The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009

Introduction
Much is made of web 2.0, the collection of web-based services for online
communities, participation and user-generated content, and of co-makership, the
corporate movement to involve partners and consumers in the development or
improvement of products and services. Both web 2.0 and co-makership are
driven by a realisation that other interested parties can and are willing to
contribute to their success.

Governments have also started to understand that they are unable to solve all
the problems of their city, region or country on their own. Public-private
partnerships have become common, but they are still mainly aimed at providing
solutions for financing large (infrastructure) projects. And they usually do not
include other stakeholders who can contribute to solutions to the (future)
problems facing places, such as the aging of populations, integration of ethnic
minorities, traffic congestion, environmental degradation and global
competitiveness.

This article argues that in future places will function differently and that their governance is evolving into one where multiple stakeholders will come together to solve specific issues and that governments, although almost always involved, will be only one of the partners of such new alliances, coalitions and partnerships.

In this article we will explore how places used to function, a state dubbed Place
1.0, how they are moving towards a situation dubbed Place 2.0, and what these
future places may look like.

Place 1.0
Traditionally, places have been discrete political, economic, social and cultural
entities. Despite trade and migration being age-old phenomena, the movements
of people, capital and goods has often been fairly restricted. Most people were
born in a place, went to school there, got married there, worked there all their
lives, supported their local football team, and were buried in the local cemetery.
Businesses were devoted to their (company) towns and would often invest in
various kinds of services for their employees and their dependants: e.g. sports,
culture, health and education. Large and successful businesses were a source of
local or even national pride. Government would decide what was good for the
place, its businesses, institutions and population. Government also assumed that
it was synonymous with the place. Many a prime minister or president still claims
to be ‘running the country’.

Opinions were formed and decisions made by the political elite, innovations were
developed and wealth created by the economic elite, and moral standards and
artistic tastes dictated by the cultural elite. The general population was simply
considered to be a workforce and a market for what the elites decided to produce
and provide. Mass democratisation never fundamentally changed this situation.
Admittedly, over time, citizens changed from being mere subjects to being
considered as clients of the public sector. However, they were still subjected to
the same machine bureaucracy albeit with a little more efficiency, care and
understanding. This machine went from being driven by commands and
inspections to being driven by delivery targets and audits.

Mass democratisation and the newfound client status has turned people into
critical and outspoken citizens and consumers. Increasingly, the political elite is
unable to deliver on the growing and ever-changing needs and demands of these
citizens, the economic elite shifts jobs and allegiances to other places with seeming ease, and the cultural elite is either out of touch with the population or
they have become part of the creative industries (e.g. entertainment, design,
advertising). In this changing environment, the old solutions to solving places’
problems no longer work, because they are aimed at solving clearly defined
functional problems: build more roads, houses and schools, hire more policemen,
teachers, doctors and civil servants, subsidise culture, penalise anti-social
behaviour, etc. The issues that many places face today (and will face in the
future) are neither discrete nor purely functional. They are complex, multi-faceted
and often involve a lot of sentiments. For example, issues such as the integration
of immigrants into society, traffic congestion, healthcare and pension crises,
environmental degradation and competitiveness are all matters that defy the
machine bureaucracy’s capabilities. Dealing with such issues effectively involves
the participation of not just (local) government departments, but also the private
and civic sectors, educational and cultural institutions and the like.

The Emergence of Place 2.0
It is the community (citizens, businesses and institutions) that makes the place
into what it is. Not the bricks and mortar, the highways and railways, the
airports, the cables, the pipes and the sewers. This infrastructure functions as the
platform for the community’s investments, initiatives and activities. The quality of
the platform does determine a lot of the community’s opportunities. In Place 1.0,
the platform was used mainly for production, trade and consumption. The main
responsibilities of government were to ensure the development and maintenance
of the platform and the production of public goods, such as healthcare, education, the arts and public transport. The business sector provided jobs and goods and services for public consumption as well as the tax revenues to keep the place going. The population provided muscle and brainpower as workforce and consumed the goods and services produced by government and business.

