room to improve and professionalize the way places are promoted. For instance, many cities or regions in West-ern Europe have long since installed specialized place mar-keters. I am not so sure if that’s the case in Eastern Europe.

INTERVIEW

The first thing that comes to my mind are the (in)famous Hard Rock Café t-shirts which were immensely popular in the 1990s so yes, I do think that destinations have become a lifestyle commodity similar to other products. Barcelona would be a great example of this. For younger travelers, it’s seen as a very hip place. Going to Barcelona – or Berlin and many such other places – is like buying the newest iPhone: You are part of the club.



Gildo Seisdedos IE BUSINESS SCHOOL------------Spain


I had been working on sales and marketing in the corporate world and I found that applying sales and marketing tech-nique for places was a need and that there was a huge gap, big opportunity as places are key for almost everything and they have been traditionally forgotten by policy makers, practitioners and academia.

At the same time, places are all different and it is not only about business as in corporate marketing and branding: social aspects are key and politics is always there!

It is always the last one ;-)

Especially true in this case: Oman National Spatial Strategy is in size and complexity one of the most complex cases I have been dealing with. The good (and/or bad) thing about place branding is that it is hard to know what it is really an achievement.

Places compete to attract and retain talent, tourists and investments and that is a pivotal issue. To succeed you need to use the right tools and place marketing is the label for all these tools.





I am really fan of “second tier” places. When you are not in the center, when you are part of the periphery taken demand into the center of your competitive strategy as a place becomes critical.

INTERVIEW

I would say they will have very soon more relevance than corporate brands. On one hand, it already exists a strong link between place brands and commercial brands – the “made in” or “made by” label is the core of many top commercial brands. On the other hand, brands are more important in economic and social aspects so it makes sense their brands to be at the same level.



I feel that awareness on places in this region is lower than in other parts of Europe so there is a gap that should be filled. Low awareness is a golden opportunity to be the first to get a space and a meaning into the minds of potential customers.


Sebastian ZenkerCOPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL------------Germany


My focus is on city and regional branding and brand man-agement. I love to be challenged and what could be more challenging as managing such a complex brand like a city or regional one? Especially the management of different stakeholders in this regards and participatory approaches are my interest of research.

In my academic career – my PhD defense. Place marketing and branding is a small niche in academia and with a very though committee from general product branding experts selling this story wasn’t by no mean easy…

In practice I would say the Fehmarnbelt inter-regional branding project. We were doing a feasibility study and had to include many different stakeholders from different coun-tries. The biggest challenge is most of the time to explain to the customer what place branding cannot and that the con-tent ‘what should be branded’ is more important (and has top priority) than to start to brand everything right away.

Place marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to place customers and for managing customer relation-ships in ways that benefit the organization and its stake-holders. Its aim is “to maximize the efficient social and eco-nomic functioning of the area concerned, in accordance with whatever wider goals have been established” (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990, p. 11). Important to notice is the dual character of marketing: it is a management strategy as well as operational tools like communication. A special role has branding in this regards, which focus strongly on the brand knowledge (i.e., awareness and image) of place cus-tomers.





The city of Hamburg is a very good example for a successful and very professional branded and managed place. Espe-cially, the structure of the Hamburg Marketing GmbH (HMG) is quite advanced in comparison with other place branding

INTERVIEW

Even more! What are the first questions if you meet some-one? It is the name, the profession and the place the person comes from. Places build a strong part of our identity and thus are more important than fashion or luxury brands. Don’t we tell everybody about the places we went? The trips we are planning? Place brands are the most important brands of our life.



In general we are living in interesting times for branding places. City governments more and more adopt business strategies and are open for using marketing and branding approaches. Nowadays even smaller places start to brand themselves. Unfortunately, many of them still solely focus on logos and slogans and surprisingly/alarming few of them have a clear communication goal, defined target markets and fitting brand content to talk about.


organizations. From former 17 different units within the city which all worked on marketing the city, there is now one holding with sub-companies responsible for different target markets (tourism, economic development, conventions and exhibitions). Additionally, they defined target markets, clear goals, and managed to a certain degree to incorporate most of the important stakeholders. Content wise, they have a clear defined brand with eleven brand building blocks (themes) which build the framework of all official brand communication. Currently, they work on success measure-ment tools to further professionalize their marketing and branding strategy.

INTERVIEW

Hamburg Metropolitan

Brand

GERMANY/HAMBURG------------------Sebastian Zenker

BACKGROUND: Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany with 1.8 million inhabitants (metropolitan region including Hamburg: 4.3 million). The city area comprises 755 km2, including 75 km2 of harbor (the second-largest European harbor). Hamburg calls itself the green metropolis of Europe with 4,700 hectares of wooded area (16.8% of the city area). Hamburg is also a city at the waterfront, with 8% of the city area covered with water drawn from three rivers and some smaller canals. The city additionally enjoys a healthy tourism industry, with over 8.95 million overnight stays in 2010. Hamburg attracts important economic powers by playing host to several of the top 500 German companies’ headquarters. Combined with international trade, Hamburg’s gross domestic product in 2009 was 85.76 billion Euro. Furthermore, with a foreigner’s population percentage of 13.5 percent, the city features an international touch: nearly 100 different consulates reside in the city, as do a high percentage of second-generation foreigners. Last, but not least, the city is a student’s town, with 20 different universities and about 75,000 students.

Before founding the Hamburg Marketing GmbH (HMG), 17 different units in the city worked on marketing the place. Starting in 2004 and finishing this process in 2010, Hamburg managed to build a holding structure with Hamburg Tourismus GmbH (HHT), Hamburg Convention Bureau (HCB) and Hamburg Business Development Corporation (GmbH) as target group specific subsidiaries. Collaboration between the four holding subsidiaries is based on close links at organizational, thematic and staffing levels. The Hamburg Marketing Holding employs about 180 people that take care of marketing Hamburg and its metropolitan area.

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AIMS:The objective is to strengthen unified communication and cooperation among municipal stakeholders, competent authorities and the Metropolitan Region, and to sustainably sharpen HMG’s international focus.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: The success template of the Hamburg brand describes those realities that for private individuals and companies from Ger-many and abroad offer the strongest leverage for the Ham-burg brand. This is the product of a brand survey commis-sioned by Hamburg Marketing GmbH from Brandmeyer Markenberatung. Ten specific brand building blocks (themes) were elaborated. Behind them stand concrete facts about the metropolis that have left a lasting impression on city customers and which they associate with Hamburg.

TIME FRAMES: Started in 2002, the Hamburg brand was developed with the help of two brand surveys in 2004 and 2009. The organizational building process was finished in 2010 – with adding another target groups specific subsidiary (Hamburg Convention Bureau) in 2012.

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: With the clear connected structure, stakeholders within the city government (e.g., tourism and the economic development department) were forced to work together closely and very productively. Unfortunately, another important player in this regards (city development) is not yet connected close enough.

BUDGET: not public

Figure 1: HMG structure

(source: http://marketing.hamburg.de/One-holding-four-subsidiarie.1795.0.html?&L=1)

Australia’s New World City?

