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Today I was invited to give a talk on ‘Place Branding and Tourism Marketing’ on the occasion of the installation of the new Strategic Advisory Council for the Department of International Flanders, Flemish Government.
I was the last of 4 speakers and after that, the Flemish Prime Minister Kris Peeters, was going to deliver a speech during the reception.
However, the presentations were running late and the Prime Minister turned up early, so he entered the room half-way my presentation, just 2 slides ahead of this quote from Simon Anholt:
Although Belgium isn’t the greatest brand...

The International Place Branding Yearbook 2011 defines reputational risk as a consequence of the failure to manage other risks effectively. It provides a unique overview of place reputation indices, such as the Anholt–GfK Roper Nation Brands IndexSM, Country RepTrak™, The FutureBrand Country Brand Index, The East West Nation Brand Perception Index, and The Global Peace Index. The Yearbook also underscores the importance of culture and society and raises a central question: What happens when that deep felt connection between identity and landscape is ruptured? How do such...

It is often said that place branding is growing from infancy to adolescence, but that it still lacks a conceptual framework or agreed analytical and strategic design approach. With our online Prezi tutorial on www.ourplacebranding.com we want to show that this is incorrect and that there is more than sufficient support for such a conceptual framework. Our 2009 book Place Branding elaborately describes such a framework through what we’ve called the three gap model and the 3 times 3 gap bridging guide (depicted in figures 3.1 and 16.1 in the book). It is supported by hundreds of references...

By: Robert Govers for Placebrandz.com

With this week’s Qatar talks on Libya, OpenDemocrady.com published an interesting paper by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen on Qatar and the Arab Spring. It provides food for thought on how some Gulf States, or rather, Emirates, are competing for nation brand hegemony in the region. Readers of our blog and our 2009 book on Place Branding will know that we have studied case Dubai extensively and Kristian’s paper has provided us with some fresh insights.

For many years since the start of the new millennium, Dubai was THE example of the...

By Robert Govers for www.Placebrandz.com
The Dutch city of Den Haag (The Hague) has branded itself as the “international city of peace and justice”. Being host to the International Criminal Court, Peace Palace and many international public, private and non-governmental organizations, the city has built itself a global reputation in this respect. Symbolic actions such as the organization of the 2009 conference on the future of Afghanistan have strengthened this reputation. However, the internal branding was never as strong as the down-to-earth Hagenaren (people from The Hague)...

By: Robert Govers for www.placebrandz.com
Place Branding is about managing your reputation. More specifically, it intends to build name awareness; a distinctive, believable, authentic, meaningful, memorable and co-created image; as well as loyalty among (potential) tourists, investors, traders, expatriates and the like. As we repeatedly argue on www.Placebrandz.com, place branding departs from the identity of place and is hence supply driven, as opposed to marketing, which, as we all know, should be demand driven. It is a good idea to, eventually, when the analysis of identity and image is...