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Place Branding?



Place branding brings together a range of existing specialisms, in particular those of brand management and development policy, to create a new discipline with equal emphasis on visionary strategy and hands-on implementation. Successful place branding combines the responsible and intelligent application of disciplines and techniques from commercial branding, as well as new leadership and partnership development practices, with a creative approach to established methods of international relations, diplomacy, and policy making.

This enables a place to build on all its strengths, and make sense out of the often chaotic and contradictory mosaic of its current and future identity. One of the things which distinguishes our place branding approach is that we use brand strategy to drive and inspire consistent and on-brand behaviour, not merely communications. If you simply tell the world about how great your country or city is, it is ordinary publicity at best, and spin at worst. In place branding, the role of communications is not primarily a method for telling the world about a place, but a method for making the world aware of the actions a place performs which best exemplify what kind of place it is. Place branding ensures that the place gets due credit for its real strengths and positive behaviour, and that the place brand gains appropriate equity from the recognition which that behaviour deserves.

The Benefits of a Place Brand

In a globalised world, every place must compete with every other place for its share of the world's wealth, talent, and attention. Just like a famous company, a famous city, region or country finds it much easier to sell its products and services at a profit, recruit the best people, attract visitors, investment and events, move in the right circles, and play a prominent and useful part in world affairs. It is all too easy to become famous for the wrong reasons. A place's reputation needs to be built on qualities which are positive, attractive, unique, sustainable and relevant to many different people around the world. A place brand strategy determines the most realistic, most competitive and most compelling strategic vision for the city, region, or country, and ensures that this vision is supported, reinforced and enriched by every act of investment and communication between that place and the rest of the world. But unless every government department or agency consistently communicates and demonstrates the same carefully developed brand, people in other places will quickly become confused about what the place brand stands for. For the same reason, the process must be led at the highest level of government, and have the personal endorsement of the 'Chief Executive', whether this is the Prime Minister, President, Monarch or Mayor. The acts of communication which a place performs, now and in the future, include the products which it exports; the way it promotes itself for trade, tourism, inward investment and inward recruitment; the way it behaves in acts of domestic and foreign policy and the ways in which these acts are communicated; the way it promotes and represents and shares its culture; the way it manages and develops its built and natural environment; the way its citizens behave when abroad and how they treat strangers at home; the way it features in the world's media; the bodies and organisations it belongs to; the other places it associates with; the way it competes with others in sport and entertainment; what it gives to the world and what it takes back. If done well, such a strategy can make a huge difference to both the internal confidence and the external performance of the place.

The Management and Implementation of a Place Brand

A place brand strategy is, of course, only as good as its implementation, and it is when people actually experience the brand that they begin to form positive attitudes and behaviours about the place. Implementation involves devising actions for each of the stakeholder groups that are in line with the brand strategy, creating the right 'internal' communications to reach, inform and engage them, devising the correct delivery mechanisms to ensure uptake, developing funding and taxation that will assure success, and training staff on whose enthusiasm and dedication the final outcomes depend. We provide support in appropriate tactical areas, such as public diplomacy, perception management, product and service development, brand training, and the construction of rewards and monitoring systems. We believe that, as outsiders, we cannot and should not attempt to create the strategic vision for a place ourselves and 'sell' this to its administration. Only the place itself - with representation from government, NGO's, industry, the arts and the population in general - is entitled and qualified to do so. Our role is to provide the objective viewpoint, the research, the framework, the structures, methods and tools for a place to arrive at its own clear, useful and distinctive brand strategy, and maximise the opportunities for creativity and innovation throughout the implementation. As noted, communications are not sufficient to change the opinions of large numbers of people about a place, especially if the reality one desires is very different from current perceptions. In most cases, it is essential to prove the point, rather than endlessly repeat it. A place brand will only come alive if people are offered the opportunity to experience it through active participation.