Can we, do we, should we, brand places?

*
[Or are we doing what we think and say we are doing?]
G.J.Ashworth
University of Groningen
NL
g.j.ashworth@rug.nl

What are we doing?

It is unfortunately still necessary to begin by stating what branding is not. It is

not a synonym for promotion, let alone marketing as a whole although these
terms are often used interchangeably. Similarly place branding is not just the
deliberate shaping and promotion of a place image by a public authority in
pursuit of policy objectives. It is also not (as many local branding policies seem
to be suggesting) the same as creating a single catchy slogan, logo, house style
design and the like, however much these might embody and reflect the
aspirations of the place management authorities.
Product brands are more than an identifying name given to a product.
A brand embodies a whole set of physical and socio-psychological attributes
and beliefs which are associated with the product (Simoes & Dibb, 2001). It is
more than the shaping of distinctiveness: it is the forging of associations. a
brand is a product or service made distinctive by its positioning relative to the
competition and by its personality, which comprises a unique combination of
functional attributes and symbolic values (Hankinson & Cowking, 1993: 10).
Branding is a deliberate process of selecting and associating with these
attributes because they are assumed to add value to the basic product or
service (Knox & Bickerton, 2003) and thus improve its competitive position.
From this value stems a series of consequential and important attributes about
the nature of the product, of its marketing and of consumer behaviour towards
it.

Paper presented at the first international conference Marketing Cities: Place Branding in Perspective,
Berlin December 4th-6th 2008. Download at: http://www.inpolis.de/inpolis-projektdetail_1_en.html

Place branding is clearly just the application of product branding to a

particular type of product, namely places.

However there are at least four

different sorts of place branding which are often confused in the literature but
which are really quite different operations conducted by different types of
producers for widely different objectives.
The first is geographical nomenclature where a physical product is
named for a geographical location.

The archetype is the sparkling wine,

Champagne. Although a place name and a product are inextricably linked, this
is not place branding as I mean it here. There is no conscious attempt to
associate any supposed attributes of the place to the product, which gains
nothing from the association, which is only an historical-geographical accident
which could conceivably have been somewhere else without loss. A place
becomes only a name for a specific brand or, in other instances, a generic
name for a production process. The place has no other significance and neither
determines the locus of production nor any other transferable characteristic.
The second is co-branding, which is common enough among physical
products (the fish-and-chips phenomenon). Co-branding of product and place,
attempts to market a physical product by associating it with a place that is
assumed to have attributes beneficial to the image of the product. The textbook example is Swiss watches. This is a different use of place nomenclature
than Champagne because the objective is to transfer the characteristics of
reliability, fastidiousness and meticulousness assumed to be associated with
the Swiss people, or the country Switzerland, to watches for which these are
presumed to be desirable attributes. The products value is thus increased by
the place association. This is an intrinsically dangerous practice if only because
place images are both multifaceted and unstable. The above characteristics of
the Swiss assumed to be beneficial to the product could be substituted by the
much less helpful, and equally assumed, characteristics of parsimony,
parochialness and creative dullness.

