Place branding

Place branding is the process of branding a particular country, region, or city to make other people feel a particular way about that destination. Place branding is similar to product and service branding that companies use to evoke certain consumer feelings about their products. Product branding stands apart from traditional branding, however, because places are complex and cannot be controlled in the same way as products and services. Place branding is meant to describe a place by identifying traits. Regions undertake place branding to increase tourism, attract new residents, and draw new businesses and investments. Governments often work on place branding with the help of marketing professionals. The strategies used in place branding vary but can include traditional branding strategies, such as releasing targeted marketing campaigns and creating logos.

Overview

Countries, regions, and cities evoke certain attitudes and feelings from both residents and tourists. Many people will have unique feelings about large countries such as China, India, and the United States. Many people also have certain feelings toward large cities such as London, New Delhi, and Tokyo. The idea of place branding is that people will take specific actions, such as running promotional campaigns or building new infrastructure, that are meant to help shape other people’s attitudes, emotions, and ideas related to the place. Even without place branding, many people will develop unique ideas and associations about places, and place branding professionals argue that using place branding is a good way to positively influence those ideas and associations.

One major reason destinations use place branding is to increase tourism. According to information released by World Travel & Tourism Council in 2021, tourism accounted for 10.4 percent of global GDP in 2019. Numerous countries, regions, and cities are vying for that massive amount of money. Making a particular destination stand out can make it more attractive. When place branding helps attract tourists, it brings more money and spending to the region.

Destinations also undertake place branding to make their locations more attractive for people to live in. Increasing the population often increases the tax base and helps grow the region’s economy. When people move to a specific area, they pay taxes and contribute to the local economy daily. People moving to an area can also help maintain buildings and locations that would otherwise deteriorate and possibly need to be demolished.

Many locations take part in place branding to attract businesses and investments. When businesses relocate to or open in a specific place, they contribute to the local economy and frequently provide opportunities for employment for local residents. The presence of businesses may attract more people to live in a specific area or appeal to other businesses considering relocation. In addition, businesses often invest money into their infrastructure, usually by building new structures or renovating old buildings. These investments can help improve an area’s aesthetics and increase property values.

Generally, place branding is undertaken by specialized groups inside of governments. Teams comprising various stakeholders—including people from an area’s business community, government representatives, and citizens from the area—may also oversee place branding. Often, such groups or organizations hire professional marketers, especially those specializing in place branding, to help with the process. The size of the place branding group will likely depend on the budget and the size of the area conducting the branding. Sometimes, only a few people will run place branding campaigns, so larger campaigns may involve multiple groups.

Place branding is accomplished in numerous steps. It is generally an ongoing process because the area being branded may change over time, or perceptions about it may change. Just as companies that brand their products and services must constantly think about how their brands are viewed and understood, people working on place branding must do the same.

A place branding project begins with a planning phase. The people in charge of building the brand will develop a vision of the brand. The vision should fully explain what emotions and associations the place brand should evoke. People involved in the planning period will also list the branding objectives. Creating specific objectives is important because it will help the group understand what they consider success and help them achieve it. The planning phase also includes comparing the initial state of the brand to the desired outcome. The team can use surveys and other tools to understand what associations people make with the destination before place branding. Comparing the current state of the brand with the vision will help the team understand the scope of work that needs to be done.

The next phases of the process include making a branding plan and implementing it. This stage usually takes the most time. Making and implementing the brand requires the team to take specific actions, such as creating and launching a marketing campaign or improving infrastructure elements in a location. After a team successfully implements a brand, it will have to continually monitor the brand, the effects of the branding, and the attitudes of the stakeholders.

When groups take part in place branding, they may use multiple tools. A critical tool in the process is placemaking. Placemaking is the process of transforming a location into a place where people want to live, work, and visit. Placemaking is about the design, accessibility, and comfort of a place. Placemaking is often part of place branding and destination marketing. When place branding, a destination creates certain feelings and associations, while placemaking is about ensuring a location has specific attributes, often physical features, that give it a desired feeling. For example, creating a walkable downtown area that is accessible for all people and fosters social gatherings may require creation of or improvements in a city’s infrastructure. The city might achieve this by installing bright streetlights, blocking off vehicle traffic in a specific location, and building accessible sidewalks. Such physical changes will make the city look different, but they will also change the way the city functions when more pedestrians use the accessible, well-lit sidewalks. This can bring more investments and businesses into the area, such as restaurants that rely on foot traffic. The addition of new businesses again physically changes the city and alters the experiences people have there.

The idea of placemaking, which originated in the 1960s, gave urban developers and local governments new ideas about how to design specific spaces and construct accessible infrastructure (Place Brand Observer Editorial Team, 2021). Often, place branding experts try to create feelings of connection, comfort, and engagement. When conducting placemaking, destinations can focus on specific goals or target certain features. For example, some regions focus on creating accessible locations where residents, tourists, and businesses can interact. Other regions might focus on creating an area that is filled with arts opportunities by building or attracting theaters, museums, and concert halls, for example. Other regions might have much more limited budgets. These areas may use a process called tactical placemaking, which focuses on making low-cost changes quickly. For example, a city might develop self-guided tours of historic neighborhoods, install brighter bulbs in existing streetlights, or hold new public events in open spaces that already exist (Steuteville, 2014).

