Editors foreword to the rst issue

Place branding is happening. A new eld of practice and study is in existence, and whatever we choose to call it or however we wish to dene it, there can no longer be any doubt that it is with us. Hardly a week goes by without a new story in the media about how a countrys negative image is damaging its trade, how a city is launching a new campaign to attract investors, tourists or a major international sporting event or how a region is promoting its own separate identity from its parent country. And we are faced every day by tourism campaigns on television, on billboards and in magazines, advertisements in the business press which glorify the technological and industrial achievements of countries and regions, advertorials listing the prestigious multinationals which have built new factories there, websites extolling the favourable tax environments and skilled workforces and so on. All this activity may look like many things, but it is really one thing: it is places trying to compete with one another in the global marketplace by building their brands. On a more personal note, I have also been struck by the increasing numbers of e-mails I receive each week from students in higher and further education, from rich and poor countries alike, who have decided to write their dissertation on the subject of branding countries or cities, asking me to answer a few simple questions (which, needless to add, usually turn out to be monumentally difcult questions requiring hours of careful thought and many pages of reply).

It is remarkable how many of those dissertations, once they are written, begin by pointing out how little clarity or agreement there is about terminology or denitions in this eld: and this is to be expected. It is a new eld, standing at the intersection of several other well-established elds (marketing, public policy, trade and tourism promotion, economic development and international relations, to name only the principal ones), so it is not surprising if similar or identical terms are often held to have widely divergent meanings. Of course almost nobody agrees on what, exactly, branding means. The consequence is confusion, and a language which is provisional at best: is public diplomacy synonymous with nation branding, or is one a subset of the other? Is destination marketing the same thing as country promotion? What is the difference between place marketing and place branding? Should we talk about marketing the nation, the state or the country? Is place branding nothing more than a modern euphemism for propaganda? These are issues which need to be debated, and a common vocabulary needs to be agreed upon if the subject is to be effectively discussed and pursued; this is the rst of several reasons why this journal has been launched. But place branding has the potential to become far more than an academic curiosity at the fringes of marketing. Just as branding has proved to be one of the most potent instruments for devising strategy and creating wealth in the commercial sector, so its application to

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the development and competitivity of cities, regions and states will have enormous and far-reaching impacts in the years to come. Why is branding so important? First, it is a conception of creating value which comes from marketing rather than from economics, and thus brings with it marketings uniquely happy combination of empirical observation and visionary strategy. Marketing embraces scientic clarity of thought and rigorous observation of human psychology, culture and society with a deep sympathy for the mystery of creativity. It brings commerce and culture together as a potent force for creating prosperity. Good marketing means having the humanism and wisdom to know that there is a difference between what makes sense on paper and how people actually behave having the intelligence of academia combined with the worldliness of practice. If we were speaking of nothing more than the application of marketing to policy making and economic development, we would be assured of adding a much-needed dose of practical, rigorous, egalitarian, good-humoured, quick-witted humanism to an area where such qualities are all too often entirely absent. But we are talking of branding, and the consequences are far more signicant. What branding adds to basic marketing (and this is probably a false concept, as is the notion that the two disciplines are separable or even distinguishable) is a highly evolved conception of building and capturing the value which results from competent marketing: what Aaker (1991) rst called brand equity. It is the creation and management of brand equity which has so changed and accelerated business during the last hundred years, and it is the creation and

