Editors / Co-authors: Johan Jansson and Dominic Power

Image of the City

October 2006

Urban Branding as Constructed Capabilities in Nordic City Regions

1

Co-authors:

Markus M. Bugge,

NIFU STEP – Studies in Innovation, Research and Education

Haldor Gislason,

Faculty of Design and Architecture, Iceland Academy of the Arts

Mervi Ilmonen,

Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology (HUT)

Johan Jansson,

Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University

Ole B. Jensen

, Aalborg University

Jomar Langeland

, Norconsult, Oslo

Hilkka Lehtonen

, Helsinki University of Technology (HUT)

Panu Lehtovuori,

Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. Helsinki University of Technology (HUT)

Jo Ullveit-Moe,

Norconsult, Oslo

Maria M. L. Nielsen,

Aalborg University

Dominic Power,

Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University.

Lene Siebert,

Norconsult, Oslo

Expert Group:

Lars Ramme Nielsen

, Ass. Managing Director at Wonderful Copenhagen

Mario Rubert

, Managing Director at Barcelona City Council

Julian Stubbs

, Managing Director at Dowell//Stubbs, Stockholm

Title: The Image of The City – Urban Branding as Constructed Capabilities in Nordic City Regions

Nordic Innovation Centre project number: 05009

Editors: Johan Jansson, Dominic Power

Institution(s): Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University

Abstract: Nordic city regions are increasingly taking part in an international competition for skilled workers and mobile knowledge. Throughout the last decades there has been a growing awareness of the cities’ role as an impetus for innovation and regional economic growth in Europe, and similarly a growing willingness to develop strategies for urban renewal and revitalization. Increasingly, efforts are made to create attractive urban spaces and to improve the urban environment in order to attract visitors, workers and companies. Yet little research has been conducted on how cities brand themselves; how cities succeed in creating or recreating a brand for the city as a good to be marketed and sold.

Through selected case studies this project analyzes the various approaches and branding processes that are undertaken in the respective city cases. Based on the respective case studies the study has sought to map a range of success criterions in urban branding. The case studies comprise both Nordic and European cities that has undergone image transformations, either through a shaping or re-shaping of its image. The study implies a focus on to what extent urban branding strategies is paralleled by physical transformation processes.

This report summarizes the various case studies accomplished in the project, and presents a range of ‘commandments’ that reflect the success criterions that have been brought forward from the case studies.

Topic/NICe Focus Area:

ISSN: Language: English Pages: 41

Key words: urban branding, city, urban redevelopment, place marketing, image building, urban planning

Distributed by: Nordic Innovation Centre Stensberggata 25 NO-0170 Oslo Norway

Contact person: Dominic Power, Associate Professor Department of Social and Economic Geography Uppsala University Box 513 S-751 20 Uppsala Sweden Tel. +46 (0)18 471 2538 Fax +46 (0)18 471 7418 www.kultgeog.uu.se/pp/Dominic.Power/

3

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2. Why brand the city? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3. Urban branding strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4. The Grand Gesture: Branding through the built environment, events, flagship projects . . 18Iconic or signature buildings as branding strategies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Use of design and architecture in Helsinki’s branding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19The Shipyard City and the Palm Beach of Fredrikshavn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Regeneration and city brands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Helsinki: Arabianranta Art and Design City; Design Quarter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Husavik village. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Branding through grand projects and events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23London – the millennium Dome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Building for temporary signatures: trade fairs and regular events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

5. Branding through planning, urban redevelopment, and administering long term change . 27Coordinating local actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Drammen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28Balancing competing regional agendas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Helsinki Metropolitan Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

6. Branding through advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Stockholm – two approaches to local anchoring of the branding process . . . . . . . . . . . 33Hjørring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Randers – Re-imagining the City of Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

7. Different strokes for different folks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38The 10 ‘commandments’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Contents

Foreword The Image of the City is a research project primarily financed by Nordic Innovation Centre which ran during 2005 and 2006. The project team also gratefully acknowledges co-funding from other organizations including Uppsala University, Alborg University, Norconsult, The City of Helsinki, The City of Espoo and The City of Vantaa. The final report, edited by Johan Jansson and Dominic Power, summarizes the various case studies conducted and lessons learned by all the project participants from the Nordic countries. We wish to thank the expert group which kindly shared with us their experiences of urban branding processes. The contents and opinions expressed in this report are, however, entirely the product and responsibility of the research group. We hope that the knowledge and insights generated in this project will be of relevance and help to policy makers, urban planners and branding agencies both in Nordic city regions and beyond. Markus M. Bugge Project manager

5

6

Executive Summary

In recent decades there has been a growing awarenessof the cities’ role as an impetus for innovation andregional economic growth in Europe, and similarly agrowing willingness to develop strategies for urbanrenewal and revitalization. Increasingly efforts arebeing made to create attractive urban spaces and toimprove the urban environment in order to attract vis-itors, investments, workers and companies. As part ofthis renewed interest in cities role and the importanceof having attractive urban spaces there has been a re-newed focus on the role of reputation and image. Ithas become an integral part of urban and regional de-velopment strategies to think not just about the builtor material infrastructure but also about immaterialthings projecting a good image and building/main-taining a good identity or brand.

Despite the fact that city and regional authoritiesthroughout the Nordic area are increasingly con-cerned with how their places are perceived andbranded, the topic of urban branding still remains arather unexplored and neglected aspect of urbantransformation processes. To date relatively little re-search has been conducted on how cities brand them-selves; how cities succeed in creating or recreating abrand for the city as a good to be marketed and sold.

The image of the City: Urban Branding as Con-structed Capabilities in Nordic City Regions is aproject that has aimed at studying cities’ image,branding and advertising strategies as a comparativeadvantage in a globalized economy. The project hasexamined strategies of urban and regional brandingin Europe and in the Nordic region from an inter-disciplinary approach in order to better understandhow cities and regions may brand themselves in orderto their best advantage.

There are many reasons for thinking that brandingand image improvement are necessary strategies inan increased competition in the global economy. Ur-ban branding strategies can be seen as a vital compo-nent in the competition for:

1. Attracting inward investments and internationalventure capital

2. Attracting and retaining companies

3. Attracting and retaining skilled knowledge work-ers

4. Attracting new citizens5. Attracting tourists and visitors6. Sales and marketing of locally produced goods

and services

Thus brands are not just about attracting investment,tourists, etc. to a place but also help the marketingand sales of the products and services such placesproduce. This list also gives a hint of the idea thaturban branding strategies are working in two direc-tions; inward and outward branding. Inward brand-ing is concerned with identity building and strength-ening the pride of the residents living in a place,thus creating an attractive environment with the abil-ity to maintain its residents and business and in thelong run also attract new citizens, tourists and busi-ness. Outward branding on the other hand is con-cerned with external communication and is directlyrelated to attracting investments, knowledge work-ers, visitors and tourists to a place. Outward brand-ing aims to help support the sales and marketing po-tential of goods and services produced in the localarea.

The report concludes that the problem with brand-ing cities is that they are very diverse products thatcan be difficult to fit neatly into a marketing cam-paign. Even if one can fit a city into one or a numberof campaigns, running such campaigns can be diffi-cult to manage and sustain. Added to this is the factthat the ‘product’ itself can react negatively to thewrong sort of marketing or branding. We feelstrongly that it is clear that for diverse ‘products’such as cities various strategies are needed and thatthere is no one solution and no model of best practiceto copy.

However, even if we think that cities and regionsneed to find their own paths and solutions there ismuch to be learnt from the experiences of otherplaces. Through our work during this project wefound that certain points emerged as important. Thesepoints have been summarized into 10 command-ments:

7

1. There is no recipe for success

– There are various urban branding strategiesand the choice of strategy needs to be adaptedto local characteristics and assets.

– It is not clear whether one should aim for onemeta-brand or for a portfolio of many brandswith separate target audiences. However,there is a need for targeted marketing in bothcases.

2. Urban branding is just a little part of commu-nity building

– The brand needs to reflect and involve localassets and people.

3. Don’t just tell it, show it

– Physical changes are often as important asmental images in showing that a city really ischanging.

– Branding is often most powerful when it islinked into and coordinated with physicaltransformation processes and urban (re)devel-opment initiatives (e.g. Drammen, Barcelona,Glasgow, Bilbao).

– The link between physical urban transforma-tion and branding/the brand needs to reflectlocal assets and characteristics.

4. Uniqueness and innovation is key

– Branding is ultimately about differentiatingyourself from others therefore there it is im-portant to be special and avoid copying whateveryone else seems to be doing.

– A first step towards this is to identify localstrengths and characteristics.

– It is important to be flexible in your thinkingand understand that even local weaknessescan be turned into strengths (for instance, lackof light in the winter can be special to somepeople!).

– It is also important not to be blind to whatothers see and be ready to accept that outsid-ers’ perceptions and needs might be very dif-ferent to your own. It can be useful to see thecity through the ‘eyes of the stranger’: e.g. byemploying a non-local marketing bureau orby conducting visitor surveys.

– Both the brand itself and the method of com-munication can take many different forms:e.g. events, award ceremonies, conferences,supporting film industry, fashion locations,delegations, trade fairs, television, press, liter-

ature, signature buildings, and local ambassa-dors.

5. Branding is a long-term process

– Avoid quick fixes; there is a need for long-term commitment.

– Branding can seldom be done without money– Facilitate a continuous flow of economicsupport and institutional anchoring (e.g.branding secretariat).

– Regular evaluation based on a clear set of suc-cess criteria is important.

– Brands develop slowly and the path is seldomsmooth so be ready for set-backs and be readyto be involved in crisis management.

6. Top-down / Bottom-up branding strategies

– There is a need to be aware that the brandingprocess may vary along a top-down versusbottom-up axis.

– There may be a danger in fully outsourcingfull control over a branding process to privateagents; there may be advantages in local(public) governance and participation in theprocess.

– The more top-down a branding process themore difficult it tends to be to involve the lo-cal population.

– Small scale actions and hard to pin down feel-ings like civic pride are of great value. Thus itcan be important to have the local populationas brand ambassadors.

– Cities that use the same (top-down) brandingagency may get ’mass produced’ brands.

7. Well functioning organisational capacity andflexibility is important

– There is a need to define local needs and char-acteristics.

– There is a need to define competitors/thecompetition and possible collaborators.

– It is important that there is an organisationalmap – to avoid duplication or conflicts – andthat participants know where they stand andwhat their responsibilities are.

– It is helpful to have a clear aim, focus, strat-egy and good internal/external communica-tion flows.

– Subcontractors, such marketing and brandingfirms, sometimes have expertise the publicsector does not have but it is important theyare given a very clear brief.

8

8. It is not necessarily true that you are in com-petition with everyone else

– Cooperation and co-branding can in many in-stances be more helpful in attracting the sortof attention and friends you are aiming at.

9. Brands work at many different spatial andtemporal levels

– There is a need to think wider than the munic-ipality (coordination) (ex. Øresund, Paris-London, Barcelona-Euro-region). Cities needto find their position within the Regional/Na-tional/Global. Different cities (size, poweretc) should address different target groups.

– Some cities/regions could gain from seasonalbranding and awareness that different strate-gies for different seasons might be needed.

– Different actors could sit down with their cal-endars and plan the entire year, would needbetter intra-urban coordination.

10. The role of key persons

– Dynamic and charismatic branding advocatesand individual driving forces should not beunderestimated. Often dedicated individualsand civic entrepreneurs are important drivingforces behind (or against) particular urbanbranding or (re)development processes. Iden-tifying, including and supporting these indi-viduals is important.

9

1. Introduction

This report deals with city images. In particular itdeals with how images are used as brands and howthese brands contribute to urban and regional devel-opment. Whilst cities, towns and villages – indeed allplaces – have always produced (or being saddledwith) images and stories in recent years it has becomeclear that such places are no longer happy to allowthese symbols, images and narratives emerge bythemselves. Instead cities have started to view theway in which they are perceived as potentially veryvaluable assets in their survival and renewal. As as-sets, city images are therefore things that need atten-tion and work; work best not left to chance.

That cities’ images are increasingly viewed as val-uable and malleable assets has much to do with ourchanging perception of the city as a place for innova-tion and economic development. During the 1990s,the dark images of violence and deprivation that largecities had been blackened with began to change.There was a growing awareness of the city’s role as adriver of innovation and regional economic growth.Indeed a range of policymakers, academics and pun-dits drew attention to the economic benefits of think-ing locally and regionally. In particular they drew at-tention to the benefits that accrue when activities andpeople are agglomerated together. If we are to com-pete in the knowledge economy, cities and regionsmust attract new influences, assemble existingstrengths, and act as arenas for the exchange and de-velopment of new ideas.