Equally such place associations can

change quite rapidly shifting from positive to negative associations. Consider

the quite different associations implied by the place co-branding of Belgian
beer, chocolates and lace. This is not place branding but product branding
using place associations to add value to the product. Occasionally it is used in
reverse: that is when products that can be associated with the place are used in
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support of the place image. Many rural areas use agricultural products with
which they can be associated as elements in their tourism promotion, linking the
place to ideas of fruitful landscapes and well-being associated with hearty and
healthy eating. As the intention is the selling of the place through the product
rather than the reverse this is place branding.
Thirdly, there are many instances where the product is effectively a
location and the geographical locus is what is being sold. Property agents and
tourism promoters, amongst others, are clearly and unavoidably selling actual
locations. In these cases the typology begins to move away from the place as
identifier to the place as product. It is not only a house or a holiday in a
particular location that is being sold but in many respects the location itself.
Marketing will often select, modify and manipulate place nomenclature to
achieve a maximum benefit creating in effect its own marketing geographies.
The difference between marketing a location, a point in space, and place, an
area possessing an identity that distinguishes it from other places, is easy to
make in theory but almost impossible to sustain in practice. The qualities of a
marketable location stem in almost cases from more than its position in a
featureless Euclidian space but are strongly influenced by the qualities of the
place in which it is situated. This location branding is certainly place branding as
I define it here because locations are being treated as marketable commodities
and exchanged in markets. However this process although centrally concerned
with places and products has goals that have more in common with the
conventional commercial marketing of physical products than place branding as
place management instrument.
Fourthly, place branding can be treated as an instrument of place
management. At its simplest level much place management depends heavily
upon changing the way places are perceived and thus used by specified user
groups. The creation of a recognisable place identity, little more than a sort of
civic consciousness, can be subsequently used to further other desirable
processes, whether inward financial investment, changes in user behaviour or
generating political capital. It should be clear from the above definitions that
this is more than the creation and promotion of place images as part of place
management: it is attempting to add value by moving perceptions of defined
user groups from the generic to the brand. This is place branding as intended
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here and as practiced by place management agencies in pursuit of policy

objectives.
The elements of a branded product can now be briefly reiterated. A
branded product requires a brand identity, a brand differentiation and a brand
personality (Akker, 1996). These are not separate attributes but re-statements
of the same feature from different perspectives.

Identifying and clarifying the

brand identity, or the core identity, is in itself an instrument of differentiation of

one product from another and recognising its brand positioning, that is its
relationship to competing products within a defined competitive arena.

The

process of product branding involves both creative initiation and subsequent

careful maintenance.

This brand management is thus both strategic and

tactical although disproportionate attention in the literature is generally paid to

the former. The objective of the process and method of measuring its degree of
success is the increase in brand equity which is the extra benefit enjoyed by the
consumer above the bare utility value of the product. Such equity in turn is
composed of the two elements of brand value (i.e. the associations themselves)
and brand awareness (the strength of the recognition of such associations).
In summary, brand identity, brand positioning and brand image are
BRAND
IDENTITY
How the owners
want the brand
to be perceived

BRAND POSITIONING
That part of the value proposition
communicated to a target group that
demonstrates competitive advantage

BRAND
IMAGE
How the
brand is
perceived

related as in the diagram below.

These are the central attributes and characteristics of product branding that we
attempt to apply to places.

Can we?

An obvious answer to this question is that even a cursory review of cities,

regions and even countries around the world reveals that the attempt is selfevidently being made to brand places (Kavaratzis, 2008). However this common
sense conclusion must be confronted by the misgiving that what we think and
say we are doing may not actually be what we are doing in reality. It all in
essence depends upon whether places can be treated as products in any
meaningful sense. This transformation could occur at three levels of increasing
profundity.

First, there is the substitution of terminology where places,

governments, users and needs become products, producers, customers and

demands.
This may be little more than a partially relevant metaphor.

Secondly,

techniques derived from marketing may be imported and added to the existing
tool-kit of place managers to be subsequently applied in contexts and for goals,
quite different from those for which they were created. Thirdly, marketing can be
applied as a philosophy, a way of viewing, reacting to and treating the external
world.

The question this poses is not just is this appropriate for a public

authority but actually is it possible and, if it is not, then what are we actually
doing when we just tinker with the terminology and test a few disembodied
techniques.
The critical questions are to what extent is a place a product, a place
user a customer and a public place management authority a producing
corporation in the same sense as a commercial firm?

Place products are

varied, diffuse and often difficult to define: they are multi-sold as well as multibought and the producers of them have goals that are multiple, vaguely
formulated and often difficult to quantify. All this is well known (Ashworth &
Voogd, 1990).