management of brand equity which will utterly change the way in which places develop and compete during the next hundred. The realisation that place branding is nothing less than macroeconomic, cultural and social dynamite leads me to the second reason why a journal of place branding is a necessity. Unless we can create a commercially neutral forum where the users, practitioners, students and theorists of place branding can meet and establish through debate and discussion the core issues of good practice, ethics and standards, there is a great risk of place branding going the same way as commercial branding: simply adding wealth where wealth is least needed, and only beginning to realise its true inuence and attendant responsibilities when it is very late and very hard to do anything about it. Standards are urgently required because the infant industry of place branding is something of a Wild West at present, and you do not need to speak to many national, regional or civic administrations before a recurring pattern begins to emerge. The politicians or civil servants hear that having a brand is the latest thing; but they are forgivably confused about the distinction between its outward signs (such as new slogans and logos) and the complex underlying strategy and long-term behavioural change which ought to underpin such ephemera; and thus they fall easily into the hands of one sort of marketing rm or another. These rms, perhaps despairing of selling difcult, invisible, long-term strategic advice to politicians with a four-year event horizon, all too often revert to selling the client what s/he wants. So what the client gets is a slogan and a logo, with nothing much behind it, and probably very little connection between it and the nations long-term development plans, too little

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political will or clout for it to be sustained or taken seriously, too little investment for it to become properly established in the minds of the audience, little understanding of who this audience actually are or what their current perceptions of the place brand are and very little real coordination or common purpose between the various stakeholders. The list of common failings could go on, but the fact is that undertaking a place branding strategy which will actually make a positive difference to the way in which the place is perceived even internally, let alone by the rest of the world is a gigantic undertaking, and there are no short cuts to it. The consequences of these supercial transactions between places and marketing rms are more serious than just another country or city or region wasting money it cannot readily afford, or creating slightly more confusion about what the place actually stands for: it is reinforcing the popular notion that branding is synonymous with creating a visual identity, and swells the numbers of disappointed administrations which have tried branding and, after spending money without seeing any results, reach the conclusion that branding does not work. But the need to promote good practice is just the rst of many dilemmas facing us at the birth of this eld, and I have identied below ve other areas about which I happily admit my own uncertainty. There are certainly more to add and I welcome additions to the list but these are the kinds of questions which most often come up in discussions about place branding with colleagues, clients, journalists and other interested parties, and the ones which appear to present the most interesting, complex and fruitful opportunities for further reection and discussion.

WHETHER IT IS RIGHT TO DO PLACE BRANDING The morality of the practice of place branding leads unavoidably to a philosophical debate about reality and perception. There is undoubtedly a school of thought which classes a concern with popular perceptions as shallow, and somehow indicative of a basic aw in the motivations of policy makers. According to this view, it is acceptable for the more commercial bodies such as investment promotion agencies, tourist boards, boards of trade, even cultural institutes to be concerned with such supercialities as their reputation with audiences or target markets, and even to expend some effort in looking after this reputation. But once we move into the arena of policy and population, there is a certain anxiety: should governments not concentrate on representing the interests of the electorate, on investing in material improvements, rather than frittering away time and money in the vain pursuit of public approval? There are several problems with this argument. The rst is that it is actually very hard to separate reality from perception: indeed, since we human beings only ever experience reality through our perceptions of it, it is not difcult to argue that they are effectively the same thing. Certainly, in politics as in commerce, peoples perceptions of companies and policies are what really count, as they are what drive peoples behaviour. It therefore makes perfect sense to take the perceptual implications of policy very seriously indeed: one could argue that for a government to make investments of taxpayers money without considering the effects this will have on the image of the country, city or region is the height of irresponsibility. To invest, for example, in hosting a major international sporting event without a

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proper long-term plan for capitalising on its impact on the countrys image is incompetent governance, pure and simple. Attempting to manage or manipulate public perceptions directly, without regard to the behaviours or actions which cause these perceptions, may rightly be viewed with suspicion, and in fact sounds like a reasonable denition of propaganda. But even here it is not a simple case, as we cannot assume that perceptions are always fair, or that they are always the simple consequence of exposure to the truth. Of course perceptions of places are almost never fair: they are composed of cliches, half-truths, outdated commonplaces, prejudice and ignorance. Who decides whether a correction of perception so that it correctly reects the reality is legitimate place branding, or as Edward Bernays (1928) once memorably put it, propaganda not impropaganda? To go a step further, is it legitimate for a country or city to project its intentions as well as the literal, current reality of the place? Can an aspirational brand strategy for a place be morally justied, in that it tells the population of the place, as well as the wider world, where the place is going? It is certainly true that place branding aims to accelerate the natural lag between good actions or improved performance and the improved reputation which, in a just world, will eventually follow. A central tenet of the philosophy of place branding for development is that if the perceptual consequences of actions and behaviours are properly taken into account at the same time as those actions and behaviours are perpetrated, then the early benets of a positive audience response (both internal and external) will accelerate the change. Normally it takes rather a long time for people inside and outside a place to register what is going

