Guest editorial

Citation

Kalandides, A. and Kavaratzis, M. (2011), "Guest editorial", Journal of Place Management and Development, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpmd.2011.35504aaa.002

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Place Management and Development, Volume 4, Issue 1

Two years ago, in 2009, we dedicated a special issue of the Journal of Place Management and Development (Vol. 2 No. 1) to the re-evaluation of the discussion on city marketing and place branding. We reviewed and collected a number of papers that, we believed, contributed to a better understanding of the terms, but also identified several open questions for further research: how do we conceptualise place branding/marketing and what is this thing so easily labelled place identity? How are these linked to place management and development or, in a different context, how are they related to product marketing, promotion and branding? The seven articles included in this special issue, dedicated to the 2nd International Place Branding Conference in Bogota, Colombia, 20-22 January 2011, take one step further towards clarifying the above.

In the first paper, Andrea Lucarelli and Per Olof Berg provide a long-overdue review of city branding as a research domain. They have undertaken a systematic quantitative review of 217 city-branding related studies published between 1988 and 2009. In the first place, the review demonstrates the interdisciplinary, complex and intriguing nature of the field, which, for many of us, is what makes it attractive and exciting. Second, it is important to highlight on a self-reflective and self-reassuring note that the article demonstrates the establishment of place branding as a research domain; something that is not always accepted. Indeed, as the authors note:

[…]place branding is an academically recognised (special journals, academic networks, etc.) sphere (a region of influence with no fixed boundaries) of scientific research activity (research programmes, conferences, etc.) with particular characteristics (sub-disciplines, history, seminal works, etc.).

Finally, the article makes a very significant contribution to the general understanding of the field by examining in detail the several approaches that different scholars have adopted, the aspects of branding they have focused on and the design of the studies reviewed. For instance, we feel it is very important to note that there is a clear bias in the studied countries and cities with:

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  European and North American cities overshadowing the rest of the world; and

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  Anglo Saxon cases dominating.

This provides evidence both for the suitability of Bogota as the place for the conference and for the cases included in this special issue.

In a direct attempt to address the main theme of the conference, i.e. the search for place identities, Ares Kalandides manages to a great extent to clarify the confusion surrounding this fundamental notion for places and place branding. He examines what is termed “sense of place” as a major determinant of the place and, arguably, of any attempt to brand a place. Kalandides takes as a starting point the different uses of the term “identity” in the place branding literature:

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  place identity as part of individual (human) identity;

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  place identity as formative of group identity;

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  mental representations of place by an individual;

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  group perceptions of place;

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  identification of a group with a territory; and

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  place identity as a sense of place, “character”, “personality” and distinctiveness.

Focusing on the last one, and drawing upon the work of sociologists and geographers, he weaves together several narratives from the Prenzlauer Berg district in Berlin to show how place (and place identity) is constituted. The analysis leads to the refinement of the “place identity metaphor” and its constituents: identification and distinctiveness, the far-reaching interactions among several elements, the understanding of place as the “simultaneity of difference” and the profoundness of power relations.

A particularly challenging area within place branding (and arguably an issue of high relevance to practitioners in the field) is the question of how to measure place brands. Given the agreement that brands in general are formed in peoples’ minds, how can place brands be captured; or, as the title of the next article by Sebastian Zenker states: “How can we ‘catch’ a city?” As Kalandides in the previous article notes, it might be justifiable for methodological reasons to think of place (and by extension place brands) in terms of distinctive, constituent elements. This is precisely the focus of the article by Zenker who argues that the place brand can be conceptualised and, therefore, measured in three distinct manners:

1. 1.

   free associations with place brands using qualitative methods;

2. 2.

   place brand attributes using quantitative methods; and

3. 3.

   a more encompassing manner using a mixture of methods.

Starting with a general overview of the place branding literature, the article then focuses on the specific part of the literature that has addressed the measurement of place brands, undertaking a thorough account of several such studies. Accepting that place branding will inevitably involve a deliberate selection of elements, Zenker interestingly proposes the exclusion of both visual elements and communication measures form measurement of brands.