AUSTRALIA/BRISBANE--------------Andrea Insch

BACKGROUND: For over thirty years, Brisbane has struggled to transform its established image as a ‘big country town’. Facing serious competition from Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane Marketing (BM), a subsidiary of the Brisbane City Council (BCC), was formed in October 2000 and focused on developing the city’s tourism and convention markets. However, the development of a brand position for the city was underwhelming and research indicated that Brisbane’s image in the Sydney market was 15-20 years out of date. Despite its lack of progress to create an attractive position to attract tourists, BM, in association with Brisbane’s three universities (University of Queensland, QUT and Griffith University), launched a number of campaigns to promote Brisbane’s “liveability” and its lower living costs as compared to Sydney and Melbourne. These initiatives formed the platform for Brisbane’s position as the fastest growing centre for international education between 2005 and 2009.


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AIMS:The launch of Brisbane’s Australia's New World City’ branding strategy in May 2009, aimed to reposition the city as a vibrant, new age city, targeting international investors, conference organisers and students. This was Brisbane’s bold attempt to become a business hub in the Asia-Pacific and a global city.

STRATEGY: The design of a brand repositioning strategy began in November 2007 and continued for about 18 months. Development of the new brand involved a year of consultation with 600 business and industry stakeholders as well as the work of two market research companies and a major advertising firm. The city’s brand reposi-tioning targeted multiple audiences – investors, migrants, visitors and students. In particular, the campaign sought to attract busi-nesses to invest and migrate to the city through exposing influen-tial decision makers to Brisbane through high profile events. Alongside this core initiative, Brisbane Marketing developed cam-paigns to boost international student numbers, attract invest-ment, major events, conventions, exports and international and domestic tourists. A website was created as an online portal for the city - http://www.choosebrisbane.com. Awareness of the new brand position was raised through a domestic marketing campaign in November 2009.

Separate campaigns have been implemented for international and domestic tourists under VisitBrisbane and international students

under StudyBrisbane. Initiatives designed to grow and retain the international student market include an annual Brisbane Wel-comes International Students event, the Brisbane International Student Ambassador Program, and the Brisbane Airport Welcome program. The team at Brisbane Marketing work closely with the city's education providers, education agents and all three levels of government (City, State and Federal) to sustain this sector – the city’s largest export market. In particular, the city is targeting students from China, South Korea, India and the Middle East.

As well as the obvious promotional messages and advertising that is supporting the campaign, Brisbane’s inner city has been the site of several major urban renewal projects and cultural initiatives, allied to the city’s brand repositioning. These initiatives are designed to capture an increasing share of major events, con-ventions and conferences and included the redevelopment of the historic Exhibition Showgrounds to include the Royal Interna-tional Convention Centre. A moratorium on infrastructure charges was introduced by the BCC to encourage the construc-tion of new four and five star hotels.

With a clear focus on economic development, Brisbane’s Mayor Graham Quirk took a lead role as the face of Brisbane, promoting it as a business hub in the Asia-pacific. BM is also seeking to lever-age Brisbane’s role as host of the G20 meetings in November 2014 to raise awareness of the city and target Asian investors, students and conference organisers. The latest campaign is part of a three


year plan to lure investors from Hong Kong and various regions of China. As part of the $700,000 integrated marketing campaign, billboards feature US president Obama as well as Asian executives carrying the slogan "Australia's New World City" and the "Choose Brisbane" tagline.

Source: brisbanemarketing.com.au

TIME FRAMES: The rebranding campaign is seen as a long-term brand position for the city. Following its inital launch in 2009, it has become the driver of the BCC’s Economic Development Plan 2012-2031, to frame the city’s economic development over the next decade.

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: Despite its intentions, there is little evidence that Brisbane’s ‘New World’ rebranding strategy has refocused its regionally-dependent economy and extended its global connectedness. For instance, the attraction of multinational firms to Brisbane has been limited, with just a handful of major Australian companies headquartered in the city. In-stead, Brisbane’s economic vibrancy is increasingly depend-ent on the tertiary education export sector. Attempts to reposition Brisbane’s brand as a global city, targeting exter-nal audiences demonstrates the inherent vulnerabilities of increasing dependency on global sources of financial and human capital, without a competitive and diversified city economy.


Source: studybrisbane.com.au

BUDGET: The reported cost of the initial campaign launch was over $1 million (2009), with $2.7 million budgeted over the follow-ing three years (2010-2012).

See also: Brisbane City Council. (2012). Brisbane Economic Development Plan 2012-2031. Retrieved 15/07/2014, 2013; COAG. (2014). International Students Strategy for Australia. Canberra: Council of Australian Government (COAG); Herde, C. (2013, 5 July). Brisbane Marketing's ambitious plans for economic growth, Courier Mail, p. 79; Marzano, G., Laws, E., & Scott, N. (2009). The River City?: Conflicts in the Develop-ment of a Tourism Destination Brand for Brisbane. In B. Prideauz & M. Cooper (Eds.), River Tourism (pp. 239-256): CABI; Urban Renewal Brisbane. (2012). The making of a New World City, 1991-2012. Brisbane: Brisbane City Council.

X-Border Place Branding

DENMARK/GERMANYSjælland/Lübeck-Ostholstein-Plön------------------Björn P. Jacobsen

BACKGROUND: By the year 2021 an 18 km fixed link will connect North Germany and South-West Denmark. This is one of the largest traffic infrastructure projects in Germany and Denmark, if not in Europe, and raises high expectations in the context of the economic development within the regions on both sides of the fixed link as well as in the wider metropolitan areas of Copenhagen and Hamburg.

Experience with comparable infrastructure projects (such as: Channel Tunnel, Öresund Bridge) has shown that such traffic infrastructure projects have the potential to initiate and/or strengthen a positive economic development in the adjacent regions. However, such positive economic development can only be materialized if the directly effected regions take early and sustainable actions. Such actions must accompany the infrastructural development with appropriate regional development instruments. Place branding when properly planned and implemented has proven to be such an instrument, which can contribute to a positive (inter-)regional economic development by positioning the region towards investors and talented workforce.

In comparison to other areas in the Baltic Sea Region, the geography covered by the “Belt Region” suffers from a low visibility among potential investors, talented people as well as public stakeholders. The mere fact that the fixed link will be built might have the potential for changing the inherent structure as well as the identity and image of the region.


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AIMS:The aim to investigate the possibility for a x-border place branding approach. Based on the feasibility an activity plan had to be developed and put into action.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: A review of best practice for transnational and interregional application of branding to places, with the purpose of get-ting inspiration/learning from different approaches to place branding. The examples of best practice were researched Europe-wide. Three relevant examples of successful and comparable transnational or interregional application of place branding are presented with a detailed and practice- oriented presentation of how these examples can be utilised in place branding the “Belt Region”.

An inventory of existing local/sub-regional place branding projects within or partly within the geography in question (“Belt Region”) as well as any umbrella place branding pro-jects or place branding projects in the vicinity was con-ducted. An assessment of whether they could be inte-grated, whether they are contradictory or an umbrella is present is presented. This includes the place branding strat-egies of Hamburg and Copenhagen.

An analysis and presentation of relevant target groups - both internal (within the region) and external (outside the region) - to be realistically addressed by place branding the “Belt Region”. The overall target group has been defined as investors and talent/workforce - which means enterprises located in the region as well as domestic and foreign inves-tors (MNE’s & SME’s). The analysis includes:Photo: Wirtschaftsförderung Lübeck GmbH © Antje Rautenberg


• (socio-economic) structure/characteristic of target groups• target group priorities• key players / decision makers within the target group• target groups’ needs, wants and insights• functional and emotional brand drivers• extended stakeholder groups to be addressed

An analysis and presentation of the inside (“identity”) and out-side (“image”) perception of the “Belt Region” among the target groups identified in point 3 as opposed to the identity and image of the three best practice cases identified in point 1.

