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city branding
HOW CITIES COMPETE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

SICCO VAN GELDER | MALCOLM ALLAN

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FOREWORD This booklet has been written to provide city stakeholders with an understanding of the latest insights in and learning about city branding. Its purpose is to inform, clarify and challenge people’s views about an area that is rife with confusion and mystification. City brandingis a discipline that is developing fast and whose theoretical underpinnings have only been developed and put into full practice in recent years. In other words, there is a lot to learn from the experiences out there and this book provides the reader with information about pitfalls, best practice and lessons learned. Obviously, a small book like this one will not do justice to city branding as anentire discipline. Please consider this book as a primer a form of initiation into a fascinating and important topic that will undoubtedly feature on an increasing number of cities’ agendas in the near future.
NOVEMBER 2006

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CITY BRANDING

Increasingly, cities compete with other places for attention, investment, visitors, shoppers, talent, events, and the like. Accelerated andintensified globalisation has lead to a situation where the main competition is no longer the city down the road or the town across the bay, but where competitors are places half a world away. And this global competition is no longer limited to the big cities that compete for the HQs of multinational corporations and UN bodies, or for large sports events. Thanks to technological advances and marketderegulations, even smaller places can suddenly be confronted with competitors located on another continent. Entire towns in Italy have lost their raison d’être as their furniture making industry clusters are wiped out by towns in China who produce the same products at much lower costs. Alicante in Spain struggles to compete with sunny beach destinations ranging from Antalya in Turkey to Pattaya inThailand. Bordeaux and its region face stiff competition from South Australia and the South African Cape Region for its traditional position of prime and premium winemaker. Traditional car making centres such as the West Midlands, Detroit, Stuttgart and Nagoya feel the heat from Bratislava and Shanghai.

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How does a city cope with this new multitude of contenders? Competing on tax breaks, taxcredits, free land, soft loans and other financial incentives to attract investors and to shore up local industries is clearly a race to the bottom and one that is impossible to sustain. Advertising on CNN and sending trade missions into the world to flog the existing offer of the city is both ineffective and a waste of precious financial resources. Shoring up the city’s current offer with some newcommercial, industrial or cultural development is not likely to turn the tide either (and perhaps Bilbao is the exception that proves the rule).

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What is needed is a frank rethink about what the city offers and will offer in future. What can be created that is so valuable about the city that its businesses, institutions and residents want to remain, that will attract investors, visitorsand talent, and that will make commentators and influencers recommend the city? Your city’s brand is the promise of that value. City branding is about deliberately creating, developing and demonstrating that value through appropriate ‘on brand’ actions, which consist of investments, physical and economic plans, attraction programmes, events, communications, and the like. City branding is notsomething that is the sole preserve of local government or any of its departments or agencies. It is a shared responsibility and practice of the city’s main stakeholders. What is more powerful than having the stakeholders jointly define and realise the brand of their city, using their own particular strengths to ensure the world receives a compelling, joinedup and consistent message about the city?...