Sicco van Gelder
Placebrands

S. van Gelder: ‘How to Improve the Chances of Successfully Developing and Implementing a Place Brand Strategy’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2008.
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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.

Ian Ryder
British Computer Society

I. Ryder: ‘Issues and Challenges of Developing and Managing Brand Strategy in a Not-for-profit (Chartered) Body’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, August 2008.

No brain-food—just a sector anecdote!
The same rules apply: we all know that “rules is rules”, right? Could we try a maybe?!
   I recently (nine months ago) took a new position working in a professional body, one of the largest of its kind in the world, which also happens to be a registered charity and incorporated under a Royal Charter. After a lifetime in the corporate world I can tell you: the rules are different! Not the fundamentals of brand strategy, clearly, but the processes and procedures of development and execution.
   Perhaps a few words of explanation about ‘Royal Charter’ are needed, because this means little or nothing to anyone outside UK shores.
   The only bodies that can award a ‘Chartered’-status professional qualification are those that have been granted a Royal Charter by HM the Queen. Whilst it is a major honour, this has huge implications if you find you want to do anything significant on branding. There are two main issues and several supplementaries.
   First, chartered organizations have a governance structure that requires a Trustee Board (TB) to have oversight and ultimate responsibility for performance. This usually comprises volunteers who are part-time, unpaid, and can come from absolutely any walk of life and any professional background. The TB then delegates authority to a CEO and Executive Board who are responsible for the operational execution of the organization’s strategy (and sometimes they don’t!).
   Secondly, any change to the organization’s range of activities or, critically, name, must be approved by what is called the Privy Council—essentially a sign off by HM the Queen.
   The “supplementaries” include a range of things related to this governance, involving many stake-holders, members included, who feel they can have a say in this and, therefore, not surprisingly there exists the potential for major disagreements between a part-time TB and the full-time team of professionals and EB who, probably rightly, usually believe that they are best qualified to make such key decisions. One of the biggest pains of all, though, are timing and process.
   Often a TB will only sit six times a year and, even then, really substantive issues will have trouble finding agenda time. But it can take a staggering 12–18 months just to get approval for a name change and corporate rebrand, which includes the need for a member-approved motion at an Annual General Meeting followed by a Privy Council seal of approval—not guaranteed, and they only meet twice a year!
   This is not to say that such organizations are not fun to work in and with, or that they don’t share many of the same brand challenges as their arguably more fortunate commercial brethren, with only “normal” governance and market forces to manage. All the issues of needing to generate commercial revenues in a competitive market-place in a service business still apply. This means all our much-loved challenges of positioning, product development and management, customer service management and indeed brand and marketing strategy development and execution, in the broadest sense, still apply.
   The key challenge is that, if you thought your only issue was to convince your CEO and fellow board members who are likely to have both familiarity with marketing principles and have the final decision, then consider the need to first do that, then take it through the process described above. This is where there is a very good chance the majority of your TB–member agreement has to come from people who may never have even heard of the word brand and if they have, it is guaranteed it was in the wrong context and with such limited knowledge that they won’t understand what you are proposing or why.
   Rather than this be just a simple “ramble” about how lucky profit-making commercial organizations are—even those B2B companies that still have far too many “critical but knowledge-challenged” individuals—I thought maybe I’d drop in a brief summary of tips for anyone working in, or agencies considering pitching for, this kind of organization.
   1. Get a really detailed understanding of the fundamental governance constraints, together with a timetable of key Committee, Council and Board meetings.
   2. Understand the background of Trustees so you can see the scale of your challenge, or the extent of your support.
   3. Have a very clear plan and timeline, always important but critical in this case.
   4. Creating a small sub-group of three or four from the TB to take with you on the journey will make the final TB sign-off so much easier—it may even be passed!
   5. Learn to manage uncertainty and develop your proposals and arguments carefully—and make sure you do this a long time ahead!
   6. Exercise enormous quantities of patience.
   7. Whichever god you believe in—ask for help!
   We’re on our journey though, having developed a new marketing strategy alongside the slower development of our brand strategy using a variant of a process model I’ve used before, this time facilitated by one of the really good, smaller brand consultancies, UffindellWest.¹ We will get there, and I look forward to writing up that journey as a case study sometime during 2010.

