Challenges
of City Branding
We
recently came across an excellent article Teemu Moilanen (2015) entitled the “Challenges
of city branding: A comparative study of 10 European cities”. It is written from the viewpoint of the
public sector economic development organization, but certainly his research is applicable
in the US and for private secotr organizations as well. We’ve summarized his findings below and you
can find the full article here.
1. Large number of stakeholders - The process of place branding requires
participation of large number of stakeholders ranging from public sector
organizations to firms and non-profit organizations, who have different
objectives. A significant proportion of the stakeholders have conflicting and
parallel activities. The sheer number of stakeholders makes it difficult to
include all relevant parties in city brand planning process.
2. Limited understanding of branding within
the network of stakeholders. Marketing in general, and branding in particular, is
foreign to many public sector stakeholder organizations and individuals, who
occasionally reject it as too commercial. Similarly, public sector
representatives have a narrow view of branding (perceived as logo planning) or
do not understand the purpose and process of branding at all, and accordingly
it is difficult to make all relevant stakeholders understand that they do have
a role in the development of city brand.
3. Limited internal buy in the challenge of
securing sufficient political support from the public sector and city hall. The private sector
is more familiar with branding as a concept. However, it is challenging to
mobilize private sector organizations to participate in the city branding
process, and to find ways to make the organization in charge of city branding
relevant for private sector actors.
4. Securing sufficient funding - A major element of this challenge is the need
to convince public sector decision makers that branding is an investment with
positive return on investment. Limited funding leads to other difficulties,
including the need to make compromises, eliminate necessary activities, and
limited or non-existent market research. To a lesser extent, attracting funding
from private sector stakeholders also is problematic.
5. Slowness and time-related issues - Large numbers of stakeholders increase
the time needed for internal communication and decision-making, and generally
slow down several phases of the brand management process. Funding-related
decisions made in the public sector are often delayed. Private sector actors
are generally faster than public sector stakeholders, leading to frustration at
one end and feelings of haste at the other end.
6. Organizational issues and lack of authority to lead - This challenge
appears to be a composite of two major features: conflicting opinions of key
stakeholders, combined with lack of clear leadership. These are exacerbated by
an unclear decision-making structure, limited coordination between
stakeholders, stakeholder’s fear of losing power when engaging in a cooperative
branding process and the challenge of building an effective system for internal
communication within a loosely structured network organization. The lack of a
linkage appears to be the main difficulty in finding individuals or
organizations to be in charge of the process.
7. Operational brand management - This challenge appears to have two major
components. The first one is a set of issues related to the difficulties caused
by day-to-day management of the external marketing communication campaign.
These include difficulties in combining city branding activities with the
activities of a single stakeholder, difficulties in finding ways to help
stakeholders to use the brand, lack of marketing skills, parallel activities
and inconsistent messages. The second component is the difficulty in
transferring the brand identity to product experience. In other words, how to
move from words to action, to diminish the gap between marketing and the
reality experienced by visitors.
8. City brand strategy formulation - It is a composite of several smaller
interlinked issues, that is, the difficulty in identifying target groups,
defining brand identity, differentiating from competitors, focusing on the
wrong competitors, difficulties in tailoring the marketing message to different
markets and customer segments, difficulty in defining the relationship between
the city brand and the regional/national brand, and
general lack of strategic thinking and dialog. Challenges related to brand
identity definition appear to be closely linked to the first two challenges
discussed in the literature review; determining if there is a common and
collective character in this complex entity of products/services
that could be captured by a single brand and simply reaching a common agreement
as to what is being marketed/branded. Several
interviewees also emphasized that a city is a highly complex product, but in
many ways similar to other cities.
9. Monitoring and poor situational awareness- Interlinked features
of this challenge are the lack of good measures for brand success, utilization
of wrong measures and use of unsophisticated monitoring tools. Combined, these
features lead to poor situational awareness and market understanding,
inefficient use of resources and failure to justify actions and budget
requirements to decision makers.
Moilanen,
Teemu. (2015) Challenges of city branding: A comparative study of 10
European cities. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy
11 (3): 216–225. Article