Such thinking has helped create a situation wherepolicy has been abuzz with terms such as clusters,creative cities, growth poles, innovative meetingplaces, technopoles and the like. This renewed focuson the city as an economic driver coincided with aseries of generational and lifestyle changes that haspressured government and the private sector into im-proving the attractiveness and vitality of urban areas.Both in the public and private sectors there has been agrowing willingness to develop strategies for urbanrenewal and revitalization. Increasingly, efforts aremade to create attractive urban spaces and to improvethe urban environment in order to attract visitors, in-habitants, workers and companies. However, these

policies have been coupled with an awareness thatsuch change needs to be communicated to others if itis to have a real effect. Thus being attractive or wellfunctioning is not enough: others must be convincedof your attractiveness and a strong image or brand isthe most effective way to do this.

These ideas has also meant that cities have begunto see themselves as products to be aggressively soldin increasingly competitive global markets for foot-loose jobs, workers, investment and capital. In thisdevelopment there has been a change from thinkingthat urban brands are useful for attracting tourists toseeing them as being of much wider value: of value toeconomic development in general.

Traditionally most regional and urban economic(re)development policies have focused on two key ar-eas: Firstly, they have concentrated a large amount oftime and money on building up the hard infrastruc-ture essential to functioning regions (everything fromroads to fibre optic cable networks). Secondly, theyhave focused on supporting the efforts of firms thatexist in (or have recently moved to) the area. A widerange of policies for firm, entrepreneurial, sectoraland cluster support have been put in place in order tohelp bring out the potential of firms to innovate andcompete. Indeed both of these types of policy focushave had wide-ranging effects.

Whilst all these sorts of policies are obviously vitalfor building and maintaining urban and regional com-petitiveness, there is a growing awareness that suchtangible measures may not be enough. With ever in-creasing levels of globalisation and technological ad-vances in communications and travel it appears thatboth businesses and workers are more mobile andfootloose than ever.

Economic geographer Phil Cooke and Loet Ley-desdorff (2006) argue that there has been a shift fromcompetitive or comparative advantages of regions toa focus on

constructed advantages

between regions.Such a perspective can easily be transferred onto anurban context, where the urban region is a focus forinterregional competition nationally or internation-ally. However, much of the research on regional de-velopment, especially in the Nordic countries, has

10

overlooked urban centres as crucial driving forces foreconomic growth and development (Halvorsen,2004). There is a need to try as many different meth-ods as possible to attract and retain the dynamic andinnovative people, images, and organizations to ourcities. In particular there is a need to be carefullyaware how we construct (both unconsciously andconsciously) the ‘advantages’ our cities and regionsexhibit.

In recent years cities such as Barcelona, Bilbao,Dublin and Manchester have shown that by chang-ing their image and brand – or the ways in whichboth the outside world and their own citizens/busi-nesses perceive the place – economic redevelopmentand reinvention are greatly helped. On a wider levelwriters like Richard Florida have shown that in theknowledge economy both firms, creative workersand entrepreneurs are drawn to places with strongand dynamic images and brands. In a highly debatedstudy of economic growth and business innovationin the USA, Florida (2002) shows that in the last 50years the regions with the highest economic growthand innovation records are those with strong brandidentities as open, tolerant and dynamics milieus.Even venture capital seems today to be highly sus-ceptible to the lure of strong regional brands thatgive resident companies the mark of quality and in-novation: e.g. the power of ‘Silicon Valley’ as abrand in motivating and attracting venture capital.Thus creating a strong regional brand makes it easierto attract not just tourists but most significantly mo-bile knowledge workers, inward investment and ven-ture capital. It may also help in building feelings ofcivic pride and accomplishment; that can in turnhelp existing firms and residents stay in ‘their’place.

The Nordic city regions, just like any other cityregions, are increasingly taking part in an interna-tional competition for skilled workers, inward invest-ment, tourists, etc.: markets where there are manystrong brands. The realisation of the competitive real-ities they face has driven many, if not most, Nordiccities of various sizes and locations into more or lessextensive image and branding work.

There is no common definition of 'brands' or'branding', however, most commentators agree thatany definition should include both tangible and intan-gible attributes of a product: e.g. both functional andemotional characteristics. Brands are the result of a

branding process whereby one attempts to charge aproduct (or set of products) with ethereal qualities:qualities that primarily function as marketing argu-ments. A brand's value is thus in the way people endup thinking and feeling about it and the product it islinked to. The aim of branding is to make an almostindistinguishable link between the character of an ob-ject and its branded image or form.

However, even experts in product marketing andbranding can attest to how difficult creating, buildingand sustaining brands is. These are complex proc-esses and failure can have long-term consequencesfor the product’s survival. This is equally true for cit-ies and regions which can become trapped in negativeimages that only help to accentuate ongoing proc-esses of deindustrialisation or outward migration. Itis therefore essential that we begin to understand theprocesses by which regional brands can be built andmaintained, how they are anchored into the businesscommunity, how they are sold to their target markets,and what international best practise can tell us aboutthese processes and the efforts of our foreign compet-itors. Strong brands take time to create and build, butare still vulnerable and relatively easy to ruin. Tomaintain a strong brand it takes continuous care andattention in order to remain strong. Urban branding,just like any other branding, has to be considered aprocess rather than a stable state of being and e.g. itcontinuously needs investments and reinvestments inorder to avoid misinterpretations and remaining freshin peoples mind.

This report builds upon a study of various urbanand regional branding initiatives. In particular itlooks at how they can contribute to constructing com-petitive advantage. Through selected case studies inthe object is to analyze the various approaches andbranding processes that have been undertaken in Nor-dic and European city regions. Furthermore, the aimof the study is not only to focus on brands in the formof symbols or logos, but also on how urban brandingstrategies are/can be paralleled by physical transfor-mation processes. The results presented are notmeant as a template for developing a branding strat-egy or as an uncritical rallying call for branding.Rather it is hoped that the practices we observed canhelp policymakers and planners, public and private,develop image and brand strategies that contribute tobalanced and sustainable growth.

11

2. Why brand the city?

Before going on to looking at how exactly city brand-ing occurs and how it can be done (for better or forworse) it is important to understand more clearly whya city might want to consciously brand itself and whatone can realistically hope to be gained. Part of theanswer to why cities are consciously engaging in ur-ban branding and what they hope to gain can be foundin macro-level changes in the global economy anddivision of labour cities find themselves caught in.

Pioneering European urban branding strategiesmust be seen against the background of increasedglobalisation and structural adjustments that havemeant the relative decline of traditional manufactur-ing in most western economies (Begg 1999:795).Rapid industrial change has meant that many of ourcities and regions can no longer guarantee that whattraditional industry is left will be a sustainable sourceof future growth. This has forced them to support orattract new types of jobs and industries that on theface of it seem to be more sensitive to intangible ele-ments of places.

The increased awareness and importance of urbanbranding strategies is partly fuelled by the idea thatcompetitiveness is no longer solely reliant on mate-rial conditions like natural resources or built infra-structure. In the so called knowledge economy it is nolonger costs for production and labour that is the coreof competition. Rather competitiveness between re-gions and cities is a consequence of intangible meas-ures – the ability to attract and retain talented andcreative labour, to provide interactive milieus wherenew ideas can grow, etc. The problem for cities andcity authorities is that it seems that Europe (and in-deed elsewhere) is full of places that have great crea-tive potential and lots of educated, skilled labour. Inaddition, many of these places have much greater po-litical willingness and ability to offer other types ofincentives and stimulants to new business – such astax breaks – than seems to be possible in the Nordicregion.

Branding and marketing seem against this back-ground to be a realistic way of differentiating your-self from the competition.

The importance of city branding and regional de-

velopment strategies is confirmed by OECD which in1999 created the Territorial Development PolicyCommittee in order to study and spread innovativeterritorial development strategies and governance. Inthis initiative data is collected with the aim of pub-lishing rankings of top European business sites(OECD 2006). For example Stockholm is rankednumber 23 (Figure 1.40). In the report on the compet-itiveness of Stockholm as a site for business attentionis paid, amongst other things such infrastructure, tothe importance of developing the city’s reputationand brand as a site for business.

“To play an even bigger role in Europe and globally,the Stockholm region will need branding to increaseits international visibility. Compared to many otherEuropean cities, Stockholm is far less known. Stock-holm may have to rely on regional branding to attractforeign resources (businesses and workers). Regionalbranding could serve to overcome the disadvantagesof being located at the edge of European and globalmarkets as well as increase its currently low interna-tional visibility” (OECD 2006, p80).

Such ranking have become increasingly common andare also gaining respect and considerable interna-tional media attention. It is therefore important thatcities and regions pay attention to such rankings andattempt to move up in them.

In general, such rankings are based on the idea thatbrands are important to places’ ability to attract busi-ness. However, there are also other reasons for think-ing that branding and image improvement are neces-sary strategies in an increased competition in the glo-bal economy. Urban branding strategies can be seenas a vital component in the competition for:

1. Attracting inward investments and internationalventure capital

2. Attracting and maintaining companies3. Attracting and maintaining skilled knowledge

workers4. Attracting new citizens5. Attracting tourists and visitors6. Sales and marketing of locally produced goods

and services

12

As can be seen from the above list, urban brandscan help not only attract things into to the area butalso be important to how things produced in the localarea get received elsewhere: i.e. in export markets. Itseems that more and more varieties of products andservice are reliant for their competitive edge on intan-gible and symbolic elements such as their identity,marketing, brand, symbolic and aesthetic merits. Ifindustries such as tourism are entirely reliant on theimage and brand to which an area is associated, it isalso true that many manufactured products areequally sold on the basis of regional and urbanbrands. An example, of this is the added value that thebrand ‘Paris fashion’ gives to French clothing andluxury goods manufacturers: or that ‘Danish Design’gives to Danish furniture exports.

The six areas in which we suggest brands canmake a contribution to urban economic developmentand competitiveness are mirrored in other academicwork. For instance, Lever identifies five basic targetsfor cities’ competition: for mobile investment; for

added value to the gross domestic product; for popu-lation; for public funds; and for hallmark events andmajor pieces of infrastructure (Lever 1999:1029).

Evidence from across the Nordic region suggeststhat for smaller (and rural) places after the attractionof investments and firms it is the attraction of newresidents that is judged by local authorities as thehighest priority. In a recent survey of 220 Swedishmunicipalities Niedomysl (2004) found that the ma-jority of municipalities had conducted place market-ing activities and that attracting new inhabitants wasa high priority. The smaller the municipality the moreimportant the attraction of new residents was consid-ered. All the municipalities stated that the quality ofthe built and lived environment was most importantto their ability to attract new residents. This suggeststhat authorities are keenly aware that marketing exer-cises need to be backed with a competitive environ-ment on the ground.

However, municipalities in Sweden were particu-larly interested in attracting families with children.

Figure 1: ‘Familiarity with cities as a business location’. Source: Cush-man, Wakefield and Baker (2004); in OECD (2006, p81).

90%

80%

69%

68%

67%

64%

63%

63%

61%

58%

57%

55%

54%

52%

48%

48%

47%

44%

42%

41%

40%

37%

29%

29%

28%

27%

27%

26%

23%

35%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

London

Paris

Brussels

Frankfurt

Barcelona

Amsterdam

Milan

Madrid

Munich

Berlin

Rome

Zurich

Geneva

Düsseldorf

Lisbon

Hamburg

Vienna

Prague

Lyon

Dublin

Manchester

Copenhagen

Stockholm

Athens

Moscov

Budapest

Warsaw

Glasgow

Oslo

Helsinki

13

Indeed young families and even long distance com-muters were deemed to be of higher importance thanthe sort of mobile single knowledge workers punditssuch as Richard Florida suggest are important to at-tract for areas interested in economic growth.

The study of Swedish municipalities also high-lights the fact that municipalities are spending in-creasing amounts on place marketing, and they arebecoming more advanced in the branding techniquesthey use in addition to rebuilding and redevelopment.Indeed information and marketing strategies are nowseen by most Swedish municipalities as necessaryparts of social and economic development spendingand planning. Furthermore, Niedomysl found that ingeneral municipalities were positive to the use andeffectiveness of marketing techniques in relation tothe goal of attracting new residents.

Whilst Niedomysl found that policymakers them-selves were highly positive about the effects of mar-keting in attracting new inhabitants, statistics on newmigrants to the areas in question gave a less positivepicture. In general, Niedomysl concludes that atpresent there is little real evidence that such cam-paigns have, to date, been effective. Though he sug-gests that it might be too early to say what the longterm effects of such initiatives and he is also suggest-ing that the picture might look different if the munic-ipalities had done nothing at all.