An analysis and presentation of which “place products” should be branded. It is important to identify and select a relevant “specialization” for the “Belt Region” - to find unique qualities that will set the “Belt Region” apart from others.

Based on these analyses a recommendation for the strate-gic approach to build a place brand for the “Belt Region” was presented.

Based on the strategic approach approved, a detailed 5-year practice-oriented activity plan has been developed and presented. The activity plan outlines all necessary and alternatively all desirable activities in order to create a sus-tainable place brand for the target group defined.

Photo: Wirtschaftsförderung Lübeck GmbH © Antje Rautenberg

Based on the activity plan, a realistic budget has been set-up and presented. The budget includes all direct costs (financial resources) as well as all necessary personnel resources to implement, steer and control the place brand for the “Belt Region” over a 5-year period.

An analysis of whether the existing structures and collabo-rations between the organisations are suitable for imple-


menting the activity plan. The presentations include the ideal organisational set-up for implementing the activity versus the current set-up. Based on this analysis the requirements for adjusting the organisational set-up including milestones on how to achieve this set-up are pre-sented. The recommendations also addresses the aspect of how to govern an interregional place brand when brand ownership is diffuse To audit and control the place branding activities relevant success criteria have been identified and described. Such success criteria should be relevant and measureable.

TIME FRAMES: The project had a timeframe of 24 months; the feasibility study and activity plan were created over a 12 months period.

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: Based on the feasibility study and activity plan regional stakeholders have a clear vision of what can be achieved, which resources are required and which actions need to be taken. Based on this information, the implementation is currently planned.

BUDGET: € 150.000

»This Is Athens«

GREECE/ATHENS----------------Manolis Psarros

BACKGROUND: The “This Is Athens” is an integrated destination marketing campaign that was launched in 2012 by the City of Athens and the Athens Development and Destination Management Agency in partnership with the integrated destination marketing agency of Toposophy (former About-Tourism). In a time of austerity for the whole country, the Municipal Authority sought to reinforce positive perceptions of Athens as a tourism destination by allocating limited resources to innovative and highly efficient marketing activities. In fact, equal attention was given to B2B and B2C sectors, insofar as the low budget was used to produce immediate results as a response to social and political pressure as well as to align the scope or new initiatives with the growing movement of urban activism at the local level.

As a result, the city’s authorities have achieved within less than three years to complete successfully a series of influential projects, which have all been part of the “This Is Athens” campaign and have helped Athens to attract more tourism business and reach new audiences and markets. Crucially, the substance created by the campaign has also encouraged the city’s authorities to get involved in planning and implementation of additional projects in the next EU funding period.


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AIMS:Due to financial circumstances and the challenges accumu-lated during the escalation of the crisis, the campaign’s initial aim in 2012 was to enhance the strategic positioning of Athens in key target markets and develop in a more sys-tematic manner the city’s presence as a tourism destination across offline and online channels.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: For the destination management organization of Athens, the “This Is Athens” campaign was a great opportunity to build further on social media and local people engagement efforts that had begun in 2010, when the city’s and the entire country’s image was put to test due to intense but short-lived public unrest incidents. As part of a comprehen-sive plan for the enhancement of the local tourism sector, the campaign was based on the work of the Athens Devel-opment and Destination Management Agency and Toposo-phy on the design and implementation of the following pro-jects: • In the case of “This is MY Athens (B2C/C2C), we have

built on the enthusiasm of volunteer Athenians to set up a greeter program, designed to give to visitors the insider’s edge of Athens. The program is available for free, with Athens Locals using their time and personal knowledge of different parts of the city to provide a unique experience to all foreign visitors.

• In the case of “Travel Trade Athens” (B2B), we delivered successfully twice in 2013 and 2014 a full day event with hundreds of tourism professionals including numerous twelve minute pre-scheduled appointments, open net-working sessions to promote or discover unique local products and experience, and special tours to explore the most contemporary offerings of the Greek capital city.

• In the case of “TBEX Europe 2014” (B2C/Media), we man-aged to bring to Athens and host one of the most sought-after and in demand events of the global tourism community, which gathers bloggers, travel writers, con-tent creators / contributors, agents and professionals of the tourism industry with intense activity in social media, from around the world.

• In the case of “This Is Athens Destination Specialist Pro-gram” (B2B/Media), we have paved the way for the crea-tion of a broad international network of dedicated tour operators accredited as experts on Athens through an online and on-site familiarization program and annual prize winning competitions.

Crucially, there have been two additional add-ons that have extended the scope of the “This Is Athens”. First, the cam-paign integrated in terms of communication messages the four main projects with other long-term initiatives of the Athens Development and Destination Management Agency (e.g. the operation of info points). Second, the campaign has


become the precursor for a series of other projects, which the Athens Development and Destination Management Agency along with Toposophy have already put an track and aim to complete by the end of 2015 (e.g. the establishment of a destination intelligence system, the development of light-scale tourism infrastructure, etc.).

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: By the end of 2014, the City of Athens and the Athens Devel-opment and Destination Management Agency had seen their efforts contributing to the steady resurgence of local tourism traffic and producing tangible results in marketing the capital city of Greece across B2B and B2C channels:• In the first ten months of 2014, international tourist arriv-

als at the Athens International Airport have increased by almost 30% compared to the same period in 2013.

• The same airport has recorded more than 3 million inter-national tourist arrivals in the first ten months of 2014, while the total number of international visitors through-out 2013 was 2.6 million.

• Hotel overnights in the wider area of Athens from 2012 to 2013 (Region of Attica) also increased by 12%.

• More than 400 Athens Locals have offered tours to foreign visitors for free under the auspices of ‘This is MY Athens’.

• The 2nd Travel Trade Athens that took place in April 2014 improved its targets compared to the first event that

Source: thisisathens.org

took place in 2013, with 85 foreign professionals from 22 countries and approximately 170 Greek tourism busi-nesses, which participated in more than 2000 meetings.

• 850 travel bloggers, writers, content creators, photogra-phers, and cinematographers from 53 countries partici-pated in TBEX Europe 2014. In terms of social media cov-erage, only on Twitter and the official hashtags #tbexathens and #thisisathens from the 20th to the 27th of October alone had a reach of more than 11.7 mil-lion unique users and aggregated more than 68,086,915 impressions through 14,500 mentions by more than 3,400 different users.

Country BrandColombia

COLOMBIA----------------

Raquel Goulart Sztejnberg

BACKGROUND: Colombia is the 3rd largest economy in Latin America and has been forecasted with the highest growth rates of the region. Nevertheless, during a long period of time the country had a bad reputation, mainly associated to drug traffic, corruption and internal terrorism, which deeply affected its image inside the region and internationally, as well as its capacity to attract tourists, talents and investments. Previously, the brand of the National Federation of Coffee Producers was the only one that represented the country for 30 years.

In order to become visible on the world map with new lenses, presenting unique assets with credibility, the country needed to reposition itself and to define a strong brand essence, along with a long term plan embracing different aspects of the country’s personality and experience. The project involved Place Branding, Place Marketing and Place Management.