A number of developments are bringing this tidy arrangement to an end. Firstly,
most places have an increasingly vocal population that now demands a say in
what used to be government matters, such as urban development, infrastructure
programmes, environmental protection and international treaties. Not
surprisingly, citizens have so far mostly been reactive. They protest, appeal, and
may participate in official consultation and in referendums. This has meant that
citizens have usually opposed decisions and propositions put to them rather than
taken responsibility for coming up with improvements or offering alternatives.
Some places (e.g. France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States)
allow citizen initiatives to put topics on political agendas and sometimes even
repeal, propose or amend laws. However, such initiatives are limited forms of
citizen participation and remain strictly within the political realm. Public
consultation, referendums and citizen initiatives have actually often helped to fuel
citizens’ disillusionment with government and politics. Rather than narrowing the
gap between government and the people, they seem to have widened the gap, as
people felt that they weren’t being taken seriously by politicians. Cursory forms of
consultation designed to keep people away, flawed referendums, and non-binding citizens’ initiatives have left a bitter aftertaste.

The second development that is bringing Place 1.0 to an end is increasing
globalisation, which has accelerated the flow of capital and goods around the
world and has made many businesses and increasing numbers of people
footloose. Loyalties and allegiances to some places crumble while other place gain such affinity. Decisions, investments and initiatives taken for the community of today may not be the right ones for the community of tomorrow. And tomorrow’s community is certain to be a temporary one also. This not only means that places need to be dynamic to meet every changing needs and demands, but also that today’s elites cannot decide what’s right for tomorrow’s community. This puts the onus on the community itself to come up with solutions rather than just being the consumers of someone else’s decisions.

The third development is partially a reaction to the first two, namely the growing
need among communities (despite their transience) to define themselves in terms
of culture, identity, aspirations and competitiveness. This is an ongoing debate
that often sits uncomfortably with places’ conventional wisdom and established
political, economic and social structures and processes.

Work in this area is leading the charge to develop new operational modes for
places. These new modes of operation are characterised by active participation
and interaction between public, private and civic stakeholders. It is exactly
because the issues at hand involve multiple and varied stakeholders and cannot
be dealt with through traditional decision making that new forms of organisation
and interaction are sought. These new forms of organisation often take the form
of alliances, coalitions or partnerships between stakeholders that are established
for the purpose of tackling issues that Place 1.0 finds too hard to deal with. The
problems are amorphous, tend to shift over time and are unworkable for a single
stakeholder, certainly for one that tends to frame its answers to problems in
terms of policies, legislation and taxation. Within the frameworks of these
alliances and partnerships, stakeholders take joint responsibility for defining and
implementing strategies that help create better functioning, more competitive and
self-confident places.

A New Modus Operandi for Places
Instead of relying on traditional elites to decide and provide, Place 2.0 depends
on alliances, coalitions and partnerships of public, private and civic stakeholder
groups to deal with specific issues. These alliances, coalitions and partnerships
will differ from issue to issue (e.g. traffic, health, environment, integration, urban
blight) and will change over time as partners leave and others join the
arrangement. Alliances, coalitions and partnerships for places are not your usual
public-private partnership or a committee of wise men and women. This is a
formal or informal body in which the key stakeholders jointly develop, create and
lead on the implementation of the strategy for a particular issue. Creating such
an alliance or partnership is the first step in changing the way the place operates,
because it simultaneously crosses divides such as those between town and gown,
government and business, arts and sports, and commerce and culture, the public
and community sectors. The alliance, coalition or partnership should be one of
equals between those stakeholders that can help solve the issues at hand through
their actions, investments, decisions and communications.

Alliances and partnerships are not like central government departments, or local
government or private companies or voluntary, community and charitable
organisations. They are a hybrid form of organisation. Their characteristics are
determined by those who set them up, the purpose for which they were created
and by those who lead the work of the partnership. The form of organisation and
operation is rarely a given. It has to be negotiated and agreed by those who are
going to be involved. What is required is an alliance or partnership where the
participants regard each other as equals, regardless of their power or resources,
where their individual contributions are valued.

Once an alliance or partnership is created, the challenge is to make it work
effectively. The representatives of the organisations that constitute the alliance or partnership have their own agendas and motivations for participating, as well as
their own ways of working, of making decisions and of getting things done. They
need to devise a whole new way of working together to reconcile their goals and
practices and to make the alliance or partnership an effective vehicle for the
issues at hand, taking the lead on finding or creating the resources required.
Shared leadership requires a far greater degree of common understanding and
joint thinking than traditional forms of leadership in the public and private
sectors.

This provides opportunities for (groups of) citizens, businesses and institutions to
contribute to the development of their place as active participants in the process
rather than only as passive onlookers or hecklers. The initiative to bring together
an alliance, coalition or partnership therefore rests with everyone in the
community.