However the question here is can we brand places if they

possess these characteristics? Can a place product have a brand identity and
brand personality association if it is so varied? Does a place product consumer
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associate with a place image in the same way as with a branded commercial
product?
Answers to these and similar questions may revolve around the idea of
corporate branding. The similarities between corporate branding, in which the
producer rather than the product is branded, and city branding, where the city
as a whole rather than its individual services are branded, have occurred to
many observers (Kavartzis, 2004; 2005; Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005). Both
ideas have multidisciplinary roots, both address multiple groups of stakeholders,
both have a high level of intangibility and complexity, both need to take into
account social responsibility, and both deal with multiple identities.
A public authority generally has multiple responsibilities to diverse
customers discharged through multiple functions by variously skilled workers.
The adoption and projection of a single clear corporate identity, ethos and
image will be difficult if not impossible.

Indeed most democratic political

systems encourage the open expression of alternatives rather than concealing

them within a spurious communal unanimity. Cities have many similarities with
large commercial corporations. However, unless these similarities are more
significant than the dissimilarities of political responsibility and public interest,
places cannot be branded in the sense defined above.

Do we?

Place branding is being consciously and deliberately applied as official policy in

a large number of ways in many places. This brief paper cannot outline in detail
all the practical techniques used by places to brand themselves. Suffice it to
recall here that the three main techniques currently fashionable among urban
planners can be listed as personality branding, signature building and design
and hallmark events branding. All are intended to not only attract attention and
place recognition (thus brand awareness) but also to raise associations
between the place and attributes regarded as being beneficial to its economic or
social development (thus brand utility).
Personality branding (or the Gaudi gambit after the success of its
Barcelona application), depends upon the simple reality that people are unique
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individuals and this unique quality can be transferred to a place, if a place and
person can be rendered inseparable. Artists as diverse as Mozart, Presley,
Macintosh, Wagner, or Dudok are now associated through personality branding
with cities as varied as Salzburg, Memphis, Glasgow, Bayreuth, and Hilversum,
such that the place becomes inseparable from the creative work. The process
is neither automatic nor necessarily beneficial. The more distinctive, indeed
eccentric, and more visual the creativity of the personality, the more easily it
transfers to the place. Similarly much personality branding is unintentional and
even damaging. The Florence of Savaranola or even the Braunau of Hitler are
associations which, however memorable, many would regard as on balance
undesirable.
Signature or flagship building is hardly new: the Coliseum, Rome,
Parthenon, Athens or Hanging Gardens of Babylon were all deliberately and
spectacularly noticeable structures, intended both to house cultural activities but
also be in themselves clear statements that the city in which they were located,
and probably the governments that created them, were associated with wider
desirable attributes. This process might be called the Pompidou ploy after the
grand projet on the Paris Beaubourg (Hamnett & Shoval, 2003). Flagships
depend for their success on a dual notoriety. The structure must be stridently
noticeable, and the creator must score highly in the celebrity architect status
scoring system. Functionality and aesthetic quality are largely irrelevant. The
currently fashionable tallest building competition for example expresses in a
visually obtrusive way that Malaysia, Taiwan or Dubai demand global attention.
Public museums, galleries and space for podium arts are a favoured function for
signature buildings but private non-publicly accessible functions for such
buildings are not uncommon (Londons Lloyds Building, Groningens Gasunie).
A city with a genuine Niemeyer, Rodgers, Libeskind, Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas et
al. in its possession has acquired recognition and status by that fact alone.
The third technique is the hallmark event, which is a regular or
spasmodic cultural, economic, sporting, political or other occurrence that
renders the place notable and confers upon it some desirable associations of
patronage in some field. The established world renowned cultural festivals such
as Edinburgh, Bayreuth, Stratford or even Glastonbury, Cannes and
Oberammergau support substantial profitable tourism industries but more
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important contribute more generally to the ambiance and character of the place
which may well have numerous beneficial spin-off effects in other economic
sectors. This alone explains the fevered competition between cities for such
designations as European City of Culture or for hosting major sporting events.
Again there is no guarantee of success. Such accolades focus global attention
upon a place product which then must satisfy the expectations aroused.
Thus place branding is being done on a global scale by localities in
pursuit of perceived local benefits. However all three of the activities outlined
above are performed for many reasons in addition to the branding of places.
Indeed in many cases the improvement in the place image has emerged as
something of an unexpected, although welcome, extra benefit of policies
designed for quite different objectives. Even if considered entirely in terms of
branding, three caveats must be mentioned to dampen any undue enthusiasm
that such branding is a panacea for urban strategic planning.

