Competing to Attract: City Branding in Europe
In a global economy, cities compete to attract talent, investors, events and tourists. To meet this challenge, cities are engaging in marketing and branding to improve their image and position themselves on the international scene. As city branding has become a key urban development tool, several questions emerge: What is a city brand? How should it be developed? This guide can constitute a useful resource for cities engaging in the process of city branding.
Description
Successful city branding can stimulate increased
competitiveness, higher returns on investments, coherent city
development and pride in the city. Through a mixture of case
studies, workshops, city presentations and external expert
presentations, a EUROCITIES working group has discussed city brand
strategy, city identity, brand governance and brand management, as
well as practical tools for promoting a city brand.
The working group proposes to consider four important questions in
the development of a city brand:
- How to build a city brand from a city identity?
- What type of brand and strategy should be used?
- How to involve stakeholders?
- How to promote the brand?
Each of these questions are treated in a separate chapter, which
offers city examples as well as the lessons learned in the
different stages of the process. In this way, the document inspires
practical steps and detailed options open to cities wanting to
develop their own brand.
Lessons learned
A key message is that a brand must always built on existing
strengths of the city: cities need to be aware of the risk of
creating too wide a gap between the brand message and reality. It
can be a simple message, focussing on one particular aspect such as
tourism, or a brand may deliver several messages.
Involvement of the private sector and civil society is vital to
constructing and maintaining a successful brand, meaning that
partners need to cooperate, and develop a long-term strategy.
Finally, once the brand is developed, it needs to be promoted and
communicated, for instance through the press, advertising, events
or social media.
Publication Date
December 2010
Document Type
Practice Document
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