The example above on attracting residents alsohighlights the different levels of competition that dif-

ferent cities face. Competition between regions andcities is happening on different levels and it is up tothe individual city or region to assess who or whomthey are competing with; what level or segment ofcities and regions they are competing with. Three dif-ferent levels of competition and competitor can beidentified:

– Global cities– Regional centers– Smaller peripheral cities

Cities are competing on different scales and are try-ing to attract different things; e.g. they are communi-cating with different audiences. Rainisto (2003) notesthat one key task for the management of an urbanbranding strategy is to decide in which market orlevel they want to compete. This decision will have adirect influence on the chosen strategy. The place-based brands, just like product brands, need to be de-veloped and changed according to the customers’needs and the differentiation of the branding strategycompeting places use. In short it is crucial that citiesunderstand the competitive environment and positionthemselves in relation this in a realistic way. Whileglobal cities might be competing for the headquartersof multinational enterprises or to be internationalcenters for fashion, film, biotech or computer sci-ence, regional centers on the other hand might becompeting for the location of national companies,

Table 1: Engagement in marketing to attract in-migrants. (Niedomysl, 2004)

Municipality type

Undertakenany kind ofmarketing(%)

Undertaken marketing camaign especially to attract in-migrantsb

(%) Three most important factors to attract in-migrants

Large citiesa na na naSuburban municipalities 28 17 the built environment, quality of life, commuting opportunitiesOther larger cities 81 66 higher education, the built environment, communicationsMedium-sized cities 81 51 living environment, quality of life, communicationsIndustrial municipalities 63 48 costs of living, quality of life, living environmentRural municipalities 82 59 living environment, quality of life, commuting opportunitiesLow-density rural municipalities 75 66 living environment, quality of life, costs of livingOther larger municipalities 91 63 quality of life, living environment, great natural beautyOther smaller municipalities 79 41 quality of life, living environment, great natural beautyAverage 70 49 living environment, quality of life, outdoor leisure opportunities

a na – not available (the large cities do not market themselves to attract in-migrants).b Any campaign to attract in-migrants during 2002–02.

14

public departments and organizations or nationalevents. Smaller peripheral cities might not be able tocompete for big companies, organizations or events.They might instead aim to attract in-migrants andtourists.

Even if strong brands can be seen to offer manybenefits the idea of branding a city or a place in thesame way as one might brand a commercial productis far from unproblematic. Just as in the USA, thelanguage and rhetoric of business is now commonlyused in the public sector in relation to Nordic citiesand regions. It has become common practice forthose working in urban affairs in the public sector totalk about how cities and regions can ‘compete’ andhow they can sell themselves. It is clear that this rep-resents a commodification of urban space: the citybecomes a product to be sold in competition withother similar products. This commodification can beseen to be part of a changing relation of urban gov-ernment to its subject – the city and its citizens. Gov-ernment becomes an organiser for the sale and mar-keting of the city (and its product) and is evaluated(both internally and externally) by its ability to pack-age and sell its product in the most efficient form.Cities that are successful in applying the logic ofcommercial sales and marketing are rewarded by ac-colades from the business world and the businesspress; and city fathers proudly boast of these rankingswhen they outline their accomplishments.

City authorities are increasingly phrasing their re-lation to urban development in terms synonymouswith firm or product development. This can be seento be worrying in a number of respects. Whilst firmsare ultimately driven to deliver profits and share-holder value, it is by no means clear what cities orregions should aim to deliver. The danger is that byattempting to commodify the city and build on its

competitive strengths (as all good businesses do)many interests and groups can be left out or marginal-ised. In fact cities aim to deliver a whole range ofpublic and private goods – encompassing everythingfrom clean streets to economic growth to democraticparticipation – to a wide range of stakeholders. In ad-dition, whilst neo-liberal dogmas suggest that the pri-vate sector knows best and its methods should bewidely adopted by the public, firms and businesses dofail (often at an alarming rate).

Jensen (2005) argues there are at least four differ-ences between branding a product and a city. Firstthere is a difference in the number of stakeholdersand their related interests; branding a city includes acomplex web of preferences. Second, it is a hard taskto negotiate a legitimate local value base with localparticipation. This is almost never an issue whenbranding a product. Third, branding a city or a placeusually has to follow the paths of existing notions orhistorical identities of a place. Most products do nothave the same depth of history or associations toconsider. Fourth, the consumers of an urban brandare often more diverse than the consumers of a nor-mal product since urban branding has to serve di-verse groups of potential investors, residents andtourists.

An often cited spokesman for the idea of competi-tiveness between states, regions and places is thebusiness economist Michael Porter. He argues thatthe national, regional and local environments directlyaffect the competitive position of firms (Porter 1990):and thus need to be just as competitive as the firmsthey serve. However, Paul Krugman, another econo-mist, has been vocal in his criticism of the idea thatstates (and regions) are necessarily in competitionwith each other for resources, trade, etc. He notes thatcountries are not firms and that their access to trade inresources, citizens and new ideas is not a zero-sumgame. He notes that countries’ welfare has less thanwe think to do with the development of other coun-tries and often much more to do with policies andevents at home. Added to this, history has shown thatwhat is good for individual countries is good for theirtrade partners: that cooperation and alliances be-tween countries pay dividends.

Krugman concludes by suggesting that thinking interms of competition at a national level can lead tobad policies. In particular it can lead to trade warsand to backing only certain sectors/branches/strate-gies (that may fail). One may wonder if Krugman’swarning about using the logic of business competi-tiveness at the level of the nation state might not also

Table 2: Categories of in-migrants stated as beinattract. (Niedomysl, 2004)

Category of inä-migrantsPercentage of municipalities

Families with children 52Highly educated or eqalified labor 30Potential return migrants 16Students 15Entrepreneurs 9Low-educated caring labour 7People about to retire or newly retired 6Secon-home owners 5

15

apply in some measure to city and regional levels.Krugman is, however, far from an enemy of businessor economic development. Rather he suggests thatthe language of competition might usefully be sub-stituted (or complemented) by the language of coop-eration and alliance. An implication of this in thecontext of urban branding is that it might be mostproductive for individual cities and regions (espe-cially those in the periphery) to work together ratherthan see themselves as competitors. As we shall seelater in this report many smaller municipalities in theNordic region have indeed chosen to cooperate with

their neighbours when branding or marketing them-selves.

We should be careful then about what sort of com-mercial methods and logics we try to adapt to com-plex urban areas. This, of course, does not mean thatwe should neglect the importance of image for citiesor regions. Neither does this means that we shouldignore the fact that everyone else seems to be busyimproving their images. It simply means that beshould we acutely aware of the differences betweenselling a product and improving a cities image orbrand.

16

3. Urban branding strategies

Despite the complexity of the branding task bothpublic and private actors have in recent years beenbusy branding cities and creating new images forthem. There are multitudes of different ways in whichsuch processes can occur. In general one can say thatthe strategies used tend to either focus on materialaspects of the place – its built environment and infra-structure – or immaterial aspects of the place – itsslogan, its identity, etc. Our research into city and re-gional branding in the Nordic region suggests thatthere are three main strategic areas in which actorshave tried to enact change aimed at creating new cityimages and brands. These strategies are categorisedinto a simple matrix building on its material respec-tively immaterial character.

The three categories are: 1) Branding through sig-nature buildings, events, flagship projects etc; 2)Branding through planning strategies, urban redevel-opment, institutional and infrastructural support; 3)Branding through advertising, myths, slogans, logosetc. The first category is about advertising a citythrough spectacular buildings or events. Also thesebuildings and event works at different levels (on alocal, national or international level). There are anumber of famous and notorious buildings, both his-

torically and contemporary, that placed a city on thepublic’s mental maps. Not the least, sports events likethe Olympic Games have caused enormous attentionand economic revenues for the organisers over theyears. The second category alludes to the idea thatthorough structural and planned transformations ofthe city can be used as urban branding strategies. Oneexample of this could be how some, formerly indus-trial cities, actively working on changing its structureto oblige the demands of a new cultural or knowledgeintensive economy. The third category refers to pureadvertising with the aim of changing the attitude oran external and/or internal audience. These categoriesare not to be looked upon as separate or divided. Oc-casionally, a single category is used as an urbanbranding strategy, but more frequently the categoriesare used as interrelated processes where the three di-mensions are integrated.

The main part (and work) of this project has beenput into research on various kinds of case-studies.These case-studies cover a wide range of different ur-ban branding strategies. The case-studies have beenaccomplished to be able to give examples and de-scriptions of urban branding strategies in differentlevels, and different scopes and scales. Evidence

Figure 2: Urban branding strategies

MATERIAL IMMATERIAL • Branding through

signature buildings, events, flagship projects etc.

• Branding through

planning strategies, urban redevelopment, institutional and infrastructural support

• B r anding through advertising, myths, s logans, logos etc.

Branding through advertising, myths, slogans, logos etc.

17

from the case-studies is used in this report to illus-trate different urban branding strategies. As many cit-ies could be used to illustrate more than one strategythe case-studies in each chapter must be understoodas examples of the categories in question.

In the following, the case-studies will function as apalette of examples on urban branding strategies. Thecase-studies are categorized along with the simplegrid presented above where the strategies are used inorder to create an easy way to understand the contextof how to interpret the different urban branding strat-egies. The case-studies are describing different ways

of using urban branding strategies. They are discuss-ing advantages and disadvantages with different strat-egies, but also positive and negative aspects from thelessons learned. The results of these discussions aresummarized in a number of commandments. Thesecommandments do not give any concrete advice ofhow cities should brand themselves at different lev-els. However, the report summarizes a number of in-sights related to branding that could be usefully takeninto consideration by politicians, policy-makers, ur-ban planners and other actors involved in urbanbranding processes.

18

4. The Grand Gesture: Branding through the builtenvironment, events, flagship projects

Much of the work of planners and city authorities isconcerned with improving the built and infrastruc-tural environment of their areas. The built environ-ment has in itself often functioned as the symbol orimage that best promotes a city or a region. It is notsurprising then that public initiatives to improve theimage of different places have often involved the ma-nipulation of the built environment to convey newimages.

Building images in stone is not, however, just anexample of institutional inertia and the material fixa-tions of planning departments. It is an approach tomarketing and advertising places that has a long andproven history. Buildings and built infrastructurehave a power and tangible symbolic value. Through-out history monarchs, governments, churches, busi-nesses and so on have attempted to use the symbolicpower of buildings to suit their own purposes. By ac-cident and by design various places have managed tocreate buildings that capture the imagination to suchan extent they become the most powerful symbol ofwhat the place stands for. Such buildings have man-aged not only to become icons but also act as mag-nets for investments, tourists and labour. Indeed it isoften to the built environment we turn when we try tosum up or understand a place. Buildings such as theEiffel Tower and the Great Pyramids are an inherentpart of how we understand and think of their homecountries/cities. Some buildings, like the Twin Tow-ers, retain their symbolic meaning long after their de-struction or disappearance.

Whilst places have long worked on creating pleas-ant and efficient built environments as a part of theirdevelopment there is a very explicit focus emerging(or re-emerging) on the role of iconic or signaturebuildings. Many places have adopted a consciousstrategy of using signature buildings and architectureto advertise and re-brand their cities. These buildinghave different functions, but are usually within areaslike culture and sports, and fairly often the building ispraised for its architecture. Architecture plays an im-portant role in urban regeneration projects and placemarketing and in this sense architecture becomes aform of advertising. According to Crilley (1993), ar-

chitecture is an integral part of the incorporation ofcultural investment and policy into urban growthstrategies, as cities struggle to attract inward invest-ment. Architecture, from new science parks to newopera houses, is thus mobilized to transmit a catchyimage of urban vitality.

Recently, signature or iconic buildings have gainedincreasing popularity among policy-makers and ur-ban developers. The basis for this development is tobe found in a couple of very successful examples ofsignature buildings that have helped give new life to acity with an image problem. One such example isFrank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Theinvestments in the building of the Museum have gen-erated huge success in changing the image of Bilbaofrom being a run down industrial city to an interna-tionally recognized centre for culture and art.Whether Bilbao’s increasing fortunes can be seen as adirect consequence of Guggenheim or not, the Bilbaoexperience has made many governments, municipali-ties and urban policy-makers seriously consider theidea of creating their own ‘Bilbao-effect’.

However, the idea of the iconic or signature build-ing have been questioned and criticized by severalpundits. The main critique of their current popularityis aimed at the difficulty of creating a truly iconic orunique building in a world that is increasingly full ofthem. As architect and author Charles Jencks (2005)suggests:

The danger (...) is that the iconic buildings becomeone-liners. They destroy cities. They send each otherup. In other words, if you have five iconic buildings ina row, they cancel each other out. They have all theseproblems. But my argument is that the iconic buildingis here to stay because of the decline of religion, thedecline of the monument, the rise of global capitalism,the rise of consumer society and celebrity culture, therise of corporations and mayors and people who askfor them. And also because the public likes iconicbuildings when they are successfully other – that is,when they are successful creative experiments.

An alternative to iconic or signature buildings is acultural or flagship project. These activities are oftenbased on local heritage, historical or artistic re-

19

sources, but also assume the guise of energetic rede-velopment programs. Examples of this phenomenoncan be found in the promotion of tourism in a numberof old British industrial cities (notably Liverpool andManchester) on the basis of their roles as popular mu-sic centers. A striking example can also be found inthe case of the Ruhr region where the repackaging ofan old industrial landscape has helped to spark offmajor new cultural developments (Gnad, 2000).However, the iconic building and other flagshipprojects or major events tend to create a ‘Disneyiza-tion’ (Bryman 2004) of the urban landscape whereevery urban space contains more or less the same in-gredients such as a the ubiquitous business and shop-ping districts and the bohemian or creative district inthe form of a SOHO™; a ‘theme park’ for bohemiansand culturally interested people.

