Branding a location

This article points out the challenge for any location-based group hoping to market itself. Often the people involved have different agendas and therefore can't agree upon a brand, theme, or project.

Mapping a Country's Future: "Professor Nicolas Papadopoulos of the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, believes the most important challenges currently facing place branding are 'lack of unity of purpose, difficulty in establishing actionable and measurable objectives, lack of authority over inputs and control over outputs, restricted flexibility, and relative lack of marketing know-how.' Consider the following examples:

"- Place marketing involves multiple stakeholders, often with competing interests. Trying to market a country to tourists as a mountain hideaway inhabited by rustic peasants may not serve the interests of those wishing to promote the country’s budding industrial infrastructure to foreign investors.

"- Measuring the effectiveness of place marketing is fraught with difficulties. The decision of a multinational firm to locate a plant in an offshore country may have little or nothing to do with promotional activities by members of the host country. Likewise, trying to measure success in meeting broad objectives, not to mention identifying the separate contributions to marketing outcome, can be a nightmare.

"- Unlike product branding, place branding is seldom under the control of a central authority. Government or industry associations are rarely in a position to dictate policy to stakeholders.

"- Marketers have far less control over place brands than over product brands. Besides country marketing campaigns, people may learn about a country in school; from media sources (including newspapers, books, TV and movies); from purchases; and from trips abroad or from contact with citizens or former residents."