on and which way the country is going, but when they do it causes accelerated change, mainly as a result of this common understanding leading to synergetic behaviour. If this process is accelerated, then its benecial effects can be brought forward. Poor and developing countries, of course, simply do not have time to wait for the natural consequences of good behaviour to come along: they are in a hurry. If nothing else, simply understanding where a place is going can help people to help it get there faster. A year ago, the thought of a desperately poor country being interested in place branding would have worried me greatly, but that was before I was persuaded by the government of one of the poorest countries on earth that their image was one of the biggest obstacles in the course of their development. This was an image of virtual destitution, of a country racked by war, disease and natural disasters, entirely dependent on foreign aid: it was an image partly created and constantly reinforced by the aid agencies for the very sound purpose of generating as much charity as possible. But the problem with such an image is that it makes it impossible for the countrys economy to get started: who would believe that such a country produces high-quality goods for export, or offers a skilled workforce to foreign investors or world-class tourist destinations? The difculty, of course, is to promote investment, tourism and exports without cutting off the supply of essential aid: but there are solutions to such dilemmas. There is always the risk that countries which do not take responsibility for their own image and reputation will end up with a brand created by a more powerful state. Axis of evil is a piece of deliberate branding which is twice as potent and probably twice as lasting

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as Cool Britannia or Tiger economies. In fact, America has a vast armoury of offensive branding weapons, from the credit ratings agencies (which can virtually kill a countrys economic prospects with a couple of letters) to Hollywood and the global news media, which can put together a new image for a country in a matter of weeks. The only way you can ght brand is with brand: I would very much like to see a group of developing countries create their own alternative economic ratings system which looks at potential rather than GNP, with due regard to the latent brand equity inherent in each country, and which might be of great interest to wise and far-sighted investors. Few places really have any choice about whether they should adopt a brand strategy or not: even if they are not deliberately branded by an aggressive superpower, many or most will suffer from the spillover effect of their continent brand: when there is little differentiation between the countries in a region, negative equity will always transfer to the entire group (for some mysterious reason, positive equity migrates in a far less equitable way). So Ecuador, a largely peaceful country which does not produce signicant quantities of narcotics, is branded as being as drug-ridden as Colombia and as dangerous as Nicaragua but is almost never credited with the Galapagos, its crown jewel; a relatively prosperous and well-governed African nation like Kenya ends up sharing perceptions of violence with Rwanda, of corruption with Nigeria, of poverty with Ethiopia and of AIDS with Botswana; and all live permanently in the shadow of South Africa, because it has branded itself so competently and begun to pull away from the rest of the continents negative equity.