The following four articles included in this special issue try to bridge the gap between academic work and consultancy practices. The article by Massimo Giovanardi has a twofold focus. The research reported in the article examines the Italian city of Urbino and the series of events designed to celebrate the city as the birthplace of the painter Raphael. It examines the influence of culture in a broad sense and cultural events specifically on the formation of place brands and, at the same time, takes a closer look at the perception of place brands by internal audiences, i.e. participants in the events investigated, both visitors and residents of Urbino. Using a combination of discourse analysis on media texts and official documents and a series of in-depth interviews with officials and participants alike, the article manages to further our understanding of the place brand consumers. A particularly interesting element of the article is the attempt to “overcome the materialist approach that prevents visitors or residents from being conceptualised as conscious, thinking and experiencing beings”; a desire that brings the article close to the notion of users as co-creators of place brands. Giovanardi’s analysis reveals several interesting findings, including a noteworthy insight. A part of the city’s users and events’ participants, termed “the strategist readers” actually demonstrate a better understanding of marketing and more enthusiasm regarding the specific events than the city’s officials themselves.

Using the region of Berlin and Brandenburg as a case study, Gerhard Mahnken questions the suitability of the brand capital region for communication goals. He argues that these two areas are far too heterogeneous to serve the purpose: while the former is a large city and the German capital, the latter is the rather sparsely populated rural area surrounding it. Drawing upon an extended study by the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS), Mahnken closes his paper with five recommendations to place managers: permanent monitoring of the subtextual social atmospheres, refined redefinition of internal target groups, opportunities for the people to create a “landscape of identity”, the construction of a public “code of conduct” in metropolitan communications policy and finally intermediary institutions must be provided as key actors for the permanent fostering and discursive enrichment of metropolitan brands.

Efe Sevin and Gizem Salcigil White examine the details of implementation projects and discuss their experiences with Turkayfe.org, a web 2.0 social networking tool that aims at promoting Turkey. The authors share their thoughts on a project that has not been around long enough to produce results yet, but which provides interesting insight on the possibilities of involving the user in place (nation) branding. Their evaluation of the project is done through the theoretical framework of political communication and their own personal experiences with it. The authors argue that web 2.0 technologies empower citizens’ participation in public diplomacy and that story telling can be an effective communication technique.

The last article comes from the Latin American context and deals with a particularly intriguing topic. Despite the significance of informal settlements for the social and physical space formation of many cities outside the Western world, the role that such settlements can play in place branding has been ignored. This is the main contribution of Jaime Hernandez and Celia Lopez who examine the potential role of informal settlements in branding cities. Using insights from the author’s research and experience in Bogota, the article provides a keen as well as intuitive analysis of the city’s “Barrios” as potential city branding vehicles. The article’s major contribution lies in showing how informal settlements not only should not be hidden from the outside world but on the contrary, can enrich city branding efforts. The argument is built on three cornerstones:

1. 1.

   that informal settlements are by their nature authentic and differentiated places with strong identity associations;

2. 2.

   that several cultural expressions displayed in these areas are of interest to a much wider audience; and

3. 3.

   that the architecture found in informal settlements and its dialectic with space and society is also a distinctive element that can be used in place branding.

Accepting the “inconvenience” of integrating informal settlements in city branding, Hernandez and Lopez calls for precisely that: integration and usage of these parts of cities in a more “honest” and holistic city branding.

We feel that the articles included in this special issue (as well as the conference itself) all have the potential to refresh the field of place branding to a significant extent. Reading separately each article handles a different issue of importance. However, we see their value in being read collectively and forming a new set of ideas and research directions that might enrich the theory and practice of place branding. Hopefully, this special issue will provide a reference point for future place branding studies. We also hope that the readers of this journal will find reading it as intriguing and enjoyable as we found putting it together.

Ares Kalandides, Mihalis KavaratzisGuest Editors