This edited volume details public branding and marketing from a global, comparative perspective. Place branding and marketing practices are now prominent in cities, states, nations, regions, and organizations all over the world. While disciplines such as hospitality management, tourism marketing, and business marketing have made inroads into understanding the intricacies of place branding, research in public administration and policy is still emerging. This volume fills that research gap. Including accounts from both the academic and practitioner communities, this book bridges the academic-practitioner divide and provides a holistic account of branding and marketing in public organizations as well as immediate application and lessons learned. The book takes an explicit public administration approach, focusing on a wide range of topics such as branding leadership, co-creation, stakeholder engagement, education, non-profit marketing and branding, and city administration. The book is divided into four sections. Section I highlights the process of developing and communicating public branding and marketing efforts. Section II focuses specifically on how social media and other digital technologies are used to communicate and evaluate place branding strategies. Section III centers on branding at the local government level. Section IV highlights how various stakeholder groups come together (or not) when participating in strategic branding efforts. Presenting various methodologies, approaches, and implications of place branding and marketing across differing social, cultural, political, and economic conditions, this book will be of use to scholars and students in public. administration, tourism studies, and business administration as well as professionals and practitioners in the public branding and marketing field.

This book examines and clarifies key aspects of regional branding with the special focus of inter-regional brands. Today regions are in strong competition for companies, tourists and most of all talent. In order to differentiate one region from another, regional developers, politicians and planners increasingly focus on establishing the region as a brand. This is by no means easy, since places are complex systems of geographical abstractions in which each place is understood in relation and contrast to other geographical entities. In doing so, regions not only differentiate, but also cooperate (within one country or between countries), building so-called Inter-Regional Brands with an even higher degree of complexity. Accordingly this volume, provides a theoretically well informed but practically oriented overview of this phenomenon – including numerous cases and best practices. As such, it will strongly appeal to both academics and practitioners in the field.

Through an interdisciplinary range of case studies from across the Northern rim of Europe, this volume shows how place reinvention as a concept affects not only global cities but also marginal regions. Linking place reinvention to the economic, the symbolic and the political production of space, the volume puts forward insights into how 'marginal areas' understand their role in the global competition between places and regions through their branding strategies, playing with representations of the unique and the ordinary, urban and rural, reindustrialization and cultural economy. It also shows how and why some places seem to retain and strengthen their uniqueness, whilst others are losing their local distinctiveness in the struggle to survive.

The practice of city branding is being adopted by increasing numbers of city authorities around the world and it is having a direct impact on public and private sector practice. The author captures this emerging phenomenon in a way that blends a solid theoretical and conceptual underpinning together with relevant real life cases.

Today's cities are competing with each other on many levels—for our business, for our residency, for our tourism dollars, for our employment, and much more. Especially in light of market models of governance seeping into the public sector, it has become both necessary and prudent for city staff to undertake place promotion to attract many potential stakeholders. In Cities for Sale, Staci M. Zavattaro reveals that cities are increasingly acting like private-sector public relations and marketing firms in scope, value, and practice. To promote their cities, public administrators are embracing tactics such as branding, media relations, in-house publication, and the use of volunteers or outside organizations as PR surrogates. This shift in communication patterns from providing public information to city self-promotion has, Zavattaro argues, both positive and negative implications for democratic governance and citizen participation.

Globalization affects urban communities in many ways. One of its manifestations is increased intercity competition, which compels cities to increase their attractiveness in terms of capital, entrepreneurship, information, expertise and consumption. This competition takes place in an asymmetric field, with cities trying to find the best possible ways of using their natural and created assets, the latter including a naturally evolving reputation or consciously developed competitive identity or brand. The Political Economy of City Branding discusses this phenomenon from the perspective of numerous post-industrial cities in North America, Europe, East Asia and Australasia. Special attention is given to local economic development policy and industrial profiling, and global city rankings are used to provide empirical evidence for cities’ characteristics and positions in the global urban hierarchy. On top of this, social and urban challenges such as creative class struggle are also discussed. The core message of the book is that cities should apply the tools of city branding in their industrial promotion and specialization, but at the same time take into account the special nature of their urban communities and be open and inclusive in their brand policies in order to ensure optimal results. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the areas of local economic development, urban planning, public management, and branding.

Since the 1990s, city branding has become a key factor in urban development policies. Cities all over the world take specific actions to manipulate the imagery and the perceptions of places, both in the eyes of the inhabitants and in those of potential tourists, investors, users and consumers. City Branding: The Ghostly Politics of Representation in Globalising Cities explores different sides of place branding policies. The construction and the manipulation of urban images triggers a complex politics of representation, modifying the visibility and the invisibility of spaces, subjects, problems and discourses. In this sense, urban branding is not an innocent tool; this book aims to investigate and reflect on the ideas of urban life, the political unconscious, the affective geographies and the imaginaries of power constructed and reproduced through urban branding. This book situates city branding within different geographical contexts and ‘ordinary’ cities, demonstrated through a number of international case studies. In order to map and contextualise the variety of urban imaginaries involved, author Alberto Vanolo incorporates conceptual tools from cultural studies and the embrace of an explicitly post-colonial perspective. This critical analysis of current place branding strategy is an essential reference for the study of city marketing.