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AIMS:Designed by the Government, the main challenge of Colombia’s rebranding project was to build a positive per-ception about the country. The strategy and campaign were launched in December 2012, followed by numerous initia-tives to ensure relevance and consistency in different points of contact, both internally and externally.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: The political efforts to change the image of the nation have started in September 2011, when the country adopted the slogan ‘Colombia is Passion’, as the first phase to promote it internationally, but without expressive results in terms of competitiveness and distinctiveness. At the end of 2012, a more consistent brand initiative was launched, focusing on the capacity of the country to deliver the answers that the world was looking for.


Colombia Country Brand, also known as Marca Pais Colom-bia, in Spanish, was a joint effort between the National Gov-ernment and the private sector. The main campaign has presented not only the brand essence, positioning and a new identity but also the team involved on the construction of Brand Colombia: Government, creative agencies and other key partners, as well as a brand manager, a crucial figure engaged to be the guardian of the brand’s promise and expressions – visual, verbal and associative ones.

Being in Latin America (with all the positive and negative associations in regards to the region), and aiming to improve the way the country was perceived by the world, there was a clear focus on transforming the existing paradigms and the stereotypes that have labeled Colombia abroad through daily actions, reinforcing facts and aspects that would give concrete evidences of change in different spheres.

One of the main strong points about this project is that the brand strategy was not the first step that helped Colombia to improve perceptions inside and outside it. In previous years, the nation was already presenting remarkable accomplish-ments in terms of security, socioeconomic development, foreign investment, trade agreements and tourism.

Public spending in health and education have positioned Colombia 15 places ahead in the regional ranking. A new

The official video: http://vimeo.com/49426896


frame for investors was designed: workforce availability, offer in highly productive sectors, development of high-capacity ports, implementation of free trade zones, tax exemptions for some sectors and a competitive business environment.

GIP has been kept in an average of 4,7% in the last 13 years. Colombia’s economy has been growing more than expected: the 2nd fastest growing country in the world (according to Brand Colombia website www.colombia.co) and the 1st in Latin America.

The brand essence, ‘Mega-diversity’, highlights all of Colombia’s strengths in terms of culture, nature, tourism and internationalization opportunities, among others. This plurality was also considered during the creative process to design a new identity and a flexible and modern brand system, named “creative geometry”. The figures represent the geographical regions of the country, reinforcing the brand message. These are graphic expressions of the brand that serve to highlight a specific topic or fact, such as the great biodiversity of birds present in Colombia, or celebra-tions around the country.

The meaning of the colors:• Blue: national water resources;• Yellow: variety of climates, lands and minerals;• Green: biodiversity, landscapes and the great variety of

green that can be found in local nature;• Violet: the variety in Colombian flowers; especially

orchids, which are one of its most important symbols;• Red: Colombia warm and talented people who live from

their passions.

The signature "CO" was adopted by the ISO code that helps identifying Colombia internationally since 1974. It is sup-posed to be as intuitive as "UK" and "USA". According to Daniel Reyes, Chief Communications Officer of Brand Colombia, the brand identity was designed to last 10 years. Figure 1. Colombia growing rates (source: colombia.co)


Other positive meanings for the acronym “CO” have helped building the new signature: union, joint participation, com-pany and cooperation.

Although ‘Mega-diversity’ is not exactly a very distinctive and unique brand essence – it could easily have been taken by other countries with the same plurality – it was not the only brand tool to define the country’s personality and experience. Colombia has also defined a vigorous statement

“The answer is Colombia”. The positioning declared that Colombia is a country solution (leveraged by the excelling capacity to solve problems and overcome obstacles): for tourists looking for new experiences, for investor looking for new opportunities and new business partners, etc. In terms of longevity, this positioning may change in less than 10 years.

A portal site was created to give information about the brand, the country and a variety of aspects around the brand strategy such as business, nature, travel and events. Social media has been allowing Colombia to deliver a coher-ent message and an integral virtual image of the country. Networks activation (Facebook, Twitter and Google+) have completed the digital approach, by giving Colombians and people interested in Colombia the opportunity to post, interact, advocate, download, research and know about the country, its talents and its answers.

A consistent sponsorship campaign was created for culture and sports worldwide to enhance the strength of the new brand, as did the project “100 Colombians”, aiming to show successful nationals abroad. In order to amplify the mes-sage without impacting the original budget, Brand Colombia has engaged allies and co-branding partners who used the sentence “We are part of the answer” (“Somos parte de la respuesta”, in Spanish) in their own promotional campaigns, using the logo in change of visibility.

Figure 2. Colombia brand applications (source: colombia.co)

TIME FRAMES: Launched in Dec. 2012, the project evolved in different types of initiatives involving new institutional partners (co-branding with a variety of trade and corporate brands) and individual ambassa-dors, called “allies” – usually famous people who wanted to pro-mote the brand spontaneously by using the country logo on different applications.


EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: • Higher levels of internal pride, patriotic spirit and sponta-

neous engagement to promote the country brand.• Increased consumption, general growth, inequality

reduction.• Key cities positioning: Medellin (named as the world’s

most innovative city due to its use of infrastructure), Cartagena (tourism) Bogotá (mobility), building interna-tional recognition, awareness and even benchmarking for other countries.

• Colombian Coffee is the first one to have its origin acknowledged and protected in Switzerland.

• 4M international visitors are expected by December 2014. • 13 free trade agreements.• 17 infrastructure projects – such as Cartagena’s Harbor,

Bogota’s Metro and the Oil Pipeline Bicentenary – are part of the list of 100 most important initiatives in Latin America.

• Qualified as the second most attractive country to invest in of Latin America for the upcoming three years. Like-wise, it is considered the fifth country in the world – and first in Latin America – in terms of investor protection.

BUDGET: The amount of marketing investments: US$ 3.8M in 2013 and US$ 5M in 2014, being 80% directed to advertising in foreign markets. As a comparison, Ecuador has invested US$ 16M for its first year of country brand promotion.

Figure 3. Co-branding campaign for Colombia

The New Barcelona Brand

Strategy

SPAIN/BARCELONA--------------------Juan Carlos Belloso

BACKGROUND: Over the last 20 years, Barcelona has successfully positioned itself as a one of the most admired cities and a city of reference among the top cities around the world, associated with aspects such as creativity, culture, sport, gastronomy and for having a high quality of life, and has also become one of the main tourist destinations in Europe, with more and 7.5 million tourists in 2013, as well as a city of reference in the field of organization and holding of corporate, scientific, cultural and sporting events and congresses.

Today, Barcelona is a modern, advanced, cosmopolitan, open, creative and inspiring city boasting a high quality of life.

However, the city was still not globally recognized as a city associated with businesses, services, innovation, knowledge and entrepreneurship, as the different research conducted in 2010 showed and, therefore, Barcelona needed to strengthen its position in this area.

And Barcelona has the opportunity, the potential and the capabilities to position itself as a global city, able to compete at the highest level with other global cities.

On November 2010 a new Strategic Metropolitan Plan of Barcelona – Vision 2020, was presented, as the result of the joint work of over 650 experts in different fields who collaborated for more than a year to create and shape a projection for the future.