Just as eye-catching buildings can be importantcommunications devices for places so too can head-line catching events. It is important to note then thatthe strategy to advertise and profile a city or a regionby focusing on one or several high profile or signa-ture things does not just relate to building unusualbuildings: it also includes hosting high profile or im-portant events and other flagship projects. Some an-nual or periodic events with altering hosts, like forexample the World Cup or the Eurovision Song Con-test, attract enormous attention, and to a certain de-gree economic turnovers, for the hosts. Permanentcalendar fixtures can also be important features of aplace’s landscape and brand: for instance the ParisFashion Week or the Davos World Economic Forum.Other interesting examples of short term happeningsthat have lasting image effects are music and culturalfestivals, trade fairs and other exhibitions.

In the following section two issues are discussed inparticular. The first topic deals with signature build-ings and larger cultural or flagship projects in urbanbranding. The second relates to the use of events asbranding strategies.

Iconic or signature buildings as branding strategies

As mentioned above, iconic or signature buildingsare often used as marketing tools to express and sym-bolise new urban images. This trend is beginning totake hold in Nordic cities or municipalities. Recentexamples in the Nordic countries include the newlybuilt Opera House in Copenhagen, the redevelopmentof the Oslo harbour around a new opera house and the

‘Turning Torso’ in Malmö. These projects have at-tracted tremendous national and international mediacoverage during planning and construction phases.Such grand projects, by their nature, often attract asmuch negative as positive comment. This is espe-cially true at local levels and during the planning andbuilding phases. The ‘Turning Torso’, for example,attracted significant negative publicity in Swedenduring its constructing: mainly due to its cost over-runs. However, opposition has gradually changed to-wards a more positive attitude and today the high risebuilding is seen as a positive symbol for the regener-ation of Malmö.

Despite notable exceptions there is a relative lackof new large-scale projects and new internationallyrecognized buildings in the Nordic countries. This isnot to say that there is a lack of iconic buildings withimportant symbolic values but rather that Nordic cit-ies have generally not been as aggressive in their useof grand projects and signature buildings as other Eu-ropean cities. This is, of course, not necessary a badthing since as important as planning new projects isthe maintenance and strengthening of the status andvalue of existing (often historical) buildings such asNyhavn in Copenhagen or Gamla Stan in Stockholm.

Use of design and architecture in Helsinki’s branding

Helsinki, being the capital of Finland, has to negoti-ate between its role as the visiting card of Finland andbuilding its own image as urban, tolerant and cultur-ally thriving. This image stands in stark contrast tothe sticky idea of Finland as ‘Europe’s last wilder-ness’. Modern design and architecture provide an im-portant and mediating ground for this development.Modern architectural building constitute an importantpart of Finland’s self understanding and imageabroad, but can also be crucial in the branding of thecity. Many of Helsinki’s important buildings stand asisolated icons, the neoclassical cathedral by C.L. En-gel, and the high-modern Finlandia Hall by AlvarAalto being prominent examples. Architectural land-marks constitute an important part in any city’s tour-ism routes. Signature architecture is not always thepreserve of art galleries or opera houses. In Helsinkisome of the most important signature buildings arecommercial spaces: such as the Academic bookstoreby Aalto; Stockmann department store by SigurdFrosterus; and the main railway station by ElielSaarinen. While Helsinki lacks contemporary signa-ture buildings (Kiasma by Steven Holl being a partial

20

exemption), much of its urban structure consists ofmodern architecture and interior design.

We should therefore try and broaden our under-standing of signature and iconic buildings. First, weshould not assume that they need to be entirely newand thus we should understand that promoting andprotecting architectural and design heritage is ex-tremely important to a city’s brand (and indeed itsself-image). Secondly, we should be aware of the im-portance and role of commercial spaces and buildingsin setting a city’s tone and image. Careful coopera-tion with commercial interests could be important if acity’s architectural and design credentials are toemerge or be strengthened.

The Shipyard City and the Palm Beach of Fredrikshavn

Signature buildings and spaces do not necessarilyneed to be permanent or even particularly character-istic of local conditions. Recently some cities havebegun to focus on ‘experience’ spaces of a more tem-porary or surprising nature to strengthen their brandor completely redirect it.

One such example is Fredrikshavn in Denmark. In1997, the closing down of two shipyards left 7000local workers unemployed, adding yet another nega-tive dimension to a public image already marked by(Swedish) tourists ‘on the loose’. To change this neg-ative trend new investments were made in, for exam-ple, the transformation of water front facilities to ca-ter for more immaterial production: the informationaltechnology industry. Moreover, and in accordancewith the notion of the new experience economy, thecity supported the ‘Ocean Blue’ project at the har-bour.

The project resulted in a variety of seasonal inter-ventions. Ski slopes in a Nordic context are perhapsnot so surprising but the construction of a summertime palm beach in a Nordic city ranks as more unu-sual. However, even though the politicians felt thatthings were changing for the better, a survey still con-firmed the negative image in the wider public. Thecity therefore hired the marketing company GaardboCOMM whose main task was to start out “tellingpositive stories”. In the advent of this strategy 1000locals were named ambassadors of the city and wereasked to spread the new gospel locally as well as na-tionally. The City Council chose a strategy of ‘wild’and daring projects challenging the main stream per-ception of a medium sized municipal city in the pe-riphery.

Regeneration and city brands

In the same way as a building may represent a city orfunction as advertising or be a part of a consciousurban branding strategy, a block, a quarter or a largerproject – flagship or culture project – can make up avital part of an urban branding strategy. A commonapproach has been to use culture in the advertising ofa city. Especially, culture has been used as a counter-image for de-industrialized cities in need of a newidentity and image.

A sort of first-generation approach to the system-atic deployment of cultural assets in the quest for lo-cal economic growth can be found in the aggressiveplace-marketing pursued by many municipal authori-ties since the early 1980s (Power and Scott 2004).This activity is often based on a local heritage of his-torical or artistic resources, but it also assumes the

Figure 3: The palm beach in Fredrikshavn.

21

guise of energetic redevelopment programs. Bilbao,Seville’s Expo, Manchester, Dublin’s Temple Bar andthe Ruhr region are instances of the remaking andmarketing of place through stressing culture and artsand are primarily focused on attracting tourists andinward investment. One of the dilemmas of this ap-proach is the mismatch that sometimes occurs be-tween the exigencies of the tourist trade and localcultural aspirations and attitudes. In short there is adanger that tourism and real estate development endup undermining the culture and arts industries theseapproaches supposedly build upon.

Of late years, an alternative (or, rather, a comple-mentary) second generation of policy approaches hascome increasingly under the scrutiny of local author-ities. In this instance, the objective is less the con-struction or redevelopment of facilities that will enticevisitors to flock into a given centre, as it is to stimulatethe formation of localized complexes of cultural in-dustries that will then export their outputs far andwide. This stress can be found in policy approachesthat stress the importance to economic developmentof creative industries, cultural industries or experi-ence industries. Such approaches are focused prima-rily on using policy to (re)build a network of creative/cultural/experience firms that are strongly anchoredto the local area through tightly-knit firm-to-firm linksand institutional infrastructures. Even more than inthe case of place-marketing approaches, this alterna-tive line of attack is critically dependent on a clearunderstanding of the logic and dynamics of the ag-glomeration processes that shape much of the geogra-phy of the modern cultural economy.

For any given agglomeration, the essential firsttask that policy-makers must face is to map out thecollective order of the local economy along with themultiple sources of the increasing-returns effects thatinvariably emanate from its inner workings. Thismost commonly involves mapping exercises and re-search on industrial activities clustered in the area.This in itself is a difficult task due both to the prob-lems of defining just where the cultural economy be-gins and ends, and to the intangible nature of many ofthe phenomena that lie at the core of localized com-petitive advantages. That said, it is this collective or-der more than anything else that presents possibilitiesfor meaningful and effective policy intervention inany given agglomeration. Blunt top-down approachesfocused on directive planning are unlikely in and ofthemselves to accomplish much at the local scale, ex-cept in special circumstances. In terms of costs andbenefits and general workability, the most successful

types of policies are generally those that concentrateon the character of localized external economies ofscale and scope as public or quasi-public goods. Thepoint here is both to stimulate the formation of usefulagglomeration effects that would otherwise be under-supplied or dissipated in the local economy, and toensure that existing externalities are not subject to se-vere misallocation as a result of market failure.Finely tuned bottom-up measures are essential in sit-uations like this.

Whether the goal is to use culture as a flag thatattracts new residents and tourists or whether there isa concerted attempt to create cultural

industries

clus-ters it is important that such strategies are connectedto, and embedded in, local structures and anchored tolocal actors. A common issue to all such local devel-opments (whatever the scale) is the need to coordi-nate the various local actors and interests involved inintervening in an area or in using one area as sym-bolic of a wider city or region. This is something thatis specifically dealt with later in the report.

Helsinki: Arabianranta Art and Design City; Design Quarter

The Arabianranta art and design city in the Helsinkiregion is a collaboration between the University ofArt and Design and the mixed-use development sur-rounding the Arabia shop and museum. Arabianrantais not a grand gesture as such but it is a clear exampleof a strong intervention in the built environment. It isequally an example of cooperation and planning pol-icy. However, as an intervention it profiles and brandsitself with very specific associations to culture anddesign.

The site for this project is situated in the huge Ara-bia porcelain factory. Around this nucleus, a new in-ner city suburb is under construction. The area is pep-pered with urban art and design-led environmentalprojects. A specific system directs 1–2 per cent of ac-quisition costs of both public and private projects toinvestments in art. Besides many art pieces, this hasled to high quality architectural execution and art thatis seamlessly integrated in new buildings. The projecthas involved local artists and architects as well as in-ternational stars, such as Robert Wilson, in large-scale projects in Arabianranta. The project can beconsidered as a best practice of both public-privatecooperation, production of themed urban area andcity branding.

Another example from Helsinki of a design andculture based intervention in the built environment

22

that has had an impact on the evolving Helsinki re-gion brand is the Design Quarter. At the initiative ofthe promotional organisation, Design Forum, parts ofPunavuori are branded as a design-intensive quarter.The core consists of the Design Forum and the De-sign Museum, located near each other. In this firststage, the Design Quarter is a marketing arrange-ment, joining the two public institutions and a selec-tion of design shops, cafes and restaurants. Ilpo Ko-skinen (Professor in industrial design at the Univer-sity of Art and Design in Helsinki) has proposed thenotion of “semiotic community” to describe this kindof place-based lifestyle option.

Husavik village

Not all attempts to use culture to boost an area’s im-age need to be based in large cities or focus on inter-national style art, architecture and design. Indeedsome of the more successful Nordic re-branding andredevelopment culture initiatives have happened insmall and isolated places; and used art and designwholly unique to the area. The Ice Hotel in Jukkas-järvi in Northern Sweden is now a well known exam-ple of a focus on design and culture led redevelop-ment and branding. The most interesting aspect of theJukkasjärvi story is the fact that they managed to turntheir weakness, their long, cold and icy winters, intotheir strength and prime attraction factor. Another ex-

ample is that of the town of Husavik in northern Ice-land. Husavik is a typical fishing village that used torun cooperative fish industry factories and agricul-tural services but suffered the closure of almost all itsindustry some years ago. The town has had to rein-vent itself as a place celebrating local culture and his-tory and nature. Small local entrepreneurs haveworked hard to sustain small enterprises in tourism,basing almost all livelihoods on the six to eight sum-mer weeks when foreign tourists visit the region.There are now two whale-watching companies estab-lished in the region and during the high season allaccommodation is usually booked. In 1998, designerswere brought in to look at the old harbour area to seehow the seafront could be developed from an indus-trial environment into something more sympatheticto visitors. After research in various locations in Can-ada and Europe a proposal was made to redevelop theexisting buildings to have capacity for retail and serv-ice areas, a museum focusing on Viking sailing tech-niques, and service locations for nature excursioncompanies. The designers presented images fromtourist locations abroad, showing details of street fur-niture, restaurants, and banking services to stimulateideas for the local public. A dynamic master plan wasmade for the town. The plan was based around theconcept of intimacy with the locality, the use of tradi-tional materials and methods with the aim being thatno one would realize that a designer has taken part in

Figure 4: Lume Media Cen-tre by Heikkinen-Komonen Architects in Arabianranta (photo Panu Lehtovuori).

23

the development. This work introduced an approachto the community that has realized the importance ofinvolving a designer in the very early entrepreneurialstages of possible projects. In this case, the innova-tive use of a designer as a facilitator for communityinvolvement in a redevelopment and branding planproved important. However, it shows that the use, andaccentuation, of local and authentic images and cul-ture can be an important starting point for the devel-opment of new types of industry: in this case tourism.