WHETHER IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO IT I am often asked whether it is feasible or advisable to reduce a country down to the level of a brand. This is an interestingly loaded question, because I am pretty sure that branding has nothing to do with reduction. Part of the function of a brand is to be a signpost, pointing the indifferent consumer in the direction of some arresting aspect of the product, company or country (Anholt, 2003). If this works, and the consumer acquires, over time, a deeper familiarity with the place or product, then the brand changes its function for that consumer and becomes shorthand for his or her growing collection of associations about it. It is worthwhile to think through the reduction argument to its conclusion too: does it really do anything to the country or to the people in the country if you create a communications strategy which reduces it down to the level of a brand? Does it harm them? In fact, it can really only add something to peoples existing perceptions of the place (it can hardly take anything away) and, if successful, it will invite more people to acquire a deeper knowledge of the place culture, heritage, landscape, products, people and all and therefore achieves precisely the opposite effect of dumbing down. As I have observed elsewhere (Anholt, 2001), there is a tendency nowadays for the commercial brands of countries to become the dominant vector of national image (think how Japanese electronics and gaming brands create and typify the image of modern Japan to younger audiences), so any attempt to enrich the nation brand through the addition of information about culture, politics, people, geography and so forth can surely only help to counterbalance this effect. Whether place branding is possible in a more practical sense is another matter

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entirely: whether it is feasible to coordinate the communications of a wide range of different stakeholders, often with widely diverging interests, and whether it is possible to get a reasonable proportion of the population to live the brand. This will depend a great deal on the political will behind the initiative, on the size of the country or city or region and how much trouble it is in: places with a big and widely acknowledged image problem usually nd it easier to acquire consensus, a sense of common purpose, and therefore to achieve coordinated action than places which are well off and have few real problems. WHETHER IT IS HONEST TO DO IT This question usually leads into a discussion about the differences between place branding and propaganda, but it seems to me that what most people mean by propaganda is the deliberate use of manipulated public opinion as a tool for achieving a political end; place branding is the consequence of a realisation that public opinion is an essential component of achieving a political end. It is, one might say, a necessary consequence of democracy and the globalisation of the media. In my view, good place branding does not usually result in advertising or marketing communications. A great deal of advertising of the component parts of the place brand, such as tourism and investment promotion, will always go on and, one hopes, thanks to a proper branding strategy, in a coordinated fashion but the country or city usually achieves relatively little through advertising itself. The real value of brand strategy for the nation or city or region apart from the benecial effects of coordinating its existing communications is that it provides governments with

a strategically robust set of criteria for selecting the actions and behaviours which best suit the countrys aims and visions, and which will do most to represent the place in its true light. Marketing communications can then play a role in ensuring that these actions and behaviours are properly showcased; but the onus, as always in good marketing, is about proving things rather than saying them. Consumers, after all, do not part lightly with their prejudices, and any attempt to contradict them will usually do little more than reinforce them. WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES OF IT ARE Is place branding a zero-sum game? Must one place always brand itself at another places expense, or can brand create an entirely new and entirely equitable conception of the global marketplace where all cities, countries and regions happily inhabit their own non-competing specialist areas, perceptual clusters, niche offerings and so forth? What will happen when most of the countries are branded, and most of the cities and regions too? In fact, it is probably just what happens when most of the products and services in the marketplace are branded: brands become an entry-level factor for the marketplace, and are used by consumers as the primary means of selection. There is also a concern that the rich countries with the resources not only to brand themselves properly but also to promote themselves heavily will create an underbranded underclass of countries, regions and cities, but there is no reason why expertise in place branding should not become recognised by aid agencies and donor governments as a legitimate and important form of skills transfer or capacity building for developing countries.

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WHETHER IT IS ACCOUNTABLE AND MEASURABLE IN ITS EFFECTS To what extent are the investments made justiable? One of the most noticeable things about the way some developing countries promote themselves is not that they do not have enough money to do it, but that they do not spend the money wisely: there is, for example, a curious lack of rigour in the way that some poorer places justify their spend on investment and tourism promotion. I recently came across the case of a lower second-tier country which was investing surprisingly large sums in export promotion campaigns, but appeared to have no system for measuring the return on this investment: in order to justify the expenditure, the countrys various trade missions were simply required to show the advertisements they had produced and the press clippings they had generated. This is somewhat like justifying the joining fee for your gym by producing your membership card, rather than showing that you have actually lost any weight. The illusion of costliness is a pervasive one in place branding, and almost certainly derives from the assumption that branding means advertising, and everybody knows how expensive media is. In reality, most places already spend considerable sums in promoting their various products and services, and even a limited amount of coordination of the messages between these stakeholders on the basis of a viable and well-understood brand strategy will achieve a more positive impact on the reputation of the place than any amount of generalised place promotion. THEMES OF THIS JOURNAL These are just a few of the issues facing place branding as the eld begins to gather momentum. Their complexity,

