Rethinking Place Branding: Comprehensive Brand Development for Cities and Regions

Citation

John Byrom (2015), "Rethinking Place Branding: Comprehensive Brand Development for Cities and Regions", Journal of Place Management and Development, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 163-164. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMD-06-2015-0015

As readers of this journal will be aware, long-standing debates exist regarding the development of place branding theory. Given the field’s somewhat amorphous and interdisciplinary foundations, this is not surprising. Among other things, this volume sets out to rethink the fundamentals of the discipline – in terms of theory, rationale and application. This it does ably, with the various contributions capturing well the current state and future development of place branding – both its diversity and its commonalities.

The volume is bookended by two chapters, the first of which stresses the need for a rethinking of place branding and sets out four key questions relating to the field which are summarised thus:

Q1. Why is place branding important?

Q2. What builds place brands?

Q3. Who builds place brands?

Q4. What is place brand management?

The following 14 chapters consider various dimensions to some or all of these questions – some more practical, others more conceptual – with Chapter 16 drawing the material together and articulating what the book has achieved.

Those seeking practical examples of place branding in application will find much to draw on here. Govers’ vignettes from Queensland and Dubai, for instance, illustrate digital applications relating to the field (Chapter 6), while Evans’ discussion of cultural and creative quarters (Chapter 10) delineates different approaches to urban design and offers useful case study examples. Of particular relevance to practitioners is perhaps Stubbs and Warnaby’s consideration of stakeholder contributions to the development of place branding (Chapter 8). Drawing on the first author’s work on developing branding strategies in Sweden, practical considerations of how to go about working with a variety of users are related. In addition, Therkelsen’s discussion of a Danish tourism campaign’s active engagement of consumers in events (Chapter 11) ties in neatly with Warnaby and Medway’s earlier conceptual chapter (Chapter 3) on the applicability of Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) seminal theory of service-dominant logic to the place product.

Innovative attempts to dissect the dimensions of place branding are also apparent. In this volume, therefore, we have Medway’s discussion of the role of the other senses (in addition to the ocular) in establishing place brand identity (Chapter 13) and Hanna and Rowley’s framework which incorporates the digital role of place brands (Chapter 7).

Given the editors’ home locations, most of the examples are drawn from the UK and Europe (and by extension, developed economies). Nevertheless, the principles have direct application to other regions of the world and stages of development. The setting for most of the discussion is urban locales: unsurprising given that, tourism notwithstanding, most effort in place branding (and indeed place management and place marketing) has preferenced town over country. Without wishing to add further to debates on what place branding theory and practice lacks, a gap in our understanding surely exists in relation to the rural (and in the UK context at least, the coastal) – an opportunity for another “state of the discipline” work such as this, perhaps.

Those interested in the future development of the place branding discipline – be they scholars, students or practitioners – will find much to interest them in the book. While hefty, the price tag can be thoroughly justified.