Branding through grand projects and events

Whilst the use of signature buildings is a commonmethod now used to put cities on the map, the use oflarge scale events coupled with building projects isalso a strategy adopted by cities to strengthen theirbrands. There is a long history of special events, tradefairs and exhibitions throughout the world and manyof these events have also involved signature buildingsand significant building and redevelopment pro-grammes. Examples include: the 1851 Great Exhibi-tion in London which involved the building of theCrystal Palace; hosting the Olympic Games and theupgrading of city infrastructure and the building ofOlympic villages and arenas (Barcelona’s hosting ofthe Olympics is often cited as the classic example ofthis); or World Fairs and Expos. Cities also regularlycompete to attract more regular events such as high-profile trade fairs that can enhance their reputation asmeeting places and centres of innovation and excel-lence. In the rest of this section we describe two suchexamples: the Millennium celebrations and Dome inLondon; and the Milan Furniture Trade Fair.

London – the millennium Dome

The Millennium Dome project in London is one ofthe best-known projects using architecture to cele-brate an event in the history of a city and a nation. Inthis respect the project has very much to do both withiconic buildings and events as branding strategies.The Millennium Dome project had several functions.First, the building housed an exhibition that shoulddemonstrate technical and cultural achievements.Second, the building was an anchor around which tonew enterprises and development could be attractedto the locality of Greenwich (the site of the Dome).Since the site was environmentally damaged theDome project was also seen as instrumental in repair-

ing the area with ecological and sustainability issues.The Millennium Dome project really increased thepace of which the Greenwich area was developed. Ifthe Dome had not been built, probably nothing wouldhave happened on the site for a long time since nodevelopment firm was willing to touch it.

In 1994, the British government established TheMillennium Commission which set up a competitionfor projects or events that would celebrate the newMillennium. An ambitious plan was launched with anenormous budget (especially for a one year event) of£758 million. The event and building was to symbol-ise a dynamic and modern Britain and put Londonfirmly at the centre of the global frenzy surroundingthe millennium.

The financial situation of the Millennium Domeinvolved a range of different and sometimes innova-tive sources. In particular the Dome project got mostof its funding from the new national lottery meaningthat no tax payer's money was used for the construc-tion of the Millennium Dome. Despite such innova-tive financial arrangements the project is perhapsmost memorable and remarkable, at least in the UK,for the level of negative media attention it drew to thepoliticians, Government departments and local au-thorities involved. Initially the idea drew positive at-tention from the press who saw it as the type of boldplan that underpinned historic successes such as theFestival of Britain in 1951 (which led to Europe’slargest arts and culture complex: the South Bank

Figure 5: Popularity curve for the Millennium Dome(Drawn at a seminar in London in 2006 in whichleading members of the Dome team and various crit-ics assessed the project).

24

Centre) and earlier world fairs. However, the situa-tion had changed by the start of construction. In theend, the British press spent several years during theconstruction phase and the entire year in which theDome actually accepted visitors systematically ridi-culing the project and those involved.

The Dome project soon created a series of regionalrifts since it quickly became a symbol of centralizedgovernment favouring spending in the capital and try-ing to hide this favouritism under a cloud of ‘spin’.The nation did not like the London power to squandermoney that could be spent locally. A long series ofdesign faults, construction problems and cost over-runs (all of which the government attempted to‘spin’) reinforced the negative images the projectgenerated. The Dome became a symbol of how to getthings wrong and a symbol for top-down planningthat was out of touch with reality and the wants andneeds of the British public.

The project thus demonstrates that the enthusiasmthat policymakers have for iconic buildings and grand(but often powerfully defined) cultural interventionscan just as easily lead to negative brands as they canto positive brands. A key question, however, is thelongevity of these negative brands. Without defend-ing the Dome in any way, it is interesting to note howmany iconic and signature buildings are built and ini-tiated under a storm of public and media protest. In-deed the architect of the Dome project, Richard Rog-ers, had a similar experience from the building of thePompidou Centre in Paris. Initially the Pompidou andthe surrounding redevelopment was widely criticisedand abused during its inception and construction.

Even the Eiffel Tower had the same problem withnegative attitudes from the public. These projects arenow, of course, quite popular with both tourists andlocals.

It seems that for many large scale projects publicpopularity grows with time; though this is dependentupon the project being of high quality. This indicatesthat whilst policy must be sensitive to how media andpublic images are handled under the construction andplanning phases the results for the place’s image andbrand may take a long time to fully emerge. Policyshould be aware that, especially in the case of signa-ture buildings and grand projects, results will not beapparent immediately and that long term commit-ment is needed if the investment is to bear fruit.

Building for temporary signatures: trade fairs and regular events

Whilst some events are one-off there is now anawareness of the role of short lived but regular eventsin marketing a city and region. An exceptional exam-ple of this is the importance of business of trade fairs,exhibitions and other temporary events as key indica-tors of a city’s dynamism and business climate. Inaddition, such events can bring cities significant reve-nue in the form of business visitors and tourists.However, attracting and hosting such events is farfrom cost free and even short lived events such astrade fairs involve significant investment in infra-structure and capacity (in terms of fair grounds, ac-commodation, etc.). The effectiveness of trade fairsas a marketing and symbolic tool combined with therevenue they can bring in has meant that there is in-tense international competition for events and thatmany cities are now investing large sums in both at-tracting trade fairs and festivals and in building thefacilities these events need.

Trade fairs, etc. also have a vital role in economicdevelopment in that they support firm level competi-tiveness and competence. For firms, trade fairs andindustry events are often the most direct and impor-tant route to new markets and distribution channels.Trade fairs have a general importance for the inter-change of information and meeting industry partici-pants as well as their export-promotion function.Larger international trade fairs also attract significantmedia attention that can be invaluable to firms tryingto establish themselves in new markets.

An interesting example in this development is Mi-lan in northern Italy. The large global design, fashionand furniture trade fairs and exhibitions the city hosts

Figure 6: Popularity curve for public iconic buildings.

NEUTRAL OPINION ABOUT THE PROJECT

THE

DATE

OF

THE

IDEA

TOCR

EATE

ASI

GNA

TURE

BUIL

DIN

G

OPE

NIN

GDA

Y

YEAR 0YEAR-1YEAR-2YEAR-3

PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT PROJECTS INTENDED TO BE ABRANDING CATALYST FOR COMMUNITIES

NEGATIVE PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT THE PROJECT

POSITIVE PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT THE PROJECT

25

work as powerful advertising for the city, but also as away of strengthening Milan’s position as a globalcentre for fashion and design. Participating and visit-ing these trade fairs and exhibitions are producers,buyers, customers, retailers, distributors and touriststhat together have the power and possibility to spreadthe idea of Milan as a centre for design and fashion.More than anything there are two events in Milan thathave come to symbolise the city and its (post)indus-trial economic base: the Milan Furniture Fair and theMilan Fashion Weeks.

Milano Furniture Fair or the Salone Internazionaledel Mobile (and the Milan International Design Weekthat runs parallel to it) is the largest furniture fair inthe world and over one week attracts more than 120000 visitors and over 1200 exhibitors. It is the mostimportant trade fair for furniture, lighting and interiordesign. The Milan Furniture Fair has a great impacton trends, networks and contacts in the furniture in-dustry world wide. To the city the trade fair has sinceits beginning been central in creating the image ofMilan as a world leading hub for the furniture anddesign industry.

The ability to successfully host such large scaletemporary activities, like the furniture fair, is also

making a permanent physical impact on the built en-vironment in Milan. Up till the year of 2004, the areaof the trade fair (Fiera Milano) was located near thecity centre. To maintain and further strengthen theposition of Milan as a centre for design, large invest-ments have been made into a totally new exhibitionarea. This new exhibition site is custom made to fitsizeable international trade fairs. The old exhibitioncomplex in the city centre will be redeveloped andrenamed the City Complex. Parts of it will remainhost for shows and conferences in the city and the restof the old exhibition complex will be transformedinto a new district with towers and buildings designedby international renowned architects like Arata Iso-zaki, Daniel Liebeskind, Zaha Hadid and Pier PaoloMaggiora (no doubt with many signature buildingsinvolved).

The new exhibition area is located just outside Mi-lan on a site previously used by an oil refinery. It isthe largest development project in Italy and also themost expensive; and largest self-financed investmentwith approximately ı750 million going into theproject. The new exhibition site occupies about 2 mil-lion square metres with a gross floor space of approx-imately 530 000 square metres. The whole exhibition

Figure 7: Entrance to the new Fiera Milano.

26

site is more like a new town involving several blocksdedicated to trade fairs and exhibitions. It has a policestation, airline check-in, chapel and a mosque. It isalso the site for three new hotels and a subway linethat links directly with central Milan.

In a similar way as the Milan furniture fair, thefashion weeks are an integral part of the internationalfashion circuit. The fashion weeks function as tempo-rary events or nodes where the industry get togetherto share information, see new fashion collections,trends, etc. and to exchange goods. These events arenot just sales points but are also meeting points andnetwork building events. The fashion weeks in Milan,just like the furniture fair, give the opportunity tomanage some of your business acquaintances (cus-tomers, producers, suppliers etc.) at one place at thesame time. For domestic and local firms such eventsmean that they can reach a wide variety of customersand markets in one place in a short period.

The fashion events also leave their mark on theyear round environment. In the case of Milan therehas been significant urban redevelopment initiativesundertaken by private actors with the aim of creatingthe right sort of flexible and symbolic spaces for tem-porary events and for incoming visitors: e.g. Dolce &Gabbana recent rebuilding of a former cinema as a1000 person show venue.

Fashion industry actors, such as Giorgio Armanietc., seem to understand that the surrounding envi-ronment reflects greatly on the perception of theproducts and brands they sell. Consequently theyhave been active in investing in urban infrastructurethat supports the sort of image they want for Milan:for instance by investing in large arts and culturalcomplexes and by marketing the city’s name bythemselves. Indeed for city’s interested in promotionit should be understood that business has the capacity

to spend substantial amounts of money on advertisingthe city that reflects the image they want to have asso-ciated with their products. The implication of this isthat policymakers could be advised to cooperateclosely with and encourage private firms to use theircity as a backdrop to advertising campaigns. Some-times indirect marketing of a city – such as its role asa backdrop for a successful product or a film – can bemuch more effective than direct advertising con-ducted by the city authorities.

The implications of what has been said about tem-porary events – and particularly trade fair events – forNordic cities and regions is that such events can beimportant components of a successful brand strategy:especially one aimed at the business sector. However,whilst cities should help develop their own events co-operation on a Nordic level can be of a wider regionalimportance and help add to all Nordic brands.

Thus Nordic and national trade fairs should besupported in efforts they make to internationalize: in-ternationally recognised trade fairs greatly enhanceboth city and larger regional brands and help firms toaccess wider markets. Private actors that run tradefair events have already started using the Nordicbrand themselves. For instance, the advertising cam-paign for Stockholm Furniture Fair 2006 went underthe slogan: “Världens största mässa för nordisk de-sign” (The world’s largest trade fair for Nordic de-sign). Copenhagen International Furniture Fair 2006advertised under the slogan: “Your access to Scandi-navian furniture and design”. Whilst the emergenceof one local trade fair as ‘the’ Nordic event may takebusiness away from other competing Nordic events itcan be considered that a few strong global brands arebetter for the regional image and for companies thana fragmented set of weaker brands.

27

5. Branding through planning, urban redevelopment, and administering long term change

In contrast to more short term focuses on creating asplash that many branding exercises involve, a rangeof Nordic and European cities have concentrated ondeveloping long term holistic approaches to urbanbranding. These approaches most often involve urbanstrategic and operative planning bodies that aim at thepromotion and development of their respective urbanregions through long term networking, branding,competence building and industrial support. Thesetypes of approaches attempt to link many areas ofurban, economic, social and infrastructural develop-ment in order to create an integrated platform withinwhich the city or region gets remade and re-imag-ined.

Of course, cities and regions have for many yearsadopted long term and integrated approaches to theirdevelopment. What is often quite new about more re-cent variants of this is the stress these initiatives nowplace on the ‘soft-side’ of development: the develop-ment of image, brand and reputation.

The integration of a focus on the ‘soft-side’ intodevelopment plans can be particularly challengingfor city and regional actors as it involves them notonly in the sort of conflicts hard-side development(such as infrastructure upgrading) involve but also inhighly emotive issues around identity and inclusion.This leaves the public sector with a challenge toadopt strategies of marketing and promotion from theprivate sector without losing public support and an-choring. Such strategies require knowledge on how toorganize both physical and image renewal, and theability to coordinate a wide range of interests be-comes crucial for the competitiveness of the respec-tive urban region.

Internationally and in the Nordic countries twomain planning tendencies have become central tosuch integrated branding approaches.