The vision of the Strategic Metropolitan Plan for Barcelona for 2020 consisted of consolidating the AMB (Metropolitan Area of Barcelona), with its model of quality social cohesion and integration, as one of the most attractive and influential European regions for innovative global talent.


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AIMS:Coinciding with the arrival of a new municipal government and governing party to the city in 2011 and following the work done by the Strategic Metropolitan Plan and on the basis of the different learnings and conclusions from differ-ent research on the perceptions of Barcelona, the aim of the new city government and from the main city public and private stakeholders was to create and implement a new city development and city brand strategy to help position Barcelona as one of the most attractive and influential European regions for innovative global talent and as the best setting for economic and business growth.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: With tis objective in mind, different initiatives and actions have been put in place both from the public and the private sectors:

Public Sector new economic development strategy: ‘Barcelona Growth’The priority of the City Council of Barcelona was to fight against the crisis. For this reason the new Municipal Govern-ment decided to start working in an urgent way in search of answers to the main questions in the current economic context: how to create employment, how to promote investment and funding, how to attract talent, or to help companies and entrepreneurs.

Source: Future Places

Advancing, inspiring, cosmopolitan, open, modern, creative, innovative, vibrant, diverse, human.


With this aim in mind, the City Council called the main eco-nomic agents of the city so as to invite them to work jointly in the search of specific measures that would allow to local economy to be reactivated. In this way, the ‘Barcelona Growth’ programme was born - an initiative promoted by the City Council that brought together public and private representatives from various fields.

From the work of ‘Barcelona Growth’ initiative 30 main eco-nomic measures were identified and put in place. Among this measures promote the Barcelona Brand and transform the ‘Mobile World Capital’ initiative into an economic power-house for different sectors, acting as a new catalyser for economic and social transformation for the city.

It was also decided to position Barcelona as the leading city in the world on the area of ‘Smart Cities’ and the smart use of technologies for the benefit of its citizens.

Private sector involvement (Barcelona Global)Following the Strategic Metropolitan Plan – Vision 2010 and, in order to help to implement the main strategies and actions identified in the strategic plan, a new private initia-tive called ‘Barcelona Global’ was created. Barcelona Global is a private, independent and non-profit association that has been set up as a citizen's platform of ideas and action, made up by people and companies who care about Barcelona and its future. The association's mission is to actively contribute to making Barcelona one of the most attractive cities in the world to attract and develop talent and economic activity.

Barcelona Global develops executive projects related to the competitiveness of Barcelona. These projects look to:• Strengthen the Barcelona brand associating it to sectors

and activities with higher added value and quality.Source: Barcelona City Council


• Facilitate the attraction, retention and landing process of foreign investment and talent in Barcelona.

• Bring together innovative talent and business decision centres and institutions.

• Encourage dialogue between sectors and across different groups as a way of detecting development opportunities.

• Collaborate with other institutions, organizations and public authorities on various types of projects and initiatives.

One of the main ideas and strategies under the action of Barcelona Global is how to make Barcelona a truly ‘business friendly city’ as well as how promote and position Barcelona through its main economic sectors.

A new Barcelona brand strategyThe City Council of Barcelona decided in 2011 to start a new project whose main objective was to review and develop a new brand strategy for the city.The project included the identification and confirmation of the main brand attributes and the unique and different values of the city, the defini-tion of the brand vision and new brand positioning and the development of a new brand story and value proposition, as well as the identification of the main available tools to strengthen and build the new brand positioning, including the identification of the main economic sectors on which to focus the efforts of the brand building strategy.

The project also contemplated the definition of a new model of brand management model through the establishment of a separate agency with the participation and involvement of the main actors of the city, public and private.

A new positioning statement was developed for the city following a deep strategic analysis and a process of consul-tation among different key stakeholders:

Source: Future Places

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Barcelona Main Brand Attributes and Values


A new city brand communication strategyAfter the new brand positioning was defined, a new city brand communications strategy was put in place in 2013 under the idea or ‘motto’ ‘Barcelona Inspira’ (Barcelona Inspires).

The objective of the new communication strategy is to help to visualize, communicate and value all the city assets and the different initiatives that the city is developing in order to position itself as a place for business and one of the most attractive cities in the world to attract and develop talent and economic activity.

TIME FRAMES: Although the city already started to work in transforming and position itself as a city of innovation and knowledge back in the 90’s, with the conversion of the old industrial district of Poblenou, the former “Catalan Manchester”, in the new 22@ Innovation District, it has not been until the development of the Strategic Metropolitan Plan Vision 2020 in 2010 that Bar-celona has started to work in an integrated and strategic way to position itself as one of the most attractive and influential European regions for innovative global talent.

It is clear that repositioning Barcelona not only as a great place to live, study and visit but also as a the ideal place for business and economic activity will take time and a lot of effort and determination and that this positioning will not

Source: Barcelona City Council

BEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015CASE STUDY

be easy to achieve, specially in a context of increased com-petition among places around the globe. However, the city has a clear vision and is currently putting in place the right strategies, actions and tools.

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: Although it is very early to measure the impact of the new economic and branding development strategy of the city, it seems that some results have already been achieved:• Barcelona is consolidating its position as one of the leading cities

in the area of ‘Smart Cities’ and ‘Mobile Technologies’ (in line with the objective of positioning itself as the Mobile World Capital).

• The city was awarded with the title of ‘European Capital of Innovation’ by the European Union in 2014 and is ranked the 4th Smart City in Europe and the 10th in the world.

• The city has also been ranked as the 4th city in Europe in Scientific publications and the 10th in the world, the 1st city in southern Europe in economic development and the 1st European city in quality of life for workers.

• Also, according to a recent international survey done by the City of Barcelona in 2013, Barcelona is being per-ceived as one of the most creative cities in the world.

However, we all know that changing the image of a place or building a new positioning takes time, as some recent research shows, and requires the constant and consistent effort of the different city stakeholders over time.

BUDGET: As an integrated new city economic development and city brand strategy it is difficult to calculate what the total budget is involved. Although a significant amount of invest-ment is done in city brand promotion and communications, the most important investment is done by all public and private stakeholders in their day to day strategies, initiatives, actions and communications that contribute to the posi-tioning and projection of he city as one of the most attrac-tive and influential European regions for innovative global talent and economic activity.

City of Peace and Justice

NETHERLANDS/THE HAGUE---------------

Robert Govers

BACKGROUND: The Dutch city of Den Haag (The Hague) has formulated a brand strategy focused on being the “international city of peace and justice”. Being host to the International Criminal Court, Peace Palace and many international public, private and non-governmental organizations, the city has built itself a global reputation in this respect. The Hague applies Anholt’s Competitive Identity approach to city branding. This includes creating substance, which is the activity that allows places to execute their brand strategy. This may be in the form of new economic, legal, political, social, cultural and/or educational activity. It is the actual innovations, structures, legislation, reforms, investments, institutions and policies that will bring about the desired progress. In addition, Competitive Identity requires symbolic actions, which are a particular species of substance that have an intrinsic communicative power. They might be innovations, structures, legislation, reforms, investments, institutions or policies that are especially suggestive, remarkable, memorable, picturesque, newsworthy, topical, poetic, touching, surprising or dramatic. Most importantly, they are symbolic of the strategy. They are, at the same time, a component of the destination’s story and the means of telling it. For The Hague, substance, such as the 2012 launch of the first international financial tribunal and hosting the 2014 Global Nuclear Summit, and symbolic actions such as the organization of the 2009 conference on the future of Afghanistan, have strengthened this reputation. However, the internal branding was never as strong as the down-to-earth Hagenaren (people from The Hague) generally questioned what was in it for them.