First, linking a

particular city with a particular creative artist, signature design or cultural activity
is a potentially dangerous strategy if only because culture, art and design are
fashion driven activities in which todays renowned celebrity is tomorrows
forgotten nonentity. The danger of using architecture to express ideology is that
ideologies change. The Nazi era Kunsthaser or Soviet era Palaces of Culture
now embarrassingly litter German and East European cities. Secondly, success
in branding is more than the effective creation and propagation of a brand.
Branding is only a means to an end and the attainment of that end may depend
upon the operation of a much wider range of variables. In Bilbao, for example,
the Guggenheim effect, has resulted in a global notoriety and an increase in
short stay cultural tourists intent only on visiting a single museum. It has not
however stimulated local cultural activities nor contributed much to the solution
of the structural economic problem that was its original purpose. Thirdly, place
branding is a cheap and seemingly simple activity. It can be performed almost
anywhere and takes little investment. A game that anywhere can play is one
that everywhere will attempt. The competition is therefore likely to be intense
and only the particularly skilful or fortunate will succeed.

Should we?
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The terminology, concepts and, to a more capricious extent, philosophy of

marketing were imported into spatial planning as an instrument for the
description, analysis and planning of places during the course of the 1980s.
The reasons for this can be traced to developments in marketing, geography
and public sector spatial planning.
Marketing had been developed, largely in the inter-war period as a
technique for selling physical products by commercial enterprises for the clear
purpose of profit in competitive markets. However the introduction of the three
concepts of social marketing (i.e. where the objective is not the selling of
physical products but influencing customer behaviour for social purposes), nonprofit marketing (i.e. marketing by non-commercial enterprises for reasons other
than direct monetary gain), and image marketing (i.e. where the product is an
intangible perception or feeling unrelated to a physical product) made possible a
transference of the marketing approach to the public sector management of
places.
Similarly geography almost since its inception as a self-conscious
academic discipline has had an interest, bordering at times on an obsession,
with the idea of sense of place (Ashworth & Graham, 2005). However, it was
only in the course of the 1970s that the attention of geographers began to focus
on the geography of perception, the semiotics of messages, deliberately
inscribed in places intended to be read by their users and the geography of
location decision-making.
However these developments in marketing and geography would have
had little effect upon the management of places if there had not been in the
same period a vaguely felt but widespread disillusionment with the effectiveness
of the traditional regulatory instruments of urban and regional planning, by the
political and professional managers of places. This occurred for a variety of
largely unconnected and diverse reasons including, changes in fashionable
political approaches, especially the rediscovery of markets in the 1980s, and the
failure of governments to make notable inroads into the deep-seated problems
of regional economic disparity, multiple economic and social deprivation and
exclusion, and urban poverty, dereliction and even governance.

Place

marketing offered a new, if largely untried, possibility that was thus eagerly
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embraced for its promise and its novelty.

The transition from the random

addition of some often crude and disembodied promotion to the existing tool
box of planning instruments to a more far reaching application of marketing as a
means of viewing and treating places as a whole was neither smooth nor
complete. However by the beginning of the 1990s there was, if not a complete
theory, at least a serious attempt to create a distinctive place marketing
approach (Ashworth & Voogd, 1990; Berg et al., 1990; Paddison, 1993;
Borchert, 1994; Ashworth, 1994; Ashworth & Voogd, 1994; Grabow , 1998).
Place managers have therefore imported branding as a technique for
reasons that have more to do with changes in spatial planning than a
disinterested belief in its efficacy. The popularity of these ideas has much to do
with fashion.