Firstly, there has been a tendency within city andplanning authorities (as well as private developers) tobecome highly selective: to highlight and support theregeneration of certain areas of their cities or certain‘clusters’. Typically this has involved either: a focuson high-technology industries and the building (andbranding) of science parks and technopoles; or a fo-

cus on regenerating problem ridden urban and declin-ing areas (most often dockland areas or quarters pop-ulated by ‘creative’ people) and to use these redevel-oped areas as symbolic of how the city as a whole ischanging. Regeneration thus becomes both aboutchanging the social and economic structure of spe-cific areas and about creating a built expression of theentire city’s new direction and regeneration.

Secondly, there has been the growth of a new re-gionalism in planning and policy circles. This hasmeant that central government as well as city and lo-cal authorities have started to pursue cooperationwithin wider regional settings as a key policy goal.Greater regional cooperation is seen as essential ifsmaller administrative units and local actors can gainthe economies of scale and scope they need in orderto make a mark in a seemingly ever more globalizedworld. In such initiatives local identities and imagesget recast (or pushed to the side) in the service ofcreating a larger regional identity and developmentplan.

Urban branding and development processes in-volve a range of various political interests, differentgovernmental bodies at various levels, and privatesector interests such as landowners, building compa-nies, business communities, inhabitants and interestgroups. This characteristic makes it crucial for urbangovernmental actors to possess viable tools and or-ganizational models for handling such a complex setof often competing interests. The rest of this sectiondeals with some Nordic branding cases that involvedfirst and foremost the necessity to coordinate differ-ent actors and interest groups. A particular issue hereis how such processes can work successfully whenboth public and private actors take part; and how dif-ferent actors can learn from and adapt to each other.

Coordinating local actors

As part of the research this report is based upon, astudy of the Norwegian town of Drammen was con-ducted. The case study demonstrates that sorting outa well functioning forum for the coordination of local

28

interests and actors is a vital basis for any urbanbranding exercise (no matter what form the brandingtakes). In addition, the case study brings up the ques-tion of the relation between the built environment andconstructed images. To create an effective re-imagingof a city – a total image change – it is, in many cases,important that this campaign is supported by a mate-rial infrastructure and built environment that is coher-ent with the images produced.

Drammen

Drammen is a relatively small town of 60 000 resi-dents located 40 km outside Oslo. In recent years thetown has worked hard to change its image in order toattract and retain residents. Studies show that Dram-men has a migration problem, where a considerablepercentage of the population moves in or out of thecity (Vestby 2005). Like many other cities at the be-ginning of the 21st century Drammen has undergonea restructuring of its business life, with service andknowledge replacing the traditional industrial pro-duction, and faces tough challenges related to attract-ing new businesses, new knowledge institutions andlast but not least, new inhabitants. In addition to thesechanges Drammen has for many years been known asNorway's largest intersection – one of the ugliestplaces in Norway – characterized by heavy pollutionand traffic noise.

This situation launched some major changes. In2003, the leader of the city’s planning council explic-itly defined them as part of a branding process (Wøhni2003). These projects have been part of a long-termprocess (lasting almost twenty years) of changing the‘face’ of the city in order to tell a different story aboutDrammen. The actual initiative for the brandingproject came from a committee consisting of mem-bers from the municipality administration and theheads of the local business chambers. The projectworking group was comprised of members from boththe public and the private sector: civic servants fromthe development and planning part of the administra-tion, heads of the business chambers and a represent-ative from the regional newspaper, and an informalproject advisory group consisting of politicians andother prominent persons.

Three important city development projects wereprioritized: the cleaning of the river; the renewal ofthe road system liberating the town centre of traffic;and the upgrading of the central town axis. But recentcomment has also highlighted the long-term public/private partnership that has “anchored the various

projects outside the town hall in a long term strategy”(Haslum 2005). A central theme in Drammen hasbeen the relationship between urban branding proc-esses and the transformation of the city’s physical en-vironment. In November 2005 the group presented itsresults and launched “Elvebyen” – “The riversidecity” as a motto for the future storytelling for Dram-men.

In Drammen, the branding process so far has beenbroadly anchored, with participants from a regionallevel, the local business community and both the po-litical and administrative level of the municipality.Although the different actors have different motiva-tions for participating and committing to the process,the impression is that they have formed a strong pub-lic/private alliance in working with the branding pol-icy, and also for all the participants the interviewsshow that there clearly is a lot of patriotism and lovefor the city involved as well. It has also been a delib-erate strategy not to involve the political level in theday-to-day work and actual outcome of the brandingproject. The reason has to do with the long-term per-spective of a branding strategy exceeding the politicalgoverning periods of four years. The inhabitants (to-gether with the media) are being put forward as themain ‘brand ambassadors’, the project has not had anexplicit strategy for involving the public during thisfirst phase. Instead there has, as mentioned above,been a focus on involving strategic partners also inreviewing the work of this first phase. There is a po-tential risk that the project therefore does not receiveas much support and attention in the population as itneeds.

Urban branding at its most effective seems to in-volve an overall strategy for developing and sustain-ing all aspects of the community: including the phys-ical environment, civic authorities, culture, educationand lobbying for state funding and national institu-tions.

Today in Drammen there is a feeling that, the com-bination of physical reconstruction combined withsuch things as improvement of the local museum andthe theatre, has profoundly changed the city. It seemsto be a common feeling locally that Drammen nowhad reached a level where it had definitive urbanqualities to offer: it had become a good “product” tosell. There has also been a general change in the atti-tude towards the city among the local population,and, perhaps most importantly, the regional newspa-per has changed their editorial policy and decided tobecome an active partner in the community buildingprocess.

29

Branding a city is a slow process where you haveto be able to build long-term credibility whilst under-standing that you cannot necessarily command an or-ganization to ‘fall in behind you’. Drammen’s answerto this challenge has been to build strategic allianceswith major public and private actors and stakehold-ers. All the participants have also financially contrib-uted to this joint venture. At the same time as thecommunication part of the strategy needs to be fo-cused and coordinated for it to be efficient and havethe desired effect, the study has also shown thatbranding with the purpose of attracting new inhabit-ants really affects all aspects of the development of acity as part of a product ‘development’ or ‘mainte-nance’ strategy. This means that it has to be treated asa broad issue involving a large spectrum of stake-holders, but also that the timing of the branding strat-egy has to be carefully considered. In Drammen theywaited until the ‘product’ in terms of the physical en-vironment was satisfactory.

In the last few years investments in the physicalenvironments have been paying off. In 2003 Dram-men won a national city-environment prize; in 2004 anational award for the design of the road system; andin 2005 a national design award for the town’s centralsquare. In planning journals and ‘specialist press’,Drammen has been presented as an example to belearnt from.

This case suggests, to us, that if one is interested inbranding directed towards attracting new migrants/residents it is important to involve a range of bothpublic and private strategic community actors in theplanning and implementing of the branding strategyto ensure ownership and momentum. It is also neces-sary to focus on means directed at turning the inhab-itants into ‘brand ambassadors’ to reach a broad audi-ence and give the brand plausibility. Whatever urbanbranding strategy used there is a need to be aware thatreaching the goal is a long term process that will re-quire financial resources and long term commitmentfrom all parties, and to carry out regular and system-atic follow-up of campaigns.

Balancing competing regional agendas

In general, urban branding and development proc-esses involve a range of various political interests,different governmental bodies at various levels, andprivate sector interests such as landowners, buildingcompanies, business communities, inhabitants and

interest groups. In particular there has been a growthof a new regionalism in planning and policy circles.This has meant that central government as well ascity and local authorities have started to pursue coop-eration within wider regional settings as a key policygoal. Greater regional cooperation is seen as essentialif smaller administrative units and local actors cangain the economies of scale and scope they need inorder to make a mark in a seemingly ever more glo-balized world. This characteristic makes it crucial forurban governmental actors to possess viable tools andorganizational models for handling such a complexset of often competing interests.

In order for small or medium-sized places or re-gions to be competitive and attract visitors, residentsand, especially ‘faceless’ foreign capital and invest-ments, they need to reach the level of a sufficient crit-ical mass. Therefore, the development of strategic al-liances with other regions or locations has increasedwith the aim of creating a win-win-situation for allparties involved. Usually the largest and most wellknown city of the region acts as an ‘umbrella brand’.Below is an interesting example from the Helsinkiregion where the main city Helsinki is working as an‘umbrella brand’ for the larger region. Other interest-ing Nordic examples of this kind are the Copenha-gen-Øresund region and the Stockholm-Mälardalenregion.

Helsinki Metropolitan Area

The example of Helsinki region's image creation at-tempts in recent years is helpful in illustrating the dif-ficulties involved in creating a single regional brand.We have already, in this report, seen that various localinitiatives and regeneration projects are underway.However, on a wider level there has been a lack ofcoherent planning of the image creation.

The core of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area con-sists of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen, witha combined population of 980 000 (2004). These fourcities have common public transport and share otherservices. From a branding point of view it is onefunctional city currently developing into a multi-levelnetwork of specialized centres and districts. In its“Territorial Review of Helsinki” (2002), the OECDuses a wider definition, including towns and rural ar-eas with significant commuting and cultural links tothe core. In this definition the Helsinki region iscounted as 1.8 million inhabitants. However, this def-inition is too wide for most concrete municipal coop-eration and development projects.

30

The presumption was that although there is offi-cially a shared branding strategy for the three cities inthe Helsinki Region, it is not appropriated well. Onthe contrary, the cities seem rather to compete witheach other.

When analysing the promotion material (handouts,internet websites with image banks and video clips)used for international marketing it seems like the cit-ies have a hard time collaborating under the commonbrand “Helsinki Region – Europe’s Magnetic North”.Instead the cities outside Helsinki seem to rely ondifferent topics and strategies. The city of Espoo isusing its own slogan “Espoo – the City for Creativityand Expertise”

,

in this emphasizing the importance ofthe Otaniemi high-tech area, where the University ofTechnology and the Nokia’s headquarters are both lo-cated. Vantaa (“The Good Life City”) on the otherhand relies on the Helsinki –Vantaa airport and hasdeveloped the concept of ‘Aviapolis’. Helsinkidoesn’t have a specific slogan; relying perhaps in-stead on its position as the capital of Finland and theonly real urban area in the region.

The marketing material that was analyzed focusedon the role of nature, good everyday life and ad-vanced high tech. Themes of urban culture, architec-ture and modern design, winter and multiculturalismare absent or less visible. Also interesting was thatalthough many of the citizens in the region live in

suburbs like Espoo and Vantaa, the suburbs and sub-urban ways of life are completely missing from thepromotion material.

The traditional, iconic images of Finland andFinns are strongly present in the material analysed.The Finnish nation state was very much constructedunder the influence of German romanticism andHerderian concepts of people, nature and history arestill emphasized even when presenting modern Fin-land. In this national imagery, the Finns are silent andunsociable people from the deep woods with a strongrelation to nature:

“Finnish culture does have a few special features.Foremost among these is the sauna, to which hostshappily conduct their guests. Second, the conversa-tional culture may at first confuse the guest. Finns of-ten listen more than they speak. They may also leavelong pauses in the conversation; these do not hold anynegative meaning“(http://www.hel2.fi/eca/).

In summary it seems that it is Finland rather than theHelsinki region that is being branded. The brandingstrategy seems to be careful, modest, defensive,based mostly on a blend of tradition (nature, nationalmythology) with welfare state values (‘good every-day life’) and a step towards creativity (high-tech).

The Helsinki region is another example of a func-tioning and well connected economic region that for

Figure 8: Map showing the four core cities and different groupings of surrounding municipalities (source YTV).

31

many purposes – attracting visitors and investment –shares more or less the same space and identity. How-ever, a lack of regional coordination means that in-stead of a variety of images and stories are producedthat are often at odds with each other. This case dem-

onstrates the problems associated with developingstrong collective brands for functionally integratedregions that are divided into a large number ofsmaller administrative areas.

32

6. Branding through advertising

All the branding exercises and approaches we studiedused advertising and direct marketing of varioussorts. This type of work is completely immaterial inits output and is often the most difficult part of abranding strategy to get right. Public sector actors areoften not as experienced as private sector ones whenit comes to buying and using marketing and advertis-ing services. In addition, reaching an ever more me-dia and advert saturated public is increasingly diffi-cult (even for the most media-experienced and well-financed firms). Presenting the right image in theright way through the right channels is a major chal-lenge for urban branding initiatives.

Particularly confusing and challenging for manycan be the sheer variety of different media and chan-nels branding can be communicated through. A pre-liminary list of the most commonly used methods isas follows:

– Advertising in the press– Adverts through industry and business press and

contact points– Brochures and audio-visual materials– Exhibitions– Homecoming days– Letters to potential in-migrants– Radio and television adverts– Road side adverts and displays– Websites

The most commonly used method is the combinationof a slogan and logo. This is often considered an es-sential starting point for any urban branding cam-paign. A series of examples and experiences haveshown this is to be a cost effective and important mar-keting tool. However, it is also a difficult tool to use:a poorly chosen slogan or logo can haunt a city formany years.