The Future of Places
The development of Place 2.0 means that the future of many places will be quite
different from their current situation. Rather than being administered by a
government places will increasingly be governed by various and varying alliances,
partnership and coalitions made up of players from the public, private and civic
sectors. This does raise a number of poignant questions, such as:

• Will the government lose control over its entire remit?
• Who will have final responsibility for their activities?
• How will these arrangements be funded?
• How to retain democratic oversight over their activities?

The answers to these questions are not easily given, but the following provides
some possible answers.

Local, regional and national governments will be active participants in these new
arrangements and will not cede responsibility entirely, but will act more and more
as one of many players rather than being the dominant one. At the same time,
traditional government activities, such as providing public services, policy making
and inter-governmental relations, will not change or cease to exist.

The partners in the alliances, partnerships and coalitions will share responsibility
for their activities and will need to figure out which party takes which
responsibilities. This means that they are accountable to each other as well as to
the wide society in which they operate. Governments can still be held to account
by voters and elected representatives, and businesses and institutions can be
taken to court if they fail in their duties. These purpose built partnership
organisations will need to allow sufficient public scrutiny of their deliberations and activities and the onus is on them to avoid secrecy and silence. But as they are established by a cross section of society’s stakeholders this should not be a major issue to them.

The funding for these partnership organisations will come from their individual
members’ resources and should be accounted for in the same way that they are
now: government budgets, company accounts, private donations, etc. This may
mean that it becomes more difficult to determine exactly hoe much a certain
project costs, but that it is still possible to trace spending for each individual
organisation involved. And each organisation will be responsible to their own
stakeholders (e.g. citizens, shareholders, employees) whether the money and
other resources were spent wisely.

The issue of democratic oversight may be trickier, because responsibilities are
moved from a single government to less well-defined entities. However, as
governments are likely to be key partners in any of these new arrangements,
parliaments and councils will still be able to call their governments to account for
their roles in these alliances, partnerships and coalitions. That is not that much
different from government responsibilities for the civil service and for outsourced
activities. Voters that are unhappy with the results of the government’s
involvement can still send them packing at election time.

Conclusion
Places are set to change the way they operate in order to compete, solve their
problems and innovate more effectively. The involvement of groups of citizens,
businesses and institutions in doing so should be applauded because it turns them from passive consumers of policies, decisions and public services into producers who can better deal with their place’s issues and shape its future. This will also help to develop more closely knit communities in a time when these are more and more fleeting. Better to belong to a shifting community for a while than to belong to a stable one that is disappearing or, even worse, never to belong at all.

The Author
Sicco van Gelder is founder of Placebrands a company dedicated to helping cities,
regions and countries develop and implement their brand strategies. He has been
instrumental in developing the theory and practice of place branding. Sicco has
advised places such as Amsterdam, Botswana, East Africa, Malaysia,
Southampton and The Hague.

Sicco has lived, worked and travelled across five continents. His exposure to the
great diversity of these continents has helped him to develop his understanding
of and sensitivity to differing cultural, motivational, economic, social and
competitive issues.

Sicco has (co)authored several books, among them:

• Global Brand Strategy – Unlocking Branding Potential Across Countries
Cultures and Markets (Kogan Page, 2003)
• Beyond Branding – How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity are
Chaning the World of Brands (Kogan Page, 2003)
• New Age Branding (ICFAI Press, 2003)
• City Branding – How Cities Compete in the 21st Century (Placebrands, 2006)
• Global Branding Perspectives and Challenges (ICFAI Press, 2007)

Sicco van Gelder
Placebrands
sicco@placebrands.net

Microsoft Word version

1. Introduction
Place branding (for countries, regions and cities) is a relatively new discipline and inevitably people have many questions about it. One important question is how to successfully brand a place. This question actually consists of a number of discrete questions, namely whether:

• Branding is more suitable for some places than for others?
• There are pre-existing factors that increase the likelihood of successful place branding?
• There are factors that improve the success-rate of the brand development process?
• It is possible to predict the success of a place brand strategy?

This paper tries to answer each of these questions by describing the criteria and factors that contribute to successful place branding. By assessing the place, the players and the plans they make, it is possible to predict the likely success of a place branding initiative.

2. Should all places brand themselves?
There is a debate whether all places should be actively branding themselves or that the method is more appropriate to some places than to others. There is a perception that places facing some sort of crisis are more likely candidates than places with stable economic, social and cultural settings.