The interchange of best practice cases between place

management agencies leads to imitation in the details of programmes so that

what sets out with the intention of creating distinctive unique place identities,
ends up replicating not just the programmes but also the places to which they
are applied. Similarly the interchange of ideas among place managers creates
an atmosphere of urgency bordering upon panic.

If our neighbours and

competitors are engaging in place branding exercises, then so must we in

defence of our market share, even if we know the result for us all is a zero-sum
gain.
A cynical view would be that the political necessity for appearing to
attempt to solve intractable economic or social problems has resulted in the
welcome adoption of branding as a last resort, solution. It has the additional
advantage of being much less costly than many alternative policies that involve
substantial investment. It is also difficult to monitor the results through the
attainment of goals, which are in essence long-term, non-quantifiable and were
only vaguely envisaged in the first instance. Branding programmes and their
implementers are therefore in practice safely non-accountable.

Shall we stop doing it?

An answer to this question depends upon an evaluation of three propositions.

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Branding is good for places

Many places seem to have reaped considerable and measurable benefits from
the pursuit of branding policies.

However in almost all cases branding alone

cannot be credited with the success.

Most often branding has worked

successfully in situations where the place product was already improving but its
external image was lagging, being still composed of already outdated elements.
The task of branding was only to encourage the reappraisal of an obsolete or
non-existent image. Secondly branding, or indeed marketing as a whole, has
rarely operated in isolation in these cases. Most usually marketing policies
were only one, and often not the most important, element in a combination of
local instruments, including financial, educational and spatial planning
programmes. A cynical view might be that branding works only when all the
other conditions for success are already in place. In other words branding has
beneficial impacts in circumstances when progress would have been achieved,
sooner or later, in any event. Conversely branding, however many resources
are devoted to it and however skilfully it is conducted, will have little effect on its
own upon intractable economic or social problems. Thus branding may be good
for some places, but is not the universal panacea that we too often seem to
think it is.

Branding has no effect on places

Well-known best practice cases seem to indicate that branding can have an
effect on places, sometimes quite dramatically.

Re-branding has clearly

occurred in some notable examples. But these remain exceptional and it is

generally the success stories (such as Manchester, Barcelona, Glasgow,
Dublin, Pittsburgh) that dominate the literature

The stories of failure are only

rarely related but are likely to be at least as numerous and potentially more
instructive. The often fatal difficulty is that the place management authorities do
not have a monopolistic control over the place brand. There are just too many
other projected images from other non-official sources that may distract from or
contradict the official message. Places are likely to have many associations for
their internal and external users and the official place management authorities
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have little or no influence upon most of these. The official branding message is
often just not noticed by those for whom it was intended, if noticed not
interpreted in the way intended, and if correctly interpreted not believed. Again a
cynical conclusion might be that branding only works when the official message
corresponds to that already held by the intended recipients and will just be
ineffective and ignored when they hold a radically different brand image.

Branding is bad for places

The very real danger is that branding, and place marketing in general, may be
used as a substitute for product improvement or problem solving. Long term
chronic and structural problems, whether economic, social or political, will not
be solved by a re-branding exercise. There is even a lurking if generally not
provable, suspicion that marketing policies in general are often a last resort
policy reverted to when other policies have demonstrably failed and when local
politicians and officials have exhausted their creativity. A feeling that something
must be done, and be seen by others as being done, in a situation where all the
available alternatives have failed, may lead to branding programmes as at least
a cheap stopgap measure. Such policies may even exacerbate the deleterious
consequences of such problems as they open up a gap in credibility between
the image as promoted and the reality as experienced. This may undermine
public confidence in local government and management rendering it more
difficult to obtain the support, internally and externally, for other policies for
solving the problem.

At best branding can only be supportive of other

endeavours and at worst may be a distraction from those endeavours.

Thus we should engage in place branding in some circumstances but not in

others. The trick is knowing the difference.

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