and the importance of getting things right as much as the danger of getting things wrong, emphasises the need for an effective and respected forum for discussing them. The rst requirement for this journal, therefore, is an Editorial Board populated with acknowledged experts whose integrity and wisdom are as undoubted as their experience and knowledge of their elds. I have used my place-branding hexagon (Anholt, 2004) as a guide in selecting the Editorial Board for Place Branding: its six points represent the six natural channels of communication for most places, and are labelled tourism, culture, policy, people, brands and investment and recruitment. I felt that if we had one or two world-class authorities from each point of the hexagon, then we are at least setting off in the right direction for fullling the journals ambition of creating an authoritative global forum to help steer, shape, develop and promote this nascent eld. The response to my requests has been extremely gratifying, and as a glance at the names on the Editorial Board will quickly conrm, we are fortunate in having some of the worlds most respected names in cultural policy and cultural relations; foreign policy, public affairs and public diplomacy; investment promotion; trade promotion; tourism and destination marketing; economic development; and international marketing and branding. As a scene-setter, the rst paper in this launch issue of Place Branding is a collection of personal comments from many of the members of the Board in response to the simple question: where do you see place branding heading? These comments, it should be stressed, are not intended to be academically rigorous, and I particularly asked the contributors to suspend their natural concerns about justifying or supporting

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their opinions: the piece is simply a bigger-than-average OpEd. It gives, I think, an interesting and wide-ranging picture of the challenges and opportunities facing the place branding community in the early years of its existence. I mentioned the number of student theses and dissertations which are now being written about this topic, and some of them are very good indeed. It seems a shame that so much good work is produced by students at bachelor and masters levels which subsequently goes to waste, so each issue of the journal will include one or two student papers which, in the opinion of the Editorial Board, are of particular interest or show particular promise. It seems important that this journal should include as much diverse material as possible, should reect the eld of place branding as completely as possible and should give as much value as possible to its rather broad audience of policy makers and marketers, academics and researchers, teachers and students, consultants and other advisers, think-tanks, diplomats, ministers and civil servants. For this reason the editorial policy aims to combine the rigour, reliability and standards of an academic journal, the authority and practical bent of a professional journal and the general readability of a magazine: in addition to empirical studies and conventional academic papers, the journal welcomes case studies, news items, book reviews and think pieces. In areas where there are interesting divergences of opinion, we may include dialogues and debates, and where there is particularly interesting practice or theory, there may be

interviews or proles of places and people. Whatever the length or format of the submissions, the principal requirement is that everything we publish in the future must play its part in furthering one or more of the aims of the journal: to start a debate leading to a denition and a theory or theories of place branding to create a body of knowledge about place branding and share best practice worldwide to encourage more cross-fertilisation between the component elds of place branding to create a set of ethical and professional standards for the eld of place branding to promote and disseminate the value of place branding for economic, social and cultural development. The publishers and Editorial Board of Place Branding welcome you most warmly to this inaugural issue, and look forward to many years of stimulating and productive debate and collaboration with you, our contributors and subscribers. Simon Anholt Managing Editor
References
Aaker, D. (1991) Managing Brand Equity, The Free Press, New York, NY. Anholt, S. (2001) in Fladmark, M. (ed) Heritage and Identity, Donhead, London, UK. Anholt, S. (2003) Brand New Justice, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, UK. Anholt, S. (2004) in Clifton, R. (ed) Brands and Branding, The Economist Books, London, UK. Bernays, E. L. (1928) Propaganda and Impropaganda, American Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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