Place branding: Evolution, meaning and implications

Abstract

Place image has traditionally been important in areas including tourism, country positioning in international relations, the protection of local producers from imports through ‘buy domestic’ campaigns and the export promotion of agricultural and manufactured products. Research and practice in each area, however, has developed independently of the others, even though they all revolve around the same notions of place-based marketing, whether practised systematically or not. More recently, the opening of new emerging markets, health scares including mad cow disease and avian flu, the events of September 11, 2001, labour shortages in technology, and the overall globalisation of markets, have resulted in greatly intensified global competition for increasing exports and for attracting everything from investment and tourism to foreign students and skilled labour. In turn, this has served to focus attention on place equity and systematic marketing, which is likely to have a major impact worldwide: developed nations now weigh-in the global arena with coordinated country branding campaigns, leading to intensified competition among them and a potentially significant disadvantage for weaker countries. This paper reviews place branding, discusses implications for government, business and research, and calls for integration of the various streams of thought in order to enhance our understanding of the field.