Note
   1. The CEO and owner of which is one of our own Medinge members.

Patrick Harris
thoughtengine
patrick@thoughtengine.co.uk

P. Harris: ‘Giving Strategy Some Momentum’, The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, August 2007.
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Ask ten people to define strategy, and almost inevitably, you will be presented with eleven answers—each of them different. This is unfortunate, especially in today’s fast-paced world where the right strategy, properly executed, may just be the difference between failure and success.
   The most succinct description of strategy at a meta-level, is to pose three questions:
     • where are you now?;
     • where do you want to go?;
     • how will you get there?
   However, all too often, organizational responses to these vital questions are dry, anodyne papers that emerge from laboured strategic planning processes and which ultimately gather dust on the desks of the senior team for a year or so. Then, with disdain as the mood and mediocrity as the accepted measure, the cycle is repeated.
   What a strategy should do, by contrast, is create a firm call to action in a collaborative way and in a clear direction. Good strategy can provide the organization with steerage to address fast-paced change including many new and emerging trends, such as:
     • instant, “blog speed” competitor response;
     • empowered consumers armed with choice and information; and,
     • power brands, which can use trust to span industry boundaries.
   Accepting the importance of good strategy, what characteristics does it have? Good strategy must first contain the essential ingredients of appropriate content set in the right context. Content tells us what is important and context tells us why.
   A healthy balance of content and context addresses the commercial realities of markets, customers and competitors, but importantly, it explains the management reasons why this particular focus is endorsed.
   Thereafter, good strategy creation comes alive and focuses on principles, behaviour and deeds. These elements provide responses on how to realize the strategy but are often overlooked by strategists and leaders alike. Crucially, they supply the means to ignite action and build organizational momentum. Achieving strategic momentum is fundamental and boldly displaces the business mantra of seeking buy-in. Obtaining buy-in is effectively a pipe dream because it assumes that the strategy is 100 per cent accurate, is communicated with 100 per cent effectiveness and is implemented with 100 per cent efficiency. Momentum, however, suggests that the essence of the strategy is communicated and that the organization is supplied with the guiding tools of principles, behaviour and deeds to implement it effectively.

Principles are overarching statements that describe how things are done. A proper principle will look a bit like the adage: ‘Everything in moderation, nothing in excess.’
   My favourite example of principles at work was a customer service issue. The CEO and I recognized that immediate action was needed to refocus the customer service effort. We gave finance and technology teams strategies about call costs and service-level agreements. But to the customer service team, we supplied only one principle: ‘Our service is like oxygen and a customer dies after three minutes without it.’
   One phrase enabled an entire division to change its working style. Can your organization’s strategy do this?
   Behaviour is the next characteristic in creating strategic momentum. Innocent’s playful health and Pret a Manger’s passionate about food are great examples expressing behaviours to suit strategies. After all, you can’t dictate a culture, but you can nurture behaviours that underpin the culture you want.
   The final, yet perhaps most critical, characteristic of strategic momentum is deeds. A good strategy outlines deeds that strategists and business leaders must live up to and that will deliver success. Deeds are, in effect, the strategy in action.
   Without a statement of deeds for the organization to observe in the actions of others and without a management team visibly making progress along those lines, there is no way to benchmark how quickly the organization is ingesting the strategy. If people cannot see others getting involved, they will become reluctant to participate. A strategy without participation is of no value to anyone, except possibly the competition!
   So how is this type of strategy created? It is important to have the means in place to regularly test and challenge the strategy as a complement to existing processes. Every organization needs a few impassioned people who are empowered to challenge the current view. Their role is to ensure that the issues that are normally taken as given are subjected to deeper investigation.
   The end result is definitely worth it—a rich strategic direction, a set of appropriate implementation tools, significant organizational momentum and the in-built flexibility to embrace strategic change when required.

Patrick Harris was Director of Creativity for Orange, managing its strategic think-tank. He is Founder of thoughtengine, a consultancy specializing in strategy, futures, creativity and brand. For more details visit www.thoughtengine.co.uk. This article originally appeared in Business Voice, the CBI magazine, July–August 2006.