The classic example of a successful slogan andlogo is the ‘I Love NY’ campaign produced for NewYork State and City authorities.

In 1977 the State of New York decided to combatincreasingly negative images surrounding the cityand state. By the 1970s New York had become asso-ciated with crime and inner city depravation for many

outsiders and the strength of these images was per-ceived to be negatively affecting investment and, par-ticularly, tourism. The State authorities consulted andemployed the advertising agency Wells, Rich andGreene and the graphic artist Milton Glaser. The logoand slogan were so successful that they are still usedtoday and are recognised as one of the most success-ful city brands ever created; it has appeared on notjust city materials but also on everything from T-shirts to postcards, and has been adapted and manip-ulated in a multitude of different ways and contexts.In rare cases such as the ‘I Love NY’ campaign thebrand can not only advertise the city but also developan iconic status of its own and a financial value. Re-cently the Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberghas stated his intention to license the logo itself on arange of merchandise. These recent moves to regaincontrol over the brand come as part of a renewed ef-fort on the part of the Bloomberg administration toaggressively market New York as a destination forcorporations, events and tourists. In the 2003 State ofthe City Address, Bloomberg said that:

“New York is in a fierce, worldwide competition; ourstrategy must be to hone our competitive advantages.We must offer the best product — and sell it, force-fully… we'll market our advantages aggressively andglobally. We'll find the money to advertise ourstrengths-and tell people around the world, NYC is theplace to be. Right now!”

The message from such examples and from the litera-ture on image communications and branding is thatthe most important part of any strategy is developinga coherent and convincing ‘story’. For both large andsmall cities finding a story or even a set of stories,which is attractive to both your target market and to

Figure 9: The official logo of New York City.

33

the public and city that it reflects can be problematic.A clear lesson from experiences around the world isthat there is no easy answer to identifying the storythat will work best. However, evidence from Danishcase studies conducted for this project suggests thatwhen branding the immaterial aspects of a city fourstages and areas are common to Danish branding ini-tiatives:

1. Identify the story (with a plot) for the territory

Branding practices are about ‘selective story telling’:most often the telling of a ‘positive story’. However,in urban branding it is important that such storieshave a direct relationship to the reality on the groundand consequently such stories are more successfulwhen they are shared by local stakeholders.

2. Use (in a managed way) professional brand-builders

Most urban branding exercises choose to use profes-sional marketing/branding bureaus for the job of con-structing a branding strategy. Choosing the right bu-reau and using their services in the right way is one ofthe most difficult parts of the branding process forpublic actors and agencies.

3. Develop an ‘image strategy’

Common to the cases is an understanding of the im-portance of an image strategy. An image strategy con-sists of an image analysis/survey, a new logo, agraphic design manual, and an implementation strat-egy for feeding the new image to local stakeholders,business communities, municipal officers, and citi-zens. The image strategy covers policies for commu-nication and media usage as well as a more or lessinstitutionalised feed-back input on its efficiency.

4. Using the brand in different ways and different forms

The aim of the vast majority of Danish initiatives wasto have as many agents as possible using the logosand slogans. As a result a large amount of merchan-dise is produced in all cases (from flags, t-shirts andties to pencils, stickers and DVDs). Media and inter-net exposure is also common to all cases. However,there is very little consciousness often of how the par-ticular communication channel/medium can nega-tively affect the brand and little appreciation thatover-exposure or exposure to the wrong groups candamage brands.

The rest of this chapter will focus on three furthercase studies conducted by the project team. The first

focused on two branding initiatives in Stockholm andproblematizes how branding processes may vary ac-cording to their local anchoring. The second is onHjørring in Denmark, and shows how an advertisingcampaign, following a large scale urban developmentproject, is used in branding and re-branding the cityimage. The third focused on the re-imagining ofRanders in Denmark and on how the local populationcontested and criticized the new brand.

Stockholm – two approaches to local an-choring of the branding process

The first case is that of Stockholm and focuses upontwo different approaches to local anchoring of thebranding process. Also, this case deals with the factthat in many places more than one branding strategymight be running at the same time. Each of thesestrategies is likely to have separate stories, imagestrategies and institutional anchoring and ownership:meaning that conflicting images and affects arelikely. Although, the bigger the city, the more storiesshould be able to fit the image of the city. Globalcentres, like the above mentioned New York City, areintertwined with different stories – from business toleisure.

Amongst many branding processes ongoing inStockholm two urban prominent brands have beendeveloping at roughly the same period. These operateat various urban geographical and political levels.The first of these is an attempt to create a new imageand brand for the entire city. This involves brandingStockholm as the ‘Capital of Scandinavia’. Parallel tothis official public/city authority branding process isa local district-level process which involves local en-trepreneurs building a brand around a shopping andentertainment area in a rapidly gentrifying area of thesouthern inner city: SoFo (South of Folkungagatan atSödermalm).

Both brands have generated considerable attentionboth nationally and internationally. The organisationof the two branding processes clearly shows how ur-ban branding may take different forms.

Stockholm – ‘the Capital of Scandinavia’

In 2005 Stockholm city authorities launched an at-tempt to re-brand the city as ‘the Capital of Scandina-via’. The overall objective for the branding exerciseis to help attract businesses and investment as well asnew citizens and tourists. The city needed a unifyingbrand that could replace the diverging brands andnames that had co-existed for a long time, such as

34

‘Beauty on Water’, ‘The Biotech Capital’ or ‘TheVenice of the North’. Of these former brands ‘Beautyon Water’ was the strongest, but as this was only di-rected towards the tourist market, it was thought im-portant to develop a new brand that covered business,inhabitants, investments and tourists.

The new brand aggressively tries to build on thegeographical centrality of the city in the Nordic andBaltic region and its place as a powerful business andcultural centre in the region. The brand builds on a setof observations about the city’s central role in the re-gion: it is the largest tourist destination in the region;it is an important centre for regional financial serv-ices and financial markets; it is home to many largedomestic firms; it hosts many global firms’ regionalheadquarters; it is a world class centre and market forthe arts and culture; and hosts globally importantevents such as the Nobel prize ceremonies. Despiteall these strengths claiming that it is the ‘capital’ ofScandinavia is quite bold. The expressed aim of thisambitious title is that it is also an attempt to challengeSwedish modesty and forcing the inhabitants ofStockholm to take a bolder and prouder attitude to-ward their own city.

Just as in other places the development of thebrand itself was outsourced to a private firm. Thebranding of Stockholm was in 2003 contracted out toStockholm-based Dowell // Stubbs branding agencyby the managing director Jörgen Kleist of StockholmBusiness Region. The fact that this company prima-rily consists of foreign born employees and ownerswas said to help ensure an objective ‘external eye’ onthe city. The firm was given the brief to develop aclear, usable and distinct message which was easy toremember and that reflected Stockholm’s position inEurope. In collaboration with selected local stake-holders the agency collected a range of Stockholm’scharacteristics, and grouped under the headings of‘centrality’, ‘business’ and ‘culture’. When the brandwas fully developed, the employer Stockholm Busi-ness Region wanted a coherent argument for andstory behind the new Stockholm brand. This led to‘the brand book’, which summarizes all the reasonsfor branding the city as the Capital of Scandinavia.

Whilst the brand was developed by a private firmits implementation is not. The implementation of thebrand is managed by a team at Stockholm BusinessRegion. A central part of the implementation activityis to make remaining local stakeholders use the newStockholm brand in their marketing efforts. Stock-holm Business Region has restructured its webpage,established a Public Relations position and uses a

wide range of printed materials in the implementationof the brand. Autumn 2006 Stockholm Business Re-gion is planning to measure the penetration of thebrand in the local business milieu.

The effectiveness of the brand is, at this stage, hardto estimate. Though it has gained widespread atten-tion in Stockholm it has perhaps not raised such pos-itive feelings in other Nordic countries. Indeed onecan imagine that for the authorities of, for instance,Copenhagen it is not so ‘Wonderful’ to have a closeneighbour symbolically downgrade them to the statusof a regional satellite. Despite such possible objec-tions, the use in the brand of the idea of being part ofa wider Scandinavian region and identity is, however,interesting. It is recognized that for many outsidersthe Nordic countries share much the same space,characteristics and market. Using broad Nordic or re-gional brands can be a way for individual cities tohelp put themselves on the map.

SoFo

Parallel to attempts to develop a citywide identitymore local processes of definition and identity crea-tion are often ongoing. SoFo (South of Folkungaga-tan) is a district within a district (Södermalm) ofStockholm. The area has, in recent years, undergonerapid gentrification and is now increasingly popu-lated with trendy cafés, bars and small fashion anddesign shops.

The name for the area is far from the result of anorganic process. The brand SoFo was invented in1998 by three friends (Henrik Borggren, Fredrik Gle-jsner and Per Holm) who were involved in helpingfriends renovate cafés and the like in the area. Theyfelt a need to name the area where they were hangingout, and inspired by SoHo in New York they inventedthe idea of SoFo.

The idea behind the slogan was to re-brand thepreviously working class quarter as a ‘hip’, gentrifiedand vibrant urban area. The strategy taken to deploythe brand constituted very much of ‘word of month’channelled through friends and colleagues. The trioprinted a number of t-shirts and stickers that wheredistributed to acquaintances that were running cafés,shops, galleries and studios in the area. In this sensethe implementation process made the local ambassa-dors ‘live the brand’. After a while people got curiousabout the meaning of ‘SoFo’, and the word of mouthstarted to spread. As such the SoFo brand was estab-lished with scarce resources and is very much a resultof social and network processes. After a couple ofyears the term SoFo had triggered such curiosity and

35

attention that it has slipped into common usage in thearea and beyond. Indeed by 2004 the word had evenworked its way back to its New York origins:

“To the uninitiated, Sweden is to style as Germany isto humor. But as anyone with finely tuned radar willtell you, the land that gave us Roxette and Lars Nils-son is now on the international fashion map. Stock-holm, the Swedish capital, even has a thriving newshopping district, which is named, much to the embar-rassment of the locals, SoFo, as in ''South of Folkun-gagatan.'' Located in the formerly working-class dis-trict of Sodermalm, SoFo serves up a smorgasbord ofindie fashion stores selling everything from asceticavant-garde to hard-edged streetwear” (Extract fromarticle on SoFo in

The New York Times

, August 29,2004).

Although the initiators did not have any intentions inmaking money on the brand they did patent the name.This was, they say, in order to prevent other andlarger commercial actors from profiting from it. Inline with this the brand policy does not allow anyoneto use the name for commercial purposes. As such theoriginators of the brand initially had an idealistic ap-proach to the brand, and this policy has probablygiven the brand a certain aura of cultural credibility.

The development of the brand is now largely takencare of by local shop owners and the like. Local shopowners have, for instance, established a network toadvertise the area and conducted joint lobbying to getthe area upgraded. The developing local businesscommunity has taken effective control of the brandand their involvement and control has been vital forits success and credibility. However, it must be notedthat whilst the trio of inventors are no longer involvedin the day-to-day running of the brand they still ownthe copyright to the brand. Whilst this seems not to bea problem at present, one can imagine that legal own-ership by private individuals of an urban area’s iden-tity and principal marketing point could create signif-icant difficult problems for the local community thatgrows around it.

The two branding stories from Stockholm illus-trate how urban branding processes may function atvarious levels and in quite distinct ways. Althoughthe two cases are not comparable as such, they wereboth developed in roughly the same period, they areboth drawing upon cultural vibrancy as one of themain attraction factors, and they have both receivedconsiderable attention locally, nationally and interna-tionally. However, the differences between the twobranding processes seem to be larger than the similar-ities. The most surprising proof of this is the fact thatthe manager of the branding agency in charge of the

Stockholm brand had not even heard of the SoFobrand when asked after having created the Stockholmbrand Capital of Scandinavia. Nor had the inventor ofthe SoFo brand heard of the Capital of Scandinaviabrand. This illustrates how these constitute two dif-ferent brands that co-exist in separate worlds withoutany direct connections or linkages.

No branding process can ever manage to incorpo-rate all possible actors, and there will always be awide range of reactions, opinions and discrepanciesabout a wide-reaching urban brand like the Capitalof Scandinavia brand. It is also too early and not theintention of the present study to evaluate the brand-ing process of Stockholm as such. The Capital ofScandinavia brand appears to be a top-down processwhere the development of the brand platform seemsto have been reserved a small number of selected pri-vate stakeholders. This seems to have lead to an effi-cient process in developing the brand, but may simi-larly represent larger difficulties in recruiting localambassadors for the brand. The SoFo case representsmore of a bottom-up approach to branding at a localscale that grew into a neighbourhood identity build-ing process. The bottom-up characteristic also refersto the grass-root nature of the marketing of thebrand, involving shop-owners and artists without anyfinancial or political power. However, highly localbrands run the risk of only representing certain slicesof a city’s life and their lack of inclusiveness is achallenge for the marketing of larger regions as awhole.