Although a place that faces a crisis may become acutely aware of the weaknesses of its brand and decide that it is high time to do something about it, there is little evidence to suggest that crises in themselves are a reason to brand a place. This is due to two factors, namely:

• brands are not built (and seldom even destroyed) in a day. Place branding is certainly a long-term endeavour and requires years of consistent and persistent actions for the brand to take shape;
• branding will not help solve the crisis simply because only decisive and targeted actions will do so. The brand will however, provide the context for solving the crises and the brand’s strengths should be applied to the solution. A strong brand will also help to mitigate the effects of a crisis as the crisis will not be (one of) its only claim(s) to fame.

If it’s not places that face immediate calamity, catastrophe or disaster, then which places can most usefully apply branding? Certainly, some kinds of places are more likely candidates for place branding. These include:

• places that face intense and increasing competition. These places are obvious candidates because they need to sharpen their competitive edge to retain or improve their positions. This is currently happening in southern Africa, where the rise of South Africa is putting pressure on the neighbours. In Europe, competition between major cities has increased over the past decade and a place such as Amsterdam finds itself competing with Madrid and Barcelona for visitors, investors, talent and events. Similarly in Asia, Hong Kong is facing more intense competition from the likes of Shanghai and Singapore;
• places that face complex development tasks, such as areas of urban expansion, regeneration and transformation. These places need to have a very strong sense of what they wish to become, what they will offer and how they will function, which is what branding can offer them. Examples are mixed-use waterfront developments that dot the cityscapes around the world: Hamburg, Toronto, Lyon, Melbourne and the like;
• places that face a slow and steady decline. Such places often lose businesses, inhabitants, institutions and events at a pace that doesn’t start the alarm bells ringing until the scale of the problem becomes acutely apparent. These places have the opportunity to stop and even reverse their slide if they act in a concerted effort to shore up their brand. Examples are Southampton in southern England and Cleveland, Ohio in the USA;
• places that have lived through a crisis and need to reinvent themselves. These places have had a major crisis that has completely altered the economic, social and (sometimes) cultural structures. There is no opportunity to reverse the situation and the only thing left is to completely rethink the brand. One of the most obvious examples is Bilbao in Spain that has reinvented itself as a tourist destination after the collapse of its manufacturing base. Other examples of places needing to reinvent themselves are Belfast and Detroit.

3. The likelihood of successful place branding
Not only is there discussion about which places should develop their brand strategies, there is also debate about what preconditions improve the likelihood of success. We find that having the following characteristics contribute to a place’s ability to brand itself:

• unity: the key stakeholders of the place need to agree to come together to shape its future by developing and implementing a brand strategy. This is not a given in most places. Stakeholders have seldom sat together to discuss their shared future and to determine how their views on the subject coincide and differ. And in even fewer places have stakeholders actually decided to act to jointly shape that future. We’ve worked in places where bringing together the stakeholders and getting them to work together was the hardest task of all;
• diversity: places that are more economically, socially, culturally and naturally diverse stand a better chance of developing a strong and effective brand. This is due to the fact that place branding is not an exercise in reduction, but rather one of adding or enhancing layers of richness. Diversity gives such places like Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town their attractive edge;
• initiative: places whose stakeholders already (jointly) undertake (marketing) initiatives. These provide necessary experiences beneficial to the place brand development efforts. This is due to the fact that they have already accepted the need for changes and are taking actions to bring them about;
• experimentation: there also needs to be a willingness to take risks and a certain tolerance towards failure of experiments. Often, accepted ways of working are entrenched and people stick by what they know. Risk aversion is often prominent in some of the large (and bureaucratic) organizations that are key stakeholders of many places.

4. What is required to successfully develop a place brand?
Not only are there existing factors that improve the likelihood of success for place branding. More importantly, there are factors that influence the success of the brand development exercise itself. These are:

• partnership and leadership: a place brand can only successfully be developed and implemented by the key stakeholders of the place. It is not a task to be left to the government alone. The organizations that can shape the future of the place through their actions, investments and communications should come together in partnership and should demonstrate shared leadership in the development and implementation of the place brand strategy. In lots of places, government departments have been tasked to brand and market their city, region or country and the results are mixed at best;
• vision and strategy: the first thing the brand partners need to do is to share and compare their views on the future of the place and make sure that they develop a shared vision of a greater magnitude than the sum of their individual visions. Existing visions often are highly sector-related (in one case we found 23 visions for the same city) and do not rise above the commonplace of a great place to live, with the best possible healthcare and education and jobs for everyone. Once they have agreed a shared vision, the partners need to map out a strategy for the brand of their place that they can jointly deliver;
• appraisal and creativity: the brand partners need to be realistic and understand what has shaped the brand of their place so far, and what has worked in the past and what has not. That should, however, not preclude them from finding new ways of doing things, from developing original ideas and from creating innovations for their place;
• “on brand” implementation: finally, the partners need to involve other stakeholders in realising the brand through actions, investments, attraction programmes and events that demonstrate the brand in action.

