Marketing place introduction to the special issue
Contrary to what will be a first impression of many outsiders, place promotion is not a
modern phenomenon, but has a rather long history. Already in the age of colonial expansion,
both west European and east coast American newspapers were full of advertisements aiming
at potential migrants. In the last decades of the 19
th
century seaside resorts and historic towns
in the US and the UK ran promotional campaigns to lure tourists. Developers of the late 19
th
and early 20
th
century suburbs in the UK used promotional strategies. And for over a hundred
years now all cities in Europe and other continents that rivalled for the nomination to host the
Olympics have been seeking the prestige associated with staging this mega event (Gold and
Ward 1994, Gold and Gold 2007).
From the 1980s onwards however, place promotion reached new and higher levels of activity
and is now a permanent feature in urban development policies. Its rise is definitely connected
to the economic recession of the early 1980s, which made urban governors more conscious of
being involved in a virtual ‘place war’ with other towns and cities, competing for inhabitants,
students, visitors, and maybe most important: firms that bring employment and income to the
urban dwellers. Cities have to be ‘sold’ to these ‘clients’. Of course the parallel between
product marketing and place marketing is not perfect. What makes them different is the
complexity of the place products, their non-exclusive use, and the non-profit character of the
selling party (Ashworth and Voogd 1990). But there is sufficient consonance between them to
make city marketeers realize that mere promotion is not enough to successfully sell a place
product. Hence the password ‘place promotion’ is exchanged for ‘city marketing’, which
according to Ashworth and Voogd’s pioneering theoretical work refers to a comprehensive
process of internal and external auditing, strategy choice, implementation of measures of a
promotional, spatial and organisational nature, and finally evaluation and feedback, in order to
reformulate goals and targets. In the period that follows, gradually a body of knowledge
concerning city marketing develops, along with a growing mass of professional writers and
consultants, some of whom reach a modern guru status (e.g. Kotler 1993, Anholt 2007, to
name but a few of the most well-known).
In the past decade, the ideas about place marketing (and the jargon that goes with it) change
again. Parallel to developments in modern consumer marketing, modern place marketing
adopts a strategy of ‘branding’. In his recent PhD thesis Kavaratzis describes this as a new
(third) episode in the application of city marketing, and characterises the goal of city branding
as ‘creating and managing emotional and psychological associations with the city’. City
branding strategies can be recognized by their tendency to focus on visual elements such as
new slogans and new logos and a the design of advertising campaigns around these visual
elements (Kavaratzis 2008). Typical examples of the new branding strategy are the campaigns
of Berlin (‘Das Neue Berlin’), Edinburgh (‘Inspiring Capital’), London (‘Totally London’)
and Amsterdam (‘I Amsterdam’).
This special issue of European Spatial Research and Policy aims to inform its readers of
some new angles and examples of modern place marketing and its possible effects. First of
all, Gregory Ashworth delves in the new branding strategy, asking for the main local planning
instruments that can and are being used. He highlights the three main instruments of city
branding, which he identifies as ‘personality association’ (e.g. Barcelona with Gaudi),
‘signature building and design’ (e.g. London with the Tower Bridge or Canary Wharf) and
‘event hallmarking’ (like being ‘Cultural capital’ or ‘Olympic city’). Then we have two
articles serving as illustrative case studies of place marketing experience, both from Western
Europe where it has a longer history, and from Eastern Europe, where it is a much more
recent phenomenon. The East European experience from Hungary (Debrecen) is described in
Gábor Kozma’s contribution to the issue, and again comes to the fore in Mihalis Kavaratzis’ article, which investigates marketing and branding practices of two European cities in East
and West (Budapest and Amsterdam). From the branding practice in these cities Kavaratzis
tries to extract lessons that will support the further theoretical development of city marketing
and city branding.
Finally, the article by Meester and Pellenbarg about the Groningen marketing campaign, is
associated with not the least important aspect of place marketing, i.e. its effectiveness. Of
course this is intrinsically difficult to measure, because it is virtually impossible to prove a
causal relationship between a positive firm migration balance, or growing numbers of visitors
and inhabitants, and the existence of a place branding campaign. Still it is odd to see that there
is generally not much attention in the place marketing literature for the effect (output) side at
all. The attention in articles, reports and books is mostly devoted to what one might call the
input side: the structure of the marketing processes, the actors involved, and the instruments
used. In case of Olympic cities writers of course tend to pay attention to newly built
infrastructures and buildings, and the tourist streams evoked by the event. But references to
remarkable changes in city or regional images as being measured during the length of a
marketing campaign are quite rare. The Groningen campaign, which has been monitored at
regular intervals for almost two decades, stands out as an exception here. An alternative
approach could be the monitoring of city inhabitant’s (or tourist’s, or entrepreneurial)
satisfaction levels. Again, it will be difficult to prove a relationship with marketing efforts. On
the other hand, this user’s satisfaction might be considered as the ultimate goal of marketing.