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AIMS:Therefore the city of The Hague came up with a new symbolic action in 2010. The Hague War Child City was a large scale project that intended to engage and enthuse the city’s stakeholders, resi-dents and the Dutch in general, to work towards an on-brand common cause to collect money for War Child and enlarge peo-ples’ involvement in the positioning of the core values of the city as “International City of Peace and Justice".

STRATEGY: The Hague War Child City won the 2010 City Marketing Innovation award. The Dutch Network for Citymarketing felt that the city of The Hague needed to be rewarded for their conceptual innovation linking a relevant international charity involved in the fight for peace and justice with the city brand, its tourism product and event calendar. In so doing it facilitated an accessible, pragmatic, yet socially responsible and resident friendly brand implementa-tion. The Jury also noted that the city makes clever use of co-branding with a strong, positive and relevant brand. It created a platform for the people of the city of The Hague to ‘live the brand’.

However, because of its internal focus and objectives, the tourism potential of this symbolic action received little acknowledgement. This led to limited integration of the initiative into the tourism prod-uct development and information delivery; insufficient embedding of content in other channels or among stakeholders and hence a complete failure towards socialization of the initiative; i.e. even



though a fully functional interactive social media website was set-up, it never saw any activity. It clearly illustrates how a mismatch of branding and marketing can lead to missed opportunities.

TIME FRAMES: One year

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: Nevertheless , the objectives were met by collecting close to €600,000 in donations as well as significant local free pub-licity. Coordinated by the municipality, the project was sup-ported by the 'Stad voor Stap naar vrede (Step/City by Step towards Peace)' campaign including a fully interactive web-site and six celebrity residents of The Hague being active as War Child City Ambassadors for a year. This also allowed for the enhancement of the city’s event calendar and hence its tourism product.

BUDGET: Roughly half a million Euros

Also see: Hulleman, B-A.B.F. and Govers, R. (2010), ‘The Hague, International City of Peace and Justice: A Relational Network Brand’, in: Dinnie, K. (ed.), City Branding: Theory and Cases, Basingstoke, Hampshire (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 150-156.

Oman National Spatial Strategy

OMAN----------------Gildo Seisdedos

INTRODUCTION: The Sultanate of Oman has gone through a spectacular process of transformation and nation building since the early 1970s (the “Renaissance”). In this very short period of time, it has achieved a remarkable improvement of its social and economic conditions. However, the country is now confronted with a number of complex challenges which require the careful attention of leaders and planners. These include the depletion of oil and gas reserves, the scarcity of water, the need to diversify the economy and the employment and human resources development of Omani nationals. These challenges need multifaceted and profound changes in planning approaches and interventions.

The leaders of the country are addressing these issues in various ways. One of the responses has been the idea of creating a National Spatial Strategy, which aims to address the spatial dimension of challenges that have accumulated over the last decades mainly as a result of the tremendous pace of growth. The motivation behind the creation of the Oman National Spatial Strategy is to react in a systematic way• to problems caused by the spatially highly imbalanced development;• to conflicting land uses problems due to improper allocation of land for development

activities.

On an operative level, the implementation goals of ONSS as a project can be identified as:• creating a framework of land use strategy that will ensure a sustainable

socio-economic development at national and regional levels;• implementing the proposed strategy in the light of the broad goals of the national long

term development strategy – Oman Vision 2020;• improving the information basis of spatial planning and developing a data

management strategy to secure good quality information and transparency of decision making.


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ONSS AS A PLACE STRATEGY: ONSS will:• set out a common vision for development on the national

and regional levels;• identify likely changes and prepare for them;• unction as a guideline and framework for all regional and

sectoral strategies (e.g. 5 year economic plans) and• establish the mechanisms by means of an institutional and

legal planning framework and capacity building to ensure that the strategy is implemented and kept up to date.

ONSS builds the framework for a long term process of implementation with a time horizon of about 30 years.

ONSS has looked at the key trends and drivers of change in Oman and their implications for the ONSS. These trends and drivers were identified from meetings and workshops with Omani stakeholders, supported by an extensive literature review. Collectively, they are seen as the major forces shaping the future development of Oman, and are thus specifically taken into account in the methodological approach to the ONSS.

The trends and drivers were classified by origin as being either internal (to Oman) or external, the key difference being that external drivers cannot be influenced directly by Oman, whilst internal drivers are forces that can be influ-enced more easily because they are domestic in origin.

Each of these drivers has been taken into account by the ONSS at both the Regional and National Levels. Indeed, it is axiomatic that a National Spatial Strategy must deal with each of these crucial issues in ways that enable (a) a land use framework for the future development of Oman to be produced that (b) satisfies their potential competing demands and (c) are resolved by way of policies for imple-mentation based on the goals of Oman Vision 2020 (2040).

This is so that the ultimate purpose of the Strategy (realising sustainable and balanced development in all respects – social, economic, environmental, cultural and governmental – through the optimum use of human and natural resources) is achieved.

STRATEGIC SPATIAL PLANNING IN ONSSThe method of long-term strategic planning provides an integrated vision for the future, based on an overall evalua-tion of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It looks into a broad spectrum of issues such as socio-economic trends, developing human potentials, optimum use and development of (public) land, the balanced growth of regions and so on.

Strategic spatial planning is a method which does not create static products but concentrates on processes, which are characterised by inter-sectoral coordination and financial


feasibility. The output is not simply a plan for land use, but a set of interrelated strategies for physical, infrastructural, economic, social, environmental and institutional develop-ment, which is shared by a large number of stakeholders.

Strategic spatial planning is not a single concept or procedure, but a method for collectively re-imagining the possible future of particular places and translating these into concrete priori-ties and action programmes. It is about framing the dynamics of change by shaping the decisions of all the agents whose activities constitute and carry these dynamics… thus, it is also about institutional design and mobilization.The plan-making process for ONSS is a multi-stakeholder process, where relevant individuals from all sectors come together to negotiate and engineer a coherent long-term vision, made tangible with priorities, goals and indicators for the purpose of implementation and monitoring.

BALANCING REGULATORY APPROACH WITH DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH

Two main spatial planning approaches were relevant for creating the strategy.

The regulatory approach to spatial planning is about creat-ing tools and measures to control spatial practices and ways to reduce their negative effects on space. It contains fewer strategic aspects.


capacity of people to respond in creative ways to problems, challenges and potentials in their local and social contexts.

While regulatory spatial planning aims to create products, such as land-use plans, master plans, zoning laws, land-use management and other regulatory measures, the develop-mental approach aims to create processes that involve long-term, cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder interac-tions aiming toward strategy-building that focuses on development of places, potentials and people.

The main guiding idea is to establish ways to create an adequate balance, spatially and temporally, between the two above-mentioned approaches in strategy develop-ment. In the planning context it can be defined as the balance between a ‘development-led planning’ and a ‘development control planning’.

PHASES AND OUTPUTS: ONSS starts with the identification of data needs and data collection. To begin with, strategies, visions and strategic priorities are formulated according to sectoral and integra-tive assessments of the collected data.