There is an immense task here of managing the stakeholders and their activities and communications to ensure that agreed initiatives are carried out, consistently and “on brand”. The brand partners must, therefore, decide how best top organise this task to ensure effective implementation of their plans.

5. When is a place brand a success?
Finally, there is the question of when a place brand strategy can be considered to be successful. In other words, what should the place brand embody of to become successful?

• value and purpose: the brand is a promise of value and one that needs to be kept. The more valuable the place brand is to its key audiences, the more likely they will be swayed by it. The brand also provides a sense of purpose to the place’s stakeholders, as it embodies the things they want to achieve. The stronger this sense of purpose, the more likely that stakeholders will pull together and deliver. Too often the brand of a place does not provide a common purpose, but only a trite slogan: City of Lights (Anchorage), the Friendly City (Orange Country), Get in on It (Baltimore), Every Day Is an Opening Day (Atlanta) and It’s Cooler Here (Edmonton);
• truth: the brand needs to reflect the reality of the place. Place brands are largely built on people’s experiences of the place, on recommendations by trusted endorsers, and on what goes on in the place. Any dissonance between the brand’s promise and these realities harms the place brand’s equity. The experience of the rough immigration treatment meted out to visitors harm the brand of the USA. The scenes of the scores of itinerant labourers sleeping on the streets of Mumbai can come as a shock to a first-time visitor to ‘The Fastest Growing Free Market Democracy’;
• inclusive and for the common good: the brand must appeal to the local community and must provide it with tangible and intangible benefits. Only if the place’s brand is embraced by its population, businesses and institutions will it also be credible to outsiders. In Bangalore local pride groups conflict with what are seen as the “outsiders” of the city’s booming IT industry. In a bid to appease these activists, the city government decided to change the official name of the city to Bengaluru, which is the local pronunciation and the city’s IT companies have started to fly the local flag. Neither move will do much unless the Kannada population of the city feel that they have a stake in the city’s future;
• creativity and innovation: the brand must help to encourage and release the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the stakeholders in their quest for realizing the place brand strategy. The brand should promote new ways of working, investing and communicating and advance new and original ideas, products and services. Newcastle-Gateshead kicked off a flurry of creative activity with the Angel of the North, a huge steel statue along the motorway, and followed this up with the distinct Millennium Bridge, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Sage Concert Hall. All a far cry from its drab and dreary post-industrial past;
• complexity and simplicity: the brand of a place needs to reflect its richness and not try to reduce it to a single utterance or representation. However, at the same time, the core of the brand must be straightforward enough for people to grasp its value easily. Italy stands for style, France for romance and Japan for perfection, but we also know that these places have a lot more to offer that makes them distinctively attractive;
• connectivity: the brand must help to connect up people, businesses and institutions inside as well as outside the place. A brand that allows and encourages people to rally around it stands a far better chance of being successful. In some cases, making use its diasporas’ relationships with the home country help to fan the brand’s flames. Cases in point are Ireland, India and China;
• validity: a brand must remain relevant to its stakeholders and audiences over a long period and it can only do so by delivering consistent value to them. This does not mean that the brand should remain unchanged. The world changes and so do people’s wishes and expectations, the competition (and what they have to offer), and economic, social and cultural developments. It is important to regularly check and preserve the soundness of the brand over time and to take appropriate actions for it to retain its significance.

6. Risks and rewards
Place branding is an intricate activity and chances of doing it successfully rest on a proper understanding of the factors that influence the outcomes. Without understanding the risks involved and how to reduce these to a manageable level, success is unlikely and subsequent failure will simply prove what the (inevitable) critics have said all along: ‘It’s a waste of money that could have been better spent on health, education, housing, infrastructure, etc.’ But if there are possible risks, there are also potential rewards to successful place branding, such as:

• improved and sustainable competitiveness, e.g. for attention, investments, jobs, inhabitants, institutions, visitors and events;
• higher returns on investment, e.g. in real estate, infrastructure, promotions and events;
• coherent development of the place as physical, social, economic and cultural planning join up to realize the brand’s promise;
• pride in the place, as the population, businesses and institutions experience its (renewed) sense of purpose and direction;
• unsolicited praise, approval and endorsement from media, celebrities and (international) institutions;
• increased word-of-mouth among (foreign) target audiences as personal experiences and a wish to be associated with the place create a buzz.