Place Branding

In an era of super brands, it may seem an unusual notion to consider a city, state, region or downtown as a brand.

For years, I have lamented the lack of marketing savvy used in developing city and town mottos, taglines and slogans. A very small portion of these are effective in highlighting their municipalities’ unique value propositions.

According the World Travel and Tourism Council, travel and tourism “contributes 9.5 percent to the global economy in 2013…and could generate as many as 5.1 million jobs by 2015 in the G20 economies.” When one considers that businesses, residents and event and meeting planners also choose one place over another, it is no wonder that cities, regions and countries are branding themselves in earnest.

In the face of increasingly intense competition, ambitious places are objectively evaluating their competitiveness and methods of optimizing their relevance and value to internal and external customers. Many of them are adopting the principles of branding to better manage their identities and how they present themselves in a global marketplace. 

It’s not easy for small cities to attract positive attention, but it is easy to forget that the rest of the world is not as interested in our hometown as those of us who live there. Small cities generally have rare opportunities to capture our attention or to impress the outside world.