The evaluation of collected data serves as the basis for the identification of data and information (scopes) needed for the RSS (Regional Spatial Strategies), which are tendered

The developmental approach has a more pronounced strate-gic approach and is about how to create conditions that will pro-actively enable positive economic, socio-cultural, envi-ronmental and institutional development. Of particular importance is social innovation (one of the six Agendas of the Research Council of Oman), which is about developing the


during Phase 2. The RSS are conducted by sub-contractors and supervised by the ONSS team during Phase 3. Main out-puts of Phase 3 are the Regional Spatial Strategy Options.

Finally, in Phase 4, the regional strategies are integrated from the regional to the national level. This will form the basis for the final assessment, adjustment and synchroni-sation of the strategies and visions, which have been pre-formulated in Phase 1. The Oman National Spatial Strategy Report is the result of the four phase’s process and the final major deliverable of the project.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF ONSSThe main goals and objectives of the strategy are:• Provision of a solid framework for land use strategy that

will ensure sustainable socio-economic development at the national and regional level and the proposal of spe-cific policies conducive to the implementation of the pro-posed strategy (with main emphasis on Vision 2020).

• Improvement of the planning system and structuring of the planning and the associated decision making process.

• For the improvement of the planning process transpar-ency and good quality information are key principles, therefore the availability of a data management strategy is essential.

• The ONSS shall be formulated in accordance with princi-ples of sustainable spatial development, so it strives to

reconcile social and economic demand on land use with the ecological function of the land:

• Economic efficiency and global competition • Optimum utilization of land and natural resources • Diversification of economy • Improvement of the standard of living • Reduced disparities between regions • Securing of spatial environmental quality and diversity • Identification of infrastructure needs• Fostering geographical balance through equitable distri-

bution of development programmes.• Facilitating the development of enterprises with utilization

and consideration of the underlying investment patterns.• Optimization of land allocation.• Balance of urban growth and promotion of rural devel-

opment.• Improvement of social services and infrastructure.• Increase in participation of national workforce in eco-

nomic activities (via employment opportunities, educa-tion system, training facilities etc.).

• Achieve public-private partnerships.• Achieve integration between planning activities and policies.

»Britain is GREAT«

GREAT BRITAIN---------------Stefan Roesch

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BACKGROUND: The “Britain is GREAT” campaign is part of the UK government’s current place marketing strategy. It aims to promote Great Britain on an international level as a place to do business, visit or study and was launched in 2011 just one year ahead of the London Olympic Games. The campaign is still going strong, entering its fourth season.

CASE STUDY

THISISGREAT

BRITAINBEST PLACE INSTITUTE © 2015

AIMS:The campaign’s initial aim was to create an additional £1 billion for businesses and attract four million additional visi-tors to the country over the course of four years.

STRATEGY/ACTIONS/TOOLS: The campaign has been rolled out all over the world. Never-theless, it focuses on ten key markets which are: China/Hong Kong, India, USA, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Turkey and Emerging Europe. The imple-mented promotional tools consist of a combination of press, posters, television, radio, digital channels, cinema, PR and partnerships. In addition UK celebrities act as ambassadors to further enhance the Britain is GREAT message. The key themes are entrepreneurship, knowledge, creativity, culture, environmental protection, music, heritage, country-side, sport, innovation, shopping and literature.

VisitBritain, the country’s national tourism organization, was initially given £100 million in order to carry out extensive promotional activites in overseas markets on the back of the campaign.

The aims of VisitBritain’s part of the campaign are the following:• Build awareness of Great Britain’s attractiveness as a tourism

destination amongst those who have not yet visited Britain.

CASE STUDY

• Encourage prior visitors to return.• Provide a series of opportunities and incentives to visit

Britain now, working in partnership with the private sector.

The concrete objectives over the first four years were to attract an additional 4.6 million visitors, resulting in total spending of £2.3 billion, the creation of 57,000 new jobs and the generation of £460 million in tax revenues.

EFFECTS AND FURTHER IMPLICATIONS: By March 2013, VisitBritain had achieved the following targets (see www.visitbritain.org): • 1.92 million visitors from overseas – 25% ahead of March

2013 target• At least £0.96 billion visitor spend – 25% ahead of March

2013 target• 24,000 new job opportunities – 25% ahead of March 2013

target• £6.9 billion in PR coverage - 600% of four-year target• Partner support for their activities worth £26 million in

cash and in kind – 50% of four-year target• VisitBritain modelling estimates that the GREAT image

campaign has potentially generated a return of £200.25 million and 422,000 visits to Britain, indicating a return on investment (ROI) of 8:1.



• 72% of the audience in target cities recall seeing the GREAT campaign.

• 23 % of those who recall the campaign plan to visit in the next year as opposed to 11% of those who do not recall the campaign.

• Analysis of the first year of GREAT Britain activity has revealed that it has potentially delivered an additional 422,000 visits from the target cities.

• This potential return from visits means the tourism com-ponent of the GREAT campaign has achieved a return on investment of 8:1.

• Across all of the survey cities, people strongly agreed that the promotional work made them want to visit places outside of London.

Due to the success of the campaign, in December 2013, the Government allocated an additional £90 million to VisitBritain’s marketing budget for the period of 2014 to 2016.

Cascais Brand Architecture

PORTUGAL/CASCAIS------------------

Joao Freire

BACKGROUND: The present case introduces the challenges faced by Cascais Municipality when developing a strategy for its brand. It highlights the complexity and the political decisions that are involved when dealing with place branding. It also exposes one of the most important aspects when dealing with a place branding which is to have a clearly set up brand architecture.

The Cascais municipality is located 30 minutes from Lisbon, has 180,000 inhabitants, covers 97 km2 and it is divided in 6 civil parishes: Alcabideche, Carcavelos, Cascais, Estoril, Parede, S. Domingos de Rana. Cascais Municipality got its name from the town of Cascais. Due to the proximity to Lisbon, the town of Cascais was always seen as a strategic post in the defense of Lisbon and therefore has a fortress. Cascais until the 20th century was a fishing town, while the rest of the municipality was mostly linked to agriculture. Carcavelos, for example, was famous for its wine.

Nonetheless, its role as a fishing and agriculture municipality started to change in the late 19th century with the increased development of tourism. In the late 19th century, the Portuguese royal family started coming to Cascais to spend time at the beach and for sailing. With the royal family came the court and Lisbon high society. The town of Cascais started suffering a mutation. New summer houses were built to cater to these new important visitors and there was an investment in infrastructure, such as electrical power. In fact, Cascais was one of the first towns in Portugal to have electrical lights.

After the proclamation of the republic in 1910 and the exile of the royal family to the UK, the town of Cascais suffered a decline. Nonetheless, this did not mean the decline of the tourism industry in the municipality of Cascais. Twenty years later an important investment was made in Monte de Estoril, Estoril that helped the Cascais municipality maintain its path of becoming a major tourism destination.


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ESTORIL:The tourism complex in Monte de Estoril was the first of its kind built in Portugal, and is therefore considered to be the cradle of the tourism industry in Portugal. The new tourism complex started its development in the 1930’s and followed the same set of values as Monaco. It had a Casino, a luxury hotel, a golf course, tennis courts and holiday houses for the Portuguese elite. It also had a train connecting Estoril to Lisbon.