Applications

Groups use many strategies when implementing place branding because every location is unique and will have different goals for its branding process. Another reason that strategies vary widely is that the profession has not adopted a standard list of approaches that are considered best practices. Place branding professionals may use placemaking, urban design, marketing campaigns, strategic investments, and other tools to achieve their goals.

Humor is often used in branding and marketing of commercial products, and some locations have taken this approach in their place branding. For example, in 2018, Iceland's place branding group used a humorous campaign to attract international visitors, teach about attractions in different parts of the country, and inform potential visitors about responsible traveling etiquette. The campaign planners used humor to achieve their goals by joking about many people's difficulty with the Icelandic language. The campaign created and released a video, "Hardest Karaoke Song in the World," which features an Icelander singing in English and using Icelandic words that non-native speakers might have problems reading or pronouncing (City, Nation, Place, 2021).

Small locations often have smaller budgets for their place branding processes. Some place branding professionals in small areas have developed unique strategies to make an impact on a budget. For example, Træna is a remote location in Norway that has used unique strategies in its efforts to attract residents. Traveling to the isolated island often requires people to take multiple modes of transportation and can take a great deal of time. The team doing the branding for the island used vacant houses to offer artists, chefs, and other professionals free housing in return for living in the area and sharing their talents with the people living there (Place Brand Observer Editorial Team, 2020).

International and national events will also affect how place branding professionals do their work. In the early 2020s, destinations around the world experienced dramatic declines in tourism because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The year 2020 was especially difficult for international tourism because governments around the world restricted international travel in an effort to contain the virus. International visitor spending decreased 69 percent in 2020 compared to 2019 spending (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2021). Some locations changed their place branding strategies to try to encourage travel as soon as people could travel again. For example, in 2020, branding for the Western Cape in South Africa adopted a new slogan, "dreaming of one day" (City, Nation, Place, 2021). That slogan was meant to evoke an emotional response that would cause people to think hopefully about the future and plan a trip for a later time.

Issues

If place branding is successful, it will necessarily change the location because it will attract people to visit, move, or invest there. Furthermore, a location can change during the process of place branding, especially because of placemaking. Place branding is complex, and many stakeholders are involved. Different groups of stakeholders might approve or disapprove of the various changes that happen. The groups often have slightly different goals and desires for the place branding. Three of the main stakeholders are the citizens who live in an area, the tourists or residents visiting the region, and the businesses in the location. Sometimes, the goals of all the stakeholders are similar, but they are often different. For example, residents of a location might have a goal of making a walkable downtown area where they can socialize and shop. In this case, the goals of the residents and businesses are most likely aligned. However, if businesses have a goal of attracting as many tourists as possible, reaching that goal might make the downtown area very congested and increase traffic in surrounding areas. Residents of the area would most likely see those specific changes as negatives.

Governments and other groups undertaking place branding and placemaking have to carefully consider the desires and needs of the various stakeholders. People conducting place branding should try to get the support of residents and businesses for plans that they develop. Involving the community in place branding can be helpful because if any of the stakeholders dislike the outcomes, they might leave. That outcome contrasts with place branding's overall goals. For that same reason, governments undertaking place branding and placemaking should anticipate the changes in the area and should have plans to address any possible negative outcomes. For example, an increase in tourists will most likely create an increase in trash. Developing a plan to mitigate trash and deal with littering could help prevent tourism from having adverse outcomes.

Locations change over time. Traditionally, locations have changed because of technology, migration, development, and other social and political factors. These changes usually happen gradually, giving the people living and working in the location time to adjust to change. However, sometimes locations change rapidly. At times, place branding can create factors that cause quick changes, or the branding can make it seem as though changes are happening in the location at a rapid pace. Regions undertaking place branding should try to anticipate how all the stakeholders will react to the changes and should try to mitigate any changes the stakeholders will see as negative.

Another issue that regions conducting place branding will face is that brand loyalty is difficult to achieve for some places. For example, some countries try to attract foreign visitors. Their place branding strategies might include marketing campaigns meant to interest foreign tourists to make long-distance trips to the location. Such marketing campaigns may be successful in bringing tourists to the country. However, tourists may visit the region only once because the trip is seen as a one-time experience. Some tourists may revisit the region, but their return trip might happen years after the initial trip. For these and other reasons, measuring brand loyalty for place branding can be difficult.

Although the practice of place branding has become popular with many countries, regions, and cities, the overall impact can be unclear in some situations. The ideas, associations, and feelings people have about locations are complex and influenced by many varied factors. It is not always clear which factors have influenced people's perceptions of certain countries and destinations (Kavaratzis, 2015). Destinations are complex, and people's attitudes and feelings toward places are also often complicated. Monitoring changes in these associations often proves difficult.

About the Author

Elizabeth Mohn earned a BS in communications in 2006. She has developed social sciences content for more than a decade.

Bibliography

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