The lessons learned from this case study may besummarized as follows:

– The organisation of urban branding initiatives maytake various shapes regarding the degree to whichthe organisation of the process is top-down or bot-tom-up directed.

– The organisation of the branding process and coor-dination of stakeholders is likely to be reflected inthe local anchoring of the brand. A broad anchor-ing implies many local ambassadors that will con-tribute to coordinate and effective marketing ef-forts.

– There is a trade-off between efficiency and coordi-nation in developing a brand and the local anchor-ing of the brand and the branding process. A rapiddevelopment process may thus cause a long imple-mentation period.

– A successful brand eventually needs to be able tolive on by itself independent of the efforts of par-ticular persons.

36

– Branding is a long-term process, but it doesn’t nec-essarily have to be expensive.

– It is inevitable that, especially in larger urban ar-eas, many brands directed by different interestgroups will arise. Such diversity may strengthen aplace’s identity and status. However, branding ini-tiatives should be aware of competing or alterna-tive stories and try to work with them.

Hjørring

Hjørring is a small city of 30 000 inhabitants locatedin Denmark and is a historical regional administra-tive, cultural and commercial centre. This image,however, did not satisfy everyone and was perceivedby many to be outdated. The advent of a motorwayconnection to the wider European motorway networkin 2002 was seen locally as an opportunity to re-im-agine the city and its wider hinterlands. In 2001, alocal marketing company was hired to brand thewhole municipality and not just the city. Against abackground of population decrease the town councilwished to re-articulate their image in strong and vis-ual terms.

The logo of the branding campaign contains inno-vative graphics signifying the motorway gateway andnetwork. Large quantities of car streamer logos weredistributed for rapid brand exposure, creating a highbut short-lived awareness of the brand. The brand val-ues were articulated against a situation of less distinctphysical urban attributes and at the end of the daytending towards more generic phraseology.

Randers – Re-imagining the City of Violence

Randers in Denmark has struggled with its image asan abandoned, dusty, industrial city out of sync withan increasingly service based Danish economy. Thecity has been labelled by the media and others as the‘city of violence’. In 2003 the new elected lord mayordecided to change this image.

A deliberate choice on the part of city officials inRanders was to use an external, non-local marketingbureau. The argument was that only by looking at thecity through ‘strangers’ eyes’ could an image strategysuccessfully negotiate the dangers of inward-lookingand restricted notions of place that often develop overa city’s history. The branding strategy in Randers wasnot just directed towards changing the city’s imagebut also involved a complete architectural surgery ofthe downtown area.

The official branding campaign of Randers hadtwo central dimensions: first an inward directed ele-ment aimed at encouraging citizens’ self-esteem; sec-ond, the development of a brand that would act as acoordinating influence on a series of massive devel-opments and investments in the city centre. In linewith these aims a positive new story was decidedupon and an image strategy was developed which re-sulted in a very comprehensive communicationspackage involving logos, fairytales, design manuals,new letter heads, and other merchandise and market-ing materials.

What is most interesting about the Randers case isperhaps not the organization and efficiency of thecity-led branding campaign but the fact that the sto-ries and images they chose for Randers becamewidely contested and criticized by many of the city’sinhabitants. Against the background of the city’s newofficial logos and images an alternative and veryironic and critical set of images and even logos weredeveloped by local people and groups.

The new official city logo latter was in the shape ofa capital R that contained a number of symbols of thecity’s history and identity: such as salmon from theRanders fjord. In reaction to the new branding cam-paign an alternative version of the official logoemerged. This alternative version mirrors the officialone but replaces the officially sanctioned set of sym-bols with a set of salmon bones, a junkie’s needle,beer bottles, motorbikes and stinking dog dirt. Ac-cording to the local newspaper the anti-branding logois meant as a protest against what is perceived as asocially exclusive branding process that paints a pic-ture that cannot be recognized by the protesting citi-zens.

What the Randers case clearly demonstrates is thelikelihood that branding processes will be contestedand that a significant no-logo movement is ready totake on meta-brands in innovative ways. Most clearlythis case demonstrates the need for new stories andimages to be rooted in a reality that those affected bythe brand can agree with. Extensive coordination and

Figure 10: The Hjørring logotype

37

cooperation with local groups and interests is thuscrucial if one is to avoid the sort of spoiling tech-niques deployed by local activities in Randers. How-ever, it must be noted that the fact that Randers has acitizenry that is so actively engaged in the city’s iden-tity that they are willing to develop and publicise al-ternative visions is far from necessarily a bad thing. Itdemonstrates a high level of local engagement andcreativity and an awareness and concern for how the

area is processed and packaged: such diversity, crea-tivity and engagement can be powerful forces forchange and innovation.

Figure 11: The Randers logotype.

Figure 12: Alternative version of the Randers logotype.

38

7. Different strokes for different folks

It is a hard task to write a conclusion to a report onsuch a broad topic as why we should brand cities andhow this may best proceed. As we have shown in thereport such exercises can have many different aims,take many forms and be directed at many differentpublics. The problem with branding cities is that theyare very diverse products that can be difficult to fitneatly into a marketing campaign. Even if one can fita city into one or a number of campaigns, runningsuch campaigns can be difficult to manage and sus-tain. Added to this is the fact that the ‘product’ itselfcan react negatively to the wrong sort of marketing orbranding. We feel strongly that it is clear that for di-verse ‘products’ such as cities diverse strategies areneeded and that there is no one solution and no modelof best practice to copy.

The 10 ‘commandments’However, even if we think that cities and regions needto find their own paths and solutions there is much tobe learnt from the experiences of other places.Through our work during this project we found thatcertain points emerged as important. These pointshave been summarized into 10 commandments:

1. There is no recipe for success– There are various urban branding strategies

and the choice of strategy needs to be adaptedto local characteristics and assets.

– It is not clear whether one should aim for onemeta-brand or for a portfolio of many brandswith separate target audiences. However, thereis a need for targeted marketing in both cases.

2. Urban branding is just a little part of commu-nity building– The brand needs to reflect and involve local

assets and people.

3. Don’t just tell it, show it – Physical changes are often as important as

mental images in showing that a city really ischanging.

– Branding is often most powerful when it islinked into and coordinated with physicaltransformation processes and urban (re)devel-opment initiatives (e.g. Drammen, Barcelona,Glasgow, Bilbao).

– The link between physical urban transforma-tion and branding/the brand needs to reflectlocal assets and characteristics.

4. Uniqueness and innovation is key– Branding is ultimately about differentiating

yourself from others therefore there it is im-portant to be special and avoid copying whateveryone else seems to be doing.

– A first step towards this is to identify localstrengths and characteristics.

– It is important to be flexible in your thinkingand understand that even local weaknessescan be turned into strengths (for instance, lackof light in the winter can be special to somepeople!).

– It is also important not to be blind to whatothers see and be ready to accept that outsid-ers’ perceptions and needs might be very dif-ferent to your own. It can be useful to see thecity through the ‘eyes of the stranger’: e.g. byemploying a non-local marketing bureau orby conducting visitor surveys.

– Both the brand itself and the method of com-munication can take many different forms: e.g.events, award ceremonies, conferences, sup-porting film industry, fashion locations, dele-gations, trade fairs, television, press, literature,signature buildings, and local ambassadors.

5. Branding is a long-term process– Avoid quick fixes; there is a need for long-

term commitment.– Branding can seldom be done without money

– Facilitate a continuous flow of economicsupport and institutional anchoring (e.g.branding secretariat).

– Regular evaluation based on a clear set of suc-cess criteria is important.

39

– Brands develop slowly and the path is seldomsmooth so be ready for set-backs and be readyto be involved in crisis management.

6. Top-down / Bottom-up branding strategies– There is a need to be aware that the branding

process may vary along a top-down versusbottom-up axis.

– There may be a danger in fully outsourcingfull control over a branding process to privateagents; there may be advantages in local(public) governance and participation in theprocess.

– The more top-down a branding process themore difficult it tends to be to involve the lo-cal population.

– Small scale actions and hard to pin down feel-ings like civic pride are of great value. Thus itcan be important to have the local populationas brand ambassadors.

– Cities that use the same (top-down) brandingagency may get ’mass produced’ brands.

7. Well functioning organisational capacity andflexibility is important– There is a need to define local needs and char-

acteristics.– There is a need to define competitors/the

competition and possible collaborators.– It is important that there is an organisational

map – to avoid duplication or conflicts – andthat participants know where they stand andwhat their responsibilities are.

– It is helpful to have a clear aim, focus, strat-egy and good internal/external communica-tion flows.

– Subcontractors, such marketing and brandingfirms, sometimes have expertise the publicsector does not have but it is important theyare given a very clear brief.

8. It is not necessarily true that you are in com-petition with everyone else– Cooperation and co-branding can in many in-

stances be more helpful in attracting the sortof attention and friends you are aiming at.

9. Brands work at many different spatial andtemporal levels– There is a need to think wider than the munic-

ipality (coordination) (ex. Øresund, Paris-London, Barcelona-Euro-region). Cities needto find their position within the Regional/Na-tional/Global. Different cities (size, poweretc) should address different target groups.

– Some cities/regions could gain from seasonalbranding and awareness that different strate-gies for different seasons might be needed.

– Different actors could sit down with their cal-endars and plan the entire year, would needbetter intra-urban coordination.

10. The role of key persons– Dynamic and charismatic branding advocates

and individual driving forces should not beunderestimated. Often dedicated individualsand civic entrepreneurs are important drivingforces behind (or against) particular urbanbranding or (re)development processes. Iden-tifying, including and supporting these indi-viduals is important.

40

References

Begg, Iain (1999) “Cities and Competitiveness”. UrbanStudies. Vol. 36, No. 5–6 pp. 795–809.

Bryman, Alan (2004) “The Disneyization of Society”. Lon-don. Sage.

Cooke, P. and L. Leydesdorff (2006). "Regional Develop-ment in the Knowledge-Based Economy: The Con-struction of Advantage." Journal of Technology Trans-fer 31(1): 5–15.

Crilley, D. (1993). Architecture as advertising: constructingthe image of development. Selling Places: The City asCultural Capital, Past and Present G. Kearns and C.Philo. Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Cushman, Wakefield Healey and Baker (2004), EuropeanCities Monitor 2004. Available at http://www.fran-kfurt.de/sixcms/media.php/2000/CitiesMonitor2004.pdf

Evans, Graeme (2003) “Hard-Branding the Cultural City –From Prado to Prada”. International Journal of Urbanand Regional Research. Vol. 27, No. 2. 417–440.

Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: and howit's transforming work, leisure, community and every-day life. New York, Basic Books.

Halvorsen, Knut (2004) Plan – Tidsskrift for samfunns-planlegging, byplan og regional utvikling, Nr. 4 / 2004

Haslum, H. (2005), “Learning from Drammen”, By-ggekunst – the Norwegian Review of Architecture, no.7, p. 31.

Jencks, Charles (2005) “The New Iconic Building?”, byCurrey in Metropolis Magazine, November 2005.

Jensen, Ole B. (2005) “Branding the Contemporary City –Urban branding as regional growth agenda?”. Plenarypaper for Regional Studies Association Conference,Aalborg May 2005.

Lever W. F. (1999) “Competitive Cities in Europe”. UrbanStudies. Vol. 36, No. 5/6, pp. 1029–1044.

Niedomysl, Thomas (2004) “Evaluating the effects ofplace-marketing campaigns on interregional migrationin Sweden”. Environment and Planning A. Vol. 36, pp.1991–2009.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and De-velopment) (2006). Territorial Review: Stockholm,Sweden. Paris, OECD Publications.

Porter, Michael E. (1990) “The Competitive Advantage ofNations”. London. Mac-Millian Press ltd.

Rainisto, S. (2003) “Success Factors of Place Marketing: Astudy of place marketing practices in northern Europeand the United States”. Helsinki University of Technol-ogy.

Vestby, G. M. (2005), NIBR-rapport 2005:13, Byenes at-traktivitet, NIBR, Oslo.

Winfield-Pfefferkorn, Julia (2005) “The Branding of Cities:Exploring city branding and the importance of brandimage”. Master thesis in Advertising Design at thegraduate school of Syracuse University.

Wøhni, A. (2003), ”Drammen – Byutvikling som begeis-trer”, KonturTidsskrift, no. 7/8, p. 82–87.

Nordic Innovation Centre

The Nordic Innovation Centre initiates and finances activities that enhance innovation col-laboration and develop and maintain a smoothly functioning market in the Nordic region.

The Centre works primarily with small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in the Nordic countries. Other important partners are those most closely involved with innovation and market surveillance, such as industrial organisations and interest groups, research institutions and public authorities.

The Nordic Innovation Centre is an institution under the Nordic Council of Ministers. Its secre-tariat is in Oslo.

For more information: www.nordicinnovation.

Nordic Innovation CentreStensberggata 25NO-0170 OsloNorway ISSN 1503-9676

Phone: +47-47 61 44 00Fax: +47-22 56 55 65

info@nordicinnovation.netwww.nordicinnovation.net