The success of the project had an impact on the entire region since it attracted other investors, which opened more hotels, built more houses and other tourism infra-structure, such as restaurants, bars, shops, and art galleries. What initially started as a tourism complex in Monte Estoril quickly spilled over to the rest of the Estoril territory.

The Estoril brand always had major advertising support from the Casino of Estoril. The Casino is the biggest in Europe, and by law, part of its profits has to be used to pro-mote tourism in Portugal. In the past the requirement was that the money would be used to promote tourism in the Estoril region, which until the 1960’s was the main tourism region of Portugal. Therefore, the region always had a strong budget to promote its brand in the international markets. An organization, Turismo do Estoril, was set up to manage and invest the promotional money from the Casino.


The development of Estoril impacted the entire region and not only the Cascais municipality. Other neighboring munici-palities such as Sintra felt the impact of the tourism develop-ment in Estoril. Sintra municipality, which includes the town of Sintra, always attracted visitors and tourists. Due to its micro-climate Sintra is surrounded by a forest and is cool during the summer. For this reason, Sintra was an attractive destination, especially in the summer, for kings and the court, which made it a rich heritage site. Today Sintra is a UNESCO town. Also relatively close to Estoril is located the monastery of Mafra. This is an impressive construction that was built in the 18th Century, and is another important tourism site. Because of its rich heritage some sites of the Sintra and Mafra municipalities were included in the Estoril offer. It was always considered that those places would enrich the expe-rience of the tourists staying in Estoril. Due to the area it covers, which is much bigger than the Estoril parish it was decided in the 1950’s that the region should be named Esto-ril Coast (figure 1).

ESTORIL COAST: The Estoril Coast brand was defined as a tourism region that incorporated the sites from Cascais, Oeiras, Sintra and Mafra municipalities. The Casino canalized the resources to the organization Estoril Coast to promote the region. But by setting the brand as Estoril Coast it meant that Cascais mu-nicipality, which included the town of Cascais, was under the


Estoril Coast brand, just like the other municipalities. So Cas-cais, in fact, was being represented by its town and not by its municipality yet its relevancy was at the same level as Estoril.

These changes had a direct impact in the Estoril Coast brand. Estoril Coast brand was included in the Lisbon and Vale do Tejo brand and was no longer financed by the Portu-gal Tourism board. In fact, the reorganization meant that the money from the Casino went to the Portugal Tourism board and not directly to the Estoril Coast organization.

That meant that the promotional resources for the Estoril Coast brand started coming from the municipalities that were incorporated in the brand: Cascais, Oeiras, Sintra and Mafra. But since 90% of the tourism receipts are from the municipality of Cascais the other municipalities were unwilling to support the Estoril Coast brand, the promo-tional costs started being mainly supported by the Cascais municipality.

With lack of support from the Casino, the Portugal tourism board and other municipalities, the Cascais municipality started questioning the merits and the return of investment of the Estoril Coast brand.

Cascais as a municipality needed to have a promotional strategy. The municipality had to invest money in its brand to capture investment and new residents, for example. But the mayor’s office also needed and wanted to promote the Cascais as a municipality for self-promotion which is essen-tial in politics. In that case, it meant that the Cascais Munici-

Figure 1

This was an acceptable status until the reorganization and redefinition of the Portugal tourism regions. In 2008 the organization of the tourism destinations in Portugal changed. The government decided that Portugal should be organized and divided in seven tourism regions: Lisboa e Vale do Tejo, Centro, Porto e Norte, Alentejo, Algarve, Açores and Madeira. Only these tourism regions would be sup-ported by the government with either direct money trans-ferred to the regions or indirectly by having the Portugal Tourism board promoting the regions internationally.


pality needed to invest in its brand but should it continue investing in Estoril Coast brand?

To solve the problem of having two brands that need pro-motional support the Cascais Municipality had to review its brand architecture.

SOLUTION: The new brand architecture should take into account the investment made in the Estoril brand from past years, but it should also find a solution that supported the needs of the municipality of Cascais brand.

To design the Cascais municipality brand architecture it was relevant to understand the assets of the municipality of Cascais, and to understand the nature and the role of the brand Estoril Coast.

This was especially relevant since there was pressure to keep the Estoril Coast brand in the market with the support from the Cascais municipality. Part of the political class and entre-preneurs, specifically the ones that are based in Estoril argue that Estoril Coast brand has equity, which was built during more than 80 years, and consequently it would be wrong to ditch it because it would jeopardize tourism in the region.

Nonetheless, after research conducted with different stakehold-ers in Portugal, Spain, UK, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Den-mark it was concluded that Estoril enjoyed a good level of aware-ness in Spain but it had quite low awareness in the other markets.

It was concluded that the relevance of Estoril Coast as brand to promote tourism in the region was diminutive. The con-clusion of the research was that the Lisbon was much more important to promote tourism in the entire region.

It was recommended that the Estoril Coast brand should be discontinued and the brand Estoril would become an asset of the Cascais municipality brand. Therefore, the brand roles should be inverted and Estoril should become a sub-brand of Cascais and not the other way around (figure 2).

Therefore a new brand architecture should be created for the Cascais municipality, where Estoril would be a sub-brand. Estoril would be especially useful for communicat-ing to the Spanish market.

Figure 2Estoril Coast Cascais

EstorilCascais Municipality


Moreover, the town of Cascais should be seen as an asset of the municipality of Cascais and therefore a sub-brand of Cascais. This was necessary in order to differentiate the municipality from the town. The municipality has much more potential than the town. In order to maintain an idea of size and relevance of the municipality it was suggested that other sub-brands could be developed in the future.

Although this brand architecture implies a bigger invest-ment because of the existence of sub-brands, in fact each one has a specific role and would leverage the brand of the Cascais municipality. Each sub-brand would have a limited communication budget and be endorsed by the Cascais municipality. This solution would allow the municipality to save money from the investment of the brand Estoril Coast

Graphic design:• Aleksander Bąk / www.aleksanderbak.pl

Photo credits:• www.mediaserver.hamburg.de © M. Lebowsky, bcsMedia• www.brisbanemarketing.com.au © Brisbane Marketing Pty Ltd / Dominika Lis / G20 Australia• www.brisbanemarketing.com.au © Brisbane Marketing Pty Ltd / Andrew Taylor / G20 Australia• www.studybrisbane.com.au © Brisbane Marketing Pty Ltd / James Goss• Wirtschaftsförderung Lübeck GmbH © Antje Rautenberg• www.flickr.com/photos/cityofathens/3705875587 © Breathtaking Athens• www.colombia.co/en/investment/why-colombia/why-colombia.html © Marca Colombia / Oscar Garces• Barcelona Inspires © Barcelona City Council• www.thehaguepeacejustice.com © Steven Scholten• www.flickr.com/photos/loufi/3321513 © Hendrik Dacquin• www.visitbritain.org © This is Great Britain• Cascais Tourism Office © María F. Carballo• www.kaboompics.com

Copyright NoticeCopyright © Best Place – European Place Marketing Institute 2015. All Rights Reserved.The images, photographs and graphic devices are used in this publication solely for information purposes. All copyrights remain by their owners.

For further information please contact:Adam MikołajczykMagdalena FlorekJarosław Górski

ul. Górskiego 100-033 Warszawa, Polska

tel: +48 22 201 26 94fax: +48 22 201 26 96

[email protected]

place marketing & branding